French Fridays with Dorie: Spiced Butter Glazed Carrots

10 pounds of carrots. We bought 10 pounds of carrots from Costco last Sunday. For a 2 person household. I had 2 dishes in mind this week featuring carrots...and at $4 something it seemed perfectly sensible to buy 10 pounds. Right? So what that I still have 7 pounds left? Maybe there is a really big carrot cake in my future.

The first dish I made this week with our carrot cache was a slow cooker pot roast with onions, carrots and potatoes. It was tasty, but I didn't get a chance to snap any photos. Sorry. And dish number two is my French Friday's with Dorie pick for this week. December is another free form month where we can cook the 5 recipes selected by the group during whichever week we choose. And given my abundance of carrots...this week was the perfect week.

Dorie's recipe for Spiced Butter Glazed Carrots is simple and tasty. But I think I missed the boat on the true "spice" factor because I left out the cardamom seeds. They didn't have a gallon size at Costco for us to buy! But I did use plenty of fresh ginger and garlic. Oh, and butter. The carrots were good. Wow good? Na. But still good. I will likely make them again. And soon...because I don't think that carrot cake requires all 7 pounds sitting in the fridge.

I served the carrots with Dorie's Chicken Diable recipe. I really, really like this recipe and have made it twice now. The sauce is delicious. Wow delicious. Especially if you are a dijon mustard fan. So good. To get Dorie's recipes pick up her fabulous book Around My French Table.

Holiday Cream Wafers

Like my leaning tower of cream wafers? For any given blog post I usually take between 70 - 120 photos. This one, I took 8. In a rush. We were on our way to a friends house for dinner with 2 other couples. I thought cookies would be a nice treat to bring along. And I won't lie, I've been looking for opportunities to test out some new (to me) holiday cookie recipes.

In case you are wondering...it's not always wise to try out a new recipe when it's T minus 2 hours and you have to mix up dough, chill it, roll it out, cookie cutter (that's a new verb!) it, toss the cookies in sugar, place them on a baking sheet, poke four sets of holes in the top with a fork, bake for 7-9 minutes, cool, fill with frosting (which also has to be made separately...one kind wasn't enough for me or the time allotted...so I went with vanilla and raspberry) and then sandwich together. Are you tired yet? I am. During the 2 hour countdown I also had to shower, blow dry, brush my teeth, flat iron and swipe on some mascara among other make up products. Wow, I sound high maintenance. Now I'm extra tired. Anyway, clearly my time management skills could use a little....work.

But somehow we, and the cookies, made it to our friends house with exactly zero minutes to spare. We enjoyed good company and tasty food. Have you ever had spaghetti with meat sauce Persian style? Or yogurt sauce with shallots? On your Persian spaghetti? Yum.

And the cookies were a hit too. With a nice cup of Earl Grey tea. On a cool December evening.

These cookies were a Christmas staple made annually by my mom when I was a kid. I remember these cookies being so delicate and delicious. She always filled them with red and green tinted frosting for a festive touch. Funny how you always want to go back to your childhood treats. At some point she relinquished her holiday cookie making to other family members and it has been years since we've had this Betty Crocker classic. This week seemed like a good time to revisit an old favorite. I wanted to give the red tinted frosting a little twist and I added 2 tablespoons of seedless raspberry preserves to the (full) frosting recipe. It's a nice addition and I actually prefer it to the standard vanilla filling.

The wafers are tender and flaky and almost melt in your mouth. The dough is simple...consisting of flour, a little heavy cream and butter, dusted with sugar. The frosting is simple....butter, sugar and vanilla extract. The sweet filling makes up for the small amount of sugar in the wafer. These fun cookies take a little patience (and timing skills) but make a special holiday treat! To get the recipe click here.

This coming weekend is my official cookie making weekend. Check back next week to see Gingersnaps, Linzers sandwiched with raspberry preserves and lemon curd, Chocolate Chip Candy Cane Cookies, Chocolate and Red Velvet Cake Truffles and Meringues. I'm already feeling the sugar high!

French Fridays with Dorie: Speculoos (Christmas Spice Cookies)

It's officially cookie season! For some reason the Christmas season is totally free reign to make mass amounts of cookies. Well I should say I take free reign to make crazy amounts of cookies. I guess I save up all my cookie mojo until December and then I just go nuts. In a given holiday cookie season I make upwards of 600-800 cookies of all shapes and sizes. Even though it seems a little crazy...I know I'm not the only one...you other crazy cookie people know who you are.


Anyway, I always like to try at least one new cookie each holiday season, and this weeks French Fridays with Dorie pick seemed perfect. Speculoos cookies are a small crisp spice cookie that scream holiday. I'm not normally a crisp cookie girl, but for some reason I couldn't stop popping these little babies into my mouth. They were addictive. The spices were perfect...a lot of cinnamon, a little ginger and bit of clove. A perfect blend of warm spicy goodness that makes me smile.

The recipe calls for you to divide the dough into discs and to roll each disc between 2 sheets of parchment paper. This is my first time rolling out dough this way and it worked beautifully. I will be trying this with other rolled cookie dough and even pie crust. Dorie is very specific that the rolled dough must be refrigerated for at least 3 hours before cutting and baking. I waited exactly 3 hours and had no issues getting the cookies cut with my 1 1/2 inch scalloped shaped cookie cutter.

If you think that you should under bake these for a less crisp cookie, don't bother. They just have a stale crunch....sort of crisp but not all the way there. Accept these are crunchy cookies and bake them accordingly.


But you can dress them up a bit by dipping them in dark chocolate. Dorie also recommends sandwiching them with Nutella or dulce de leche. Both would be delicious for certain.


If you want the recipe check out Dorie's newest cookbook, Around My French Table. Perhaps this is going to be corrected in future publications of the book, but my version leaves the egg out of the ingredient list and instructions. So be sure to add in 1 egg to the butter sugar mixture....cause if you don't you won't have cookies....you'll have crumble...and you can't add the egg in at the end. Cause it doesn't work. Trust me.

These are tasty little holiday cookies. Give them a try!

Hanukkah Cake Truffles

Did you know Hanukkah starts on December 1st this year? So this weekend I was busy prepping Hanukkah gifts and goodies for my husband's family back in Illinois. I decided the "goodies" should be cake truffles, my newest fascination in sweet treats! (If anyone in my hubby's family is reading this prior to December 1st, act surprised when these goodies show up in the mail on Wednesday.) Though I have only posted about cake truffles once, I have now made them 4 times. Testing out cake flavor and frosting combinations to see what works best. I thought Hanukkah themed cake truffles would look best with white cake (with vanilla frosting). Granted I had never taste tested a white cake truffle, so I was really just winging it. I'm generally not a white cake girl (chocolate is my go to cake), but these turned out tasty...especially the ones dipped in dark chocolate.

Wondering what a cake truffle is? A bite size creamy, smooth, moist cake blended with frosting and covered in delicious candy coating (such as dark chocolate). It's a little bite of heaven really.


The coolest part about making cake truffles is decorating them! Sprinkles, sanding sugars, jimmies and colored candy melts are just a few things I used to decorate my Hanukkah cake truffles.


I'm planning to make more truffles for Christmas and I will share some step by step instructions and photos. If you want to know more about cake truffles now check out Bakerella's blog. They go by the name of cake balls or cake pops on her site. She has perfected (what I like to call) the cake truffle and has taken it to the next level with some pretty amazing decorative skills. If you haven't seen Bakerella's work before, your socks will be knocked off.

I found the perfect size treat boxes at Michaels. The box is made by Wilton and sold in a pack of 3 for $2.99. The box fits 9 cake truffles perfectly. Add pretty ribbon and a personalized label and you have a special and delicious gift.


Happy Hanukkah!

French Fridays with Dorie: Roast Chicken for Les Paresseux

This is my first time roasting a whole a bird. The recipe was choosen as November pick for the online cooking group French Fridays with Dorie. This recipe is roast chicken for the lazy (or les paresseux). Seemed like a good way to roast my first chicken. I have mixed feelings about the process. It took forever...90 minutes. It made the bottom of my pan black and splattered all over my oven. And I'm pretty sure the high heat was the cause of my pan cracking the next day when I took it out of the water where it was soaking. I used a pampered chef stoneware 9x13 casserole dish which is now destined for the trash can...I'm a little sad about that. The flavor of the chicken was not anything to write home about. It's not all bad though. It was easy. The skin was brown and crispy. And the infamous piece of bread that cooked under the chicken was pretty tasty. But I could only eat a few bites because you know its soaked with chicken fat that has gotten crispy and delicious. My feelings aren't really mixed. I didn't think the chicken warranted the effort, mess and waiting time that went into it.

I'm not giving up on cooking whole chickens. But will be looking for a different technique and flavoring elements next time.

I made this chicken along with homemade green bean casserole. Somehow I forgot to take pictures of the casserole....which turned out fabulous! For a beautiful photo and the recipe check out Michelle's blog, The Brown Eyed Baker. This recipe beats the canned soup version. The creamy mushroom sauce has a wonderful garlic flavor and pairs perfectly with the green beans and cripsy onion and breadcrumb topping. It's so so good.

World Peace Cookies

World Peace Cookies are evil. I ate way too many of them. And my belly hurts. They are sort of addictive. Like chips. The weird part is I don't think my most favorite cookie by a long shot, but they have some mysterious quality that isn't going to bode well for my tummy or my hips.

These are eggless, dark chocolate cookies with a hit of salt. The recipe calls for fleur de del....but I only had kosher salt. Next time I would spring for the fleur de sel. The other very slight change I made was to use semisweet (70%) and milk chocolate chunks instead of bittersweet. It worked out nicely to bring different sweetnesses of chocolate into the mix.


Roll the dough into logs, refrigerate for 3 hours and slice and bake. Easy. Good. And now....gone!

World Peace Cookies
Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 stick plus 3 tablespoons (11 tablespoons) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup (packed) light brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon fleur de sel or 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped into chips, or a generous 3/4 cup store-bought mini chocolate chips

Makes about 36 cookies.

Sift the flour, cocoa and baking soda together.

Working with a stand mixer, preferably fitted with a paddle attachment, or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the butter on medium speed until soft and creamy. Add both sugars, the salt and vanilla extract and beat for 2 minutes more.

Turn off the mixer. Pour in the flour, drape a kitchen towel over the stand mixer to protect yourself and your kitchen from flying flour and pulse the mixer at low speed about 5 times, a second or two each time. Take a peek — if there is still a lot of flour on the surface of the dough, pulse a couple of times more; if not, remove the towel. Continuing at low speed, mix for about 30 seconds more, just until the flour disappears into the dough — for the best texture, work the dough as little as possible once the flour is added, and don’t be concerned if the dough looks a little crumbly. Toss in the chocolate pieces and mix only to incorporate.

Turn the dough out onto a work surface, gather it together and divide it in half. Working with one half at a time, shape the dough into logs that are 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Wrap the logs in plastic wrap and refrigerate them for at least 3 hours. (The dough can be refrigerated for up to 3 days or frozen for up to 2 months. If you’ve frozen the dough, you needn’t defrost it before baking — just slice the logs into cookies and bake the cookies 1 minute longer.)

GETTING READY TO BAKE: Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment or silicone mats.

Working with a sharp thin knife, slice the logs into rounds that are 1/2 inch thick. (The rounds are likely to crack as you’re cutting them — don’t be concerned, just squeeze the bits back onto each cookie.) Arrange the rounds on the baking sheets, leaving about 1 inch between them.

Bake the cookies one sheet at a time for 12 minutes — they won’t look done, nor will they be firm, but that’s just the way they should be. Transfer the baking sheet to a cooling rack and let the cookies rest until they are only just warm, at which point you can serve them or let them reach room temperature.

SERVING: The cookies can be eaten when they are warm or at room temperature — I prefer them at room temperature, when the textural difference between the crumbly cookie and the chocolate bits is greatest — and are best suited to cold milk or hot coffee.

STORING: Packed airtight, cookies will keep at room temperature for up to 3 days; they can be frozen for up to 2 months.

Chicken Diable

We eat a lot of chicken in our house but only prepare it a handful of different ways. Marinated in Italian dressing and grilled, BBQ'd with a little sauce, breaded with Italian or panko breadcrumbs and pan fried or hubby's personal favorite, Shake n Bake (yuck). As I was flipping through Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table and honed in on a new chicken preparation. Chicken Diable. Shallots, garlic, wine and dijon mustard lured me in.

Chicken Diable is thinly pounded out chicken breasts lightly salted and peppered and pan fried in a bit of butter and olive oil. The chicken goes into a 200 degree to keep warm while you whip up a quick sauce. The sauce is really easy and most importantly it's delicious! For the sauce saute 1 medium finely chopped shallot and 1 finely chopped clove of garlic in the remaining olive oil and butter in the pan you cooked the chicken in. Season lightly with salt and pepper and cook for about 2 minutes. Pour in 1/3 cup white wine and bring to a simmer for about a minute. Add 1/2 cup heavy cream and return to a simmer. Then stir in 3 tablespoons of dijon mustard (I only used 2) and 2 teaspoons of Worcestershire sauce until heated through. Add additional salt and pepper if needed. Remove from heat and spoon sauce over chicken. The sauce is rich and velvety with a hint of dijon mustard and garlic and shallots in the background. It's definitely on my repeat recipe list. Though Hubby didn't love it...but I guess he can just eat chicken sans sauce.

I can't emphasize how easy this mustardy gravy is. Easy and tasty. Sounds like a winner to me.