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White Chocolate Chip Macadamia Nut Cookies

During our inn ownership, my husband and I met the nicest older couple from Savannah, Georgia. They would sit quietly in the parlor in the afternoons and look forward to my daily afternoon baked goods. I made a White Chocolate Chip Coconut Macadamia Nut Cookie that they just loved. It became a favorite. The next year we were saddened to learn that she had passed away. The following year, he came back without her. Undoubtedly he had mixed emotions,  but he was happy to have her memory with him in a place they loved spending time away. We loved sharing that with him. And I made those cookies for him.

That following Christmas, I sent him a batch of their cookies. He came back again that following summer and looked forward to their cookies. Over the next two years, his health wasn’t bad, but it was probably in his best interest that he not travel alone. So we kept in touch over the last couple years. I then virtually ran into his daughter on Facebook a couple months ago. She told me her father was doing alright, but they had moved him into a nursing facility after falling and having hip surgery. He’s recovering, but he made a comment to his daughter that “the food is much better in the nursing facility than the hospital”! So I made a batch of their and packaged them in colored plastic wrap and boxed them up and shipped them off to Savannah. Our little local grocer didn’t have any macadamias so I used pecans (he’s from Georgia, he’ll love ‘em and I’m sure he’ll forgive me!)

The Recipe:

1 1/2 sticks butter, softened

1/3 cup white sugar

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 egg

1 tablespoon vanilla

mix well.

Add 1 2/3 cups flour

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Fold in 2 cups white chocolate chips

1 cup shredded coconut

3/4 cups macadamia nuts (or pecans)

Bake at 350 for 8-10 minutes or until the tops get just slightly brown. Less time = chewier cookie. More=crispier cookie.

AND BON APPETIT!

]]> http://MyDeliciousMornings.com/2010/05/02/my-sentimental-cookies/feed/ 0 http://MyDeliciousMornings.com/2010/03/07/indulgent-homemade-cinnamon-rolls-my-adaptation-from-a-cooking-light-recipe/ http://MyDeliciousMornings.com/2010/03/07/indulgent-homemade-cinnamon-rolls-my-adaptation-from-a-cooking-light-recipe/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:16:55 +0000 Dana Moos http://MyDeliciousMornings.com/?p=409

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I don’t even recall how long ago I clipped this recipe from a Cooking Light magazine. I just knew I’d file it under “will bake someday”. I was never one to play with yeast recipes. But as much as I love Cinnabon, I thought I’d give this one a try.

Dough

1 package of yeast

1/4 cup warm water (100-110degrees)

1/2 cup warm milk (100-110degrees)

1/3 cup sugar

1/4 cup softened butter

1 teaspoon vanilla

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 large egg, beaten

3 1/2 cups flour, divided

Filling

3/4 cup raisins (preferably golden)

3/4 cup brown sugar (original calls for 2/3)

1/2 stick melted butter

Glaze

1 cup powdered sugar

2 tablespoons milk

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Dissolve yeast in warm water in large bowl. Let stand 5 minutes. Add the milk, sugar, butter, vanilla, salt and egg and stir until combined. Place in stand mixer with the dough hook, add 3 cups of flour and mix on speed 2 until dough pulls away from the side. Place in large bowl coated with cooking spray and place in a warm location (85 degrees is ideal) for an hour or until doubled in size.

To prepare filling – combine raisins, brown sugar and cinnamon. Roll dough into a 10×15 rectangle. Brush dough with melted butter, and sprinkle the brown sugar mixture. Roll up and pinch seam to seal. Wrap and chill for 20 minutes.

Unwrap and cut into 20 1/2 inch slices or 10 1 inch slices! Arrange cut side up on a cookie sheet lined with either parchment or a silicone mat, 1 inch apart and let rest on the sheet, covered, to rise again, about an hour.

Then bake at 350 for 15-20 minutes, until just very lightly browned. To prepare glaze, combine the ingredients with a whisk and drizzle over warm cinnamon rolls.

Don’t worry about the calories. Eveything in moderation. And BON APPETIT!

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This dish started with my attempt to perfect the art of a beautifully poached egg. When I was at the Harvest Brunch at The Danforth Inn in Portland, Maine, and saw the poached egg that Chef Carmen Gonzales served us, I thought to myself, I must make a poached egg like that! Add leftover polenta from dinner the previous night, some roasted tomatoes and voila, breakfast was born!

The Polenta was simple – bring 5 cups of water, chicken or vegetable stock to a slow rolling boil, slowly add in 1 cup of polenta, making sure to whisk it in to prevent lumps. Continue stirring for about 20-30 minutes until it pulls away from the sides and has thickened. Add 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 cup grated Parmesan. Pour into a buttered 9×13 glass dish and refrigerate until firm, a couple hours.

Next, cut several Roma tomatoes in half, sprinkle with salt, pepper and a dash of sugar and roast at 350 for about 45 minutes. Add thinly sliced smoked Swiss cheese and keep in a warm oven while you work on the polenta.

Cut the polenta into triangles and pan fry in butter, a few minutes on each side, until browned. Keep warm in the oven with the tomatoes.

Now for the poached eggs. Bring a couple inches of water and a couple tablespoons of white vinegar to a boil in a sauce pan. Crack one egg per bowl and have ready to drop into the water. Lower the heat to barely a slow boil and with a whisk, stir very quickly to create a vortex, remove the whisk and carefully lower the egg into the center of the vortex. This helps keep the egg white from spreading and losing shape. Cook until desired doneness.

And the plating – always using a warmed plate, top with baby spinach (or other baby greens) a couple pieces of the polenta, top with roasted tomatoes and a poached egg on top. Salt and cracked pepper to taste. And you have a wonderful Italian inspired breakfast.

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I arrived to show Kenniston Hill Inn in Boothbay, Maine and the innkeeper just made a loaf of Amish Cinnamon Bread. If you haven’t heard of that before, it’s a starter that apparently only the Amish can create. It’s a chain letter of sorts but with food. It’s passed on and on… It was similar to a cinnamon coffee cake and felt heavy but didn’t taste heavy. It’s a great cake to go with tea or coffee. And my favorite coffee has long been Rock City Roasters in Rockland, Maine. I now have a second favorite, Bard Coffee in Portland, Maine.

So I left there with a starter batch and instructions on caring for it for the following 9 days before turning it into a sweet bread with a texture similar to banana bread. And because it’s my nature to take a recipe and change it to make it my own, that’s what I did. I’ll give you both the original recipe and my recipe.

So you’ve been given a starter bag… Here are your instructions:

Note: Do not use wood or metal spoon, bowl or pan, glass or plastic only; do NOT refrigerate, it’s normal for the batter to bubble, rise and ferment, just let the air out and zip the bag again.

• Day 1 you receive your bag, just let it sit and label it Day 1
• Day 2 mush the  bag, let the air out
• Day 3 repeat
• Day 4 repeat
• Day 5 repeat
• Day 6 add to the bag: 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk, mix well
• Day 7 mush the bag, let the air out
• Day 8 repeat
• Day 9 repeat
• Day 10 follow the instructions below:

1. Pour the contents of the bag into a large glass or plastic bowl.
2. Add 1.5 cups flour, 1.5 cups sugar, 1.5 cups milk, whisk well.
3. Label four 1 gallon Ziploc bags with “Day 1″ and date. Fill each bag with 1 cup of the starter mixture. Pass three along to others and keep one for yourself.
4. Preheat oven to 325
5. To the remaining batter (the one you’ve kept):

• 3 eggs
• 1 cup oil
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1.5 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 cups flour
• 1 large box instant vanilla pudding

Grease two large loaf pans. Sprinkle cinnamon sugar in the pan to dust the inside. Pour batter evenly into the pans and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. Bake for about an hour, until a toothpick comes out clean.

NOW, for MY variation:

I substituted chocolate pudding for vanilla pudding; I omitted the baking soda and the cinnamon in the batter and I put the batter into two 10 inch round scalloped edge baking dishes. I added a ring of chocolate chips, cranberries, pecans and several dollops of cinnamon filling to the center. Then baked them for about 50 minutes and cut into wedges. I tasted it warm and cool and both were very good. I suspect that by leaving out the baking soda, the baking powder alone allowed the cake to be a bit more airy and rise more than it would with baking soda as well. The texture of this cake was a cross between a coffee cake and a devils food cake.

ENJOY!

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For those of you who have me figured out, you realize I’m all about the images. I try not to get too wordy in my posts. I like to let the photos speak for themselves. But this post has a story to it, one that has to be told in its long version to be appreciated.

I started with this toffee recipe back before I bought a bed and breakfast in Maine in 2004. It fact, made it several times, successfully. So when we bought the inn, I thought I’d make it as my thing, to put in the candy dishes in the rooms every day. It would become my signature candy, no commercial candies for me, it had to be homemade. So one day I got out my trusty candy thermometer (the same one I used before when making the toffee) along with the other ingredients and started making toffee. Let me first preface the rest of the story by saying DO NOT MAKE TOFFEE AT CHECK-IN TIME. Repeat, DO NOT MAKE TOFFEE AT CHECK-IN TIME. My kitchen was open to the guest entrance (which I loved) so in walk some guests to check in. I’m standing over my pot of melted butter and sugar in its light golden stage of yumminess. I tell my guests that I’ll just leave the mixture on low while I give them the tour and show them to their room. They even offer to wait until I’m done (maybe they had more sense than I did given that I was using a candy thermometer- pretty serious stuff). But NO, DON’T WORRY, THE CARAMEL IS STILL IN THE VERY EARLY STAGES AND NOT EVEN READING 200 YET (it needed to reach 290)…so off we go. You can see where this is going. After a few minutes upstairs I begin to smell smoke. I run downstairs to the kitchen and the caramel in the pan is as BLACK as ASPHALT and smoking the house up. Thankfully the smoke alarms didn’t go off (my guess is that because Summer in Maine is gorgeous we leave all windows open almost all Spring/Summer/and part of Fall. I ran outside with the pan so that it could continue to smoke OUTSIDE and not INSIDE. Baking  is supposed to make the inn smell good, right? The rest of the checkins that day heard my “don’t assume the smell of burned food will be what’s to come in the morning, please!!!!” and they all laughed.

Over the next year I attempted to make toffee again, promising NEVER to leave the pan unattended again. I followed the recipe exactly. Removed the mixture from the heat when the thermometer read 290. But it still looked too pale to be done. But I followed the recipe. After a handful of attempts and trashed toffee, I bought a new thermometer. This time, a fancy digital thermometer.

So it had been a while before I decided to try making toffee again. But now that I have a new thermometer, I was confident. But this time I had just been given a gift of a box of See’s Peanut Brittle, I think it was just before the holidays, and we happened to have a little snow on the ground. If you haven’t tasted See’s brittle, GO ONLINE and BUY IT NOW, it’s just amazing. Or maybe you shouldn’t because you could become addicted and be in my predicament of trying to create it at home…So the primary difference between brittle and toffee is baking soda and/or cream of tartar, it some how changes the texture just slightly.

I get all of my ingredients out, new candy thermometer and I decide to make brittle. I follow the recipe (except I used too small a saucepan but couldn’t have imagined that would matter)…WRONG. Candy making tip: DO NOT ASSUME WHEN MAKING CANDY. Repeat: DO NOT ASSUME WHEN MAKING CANDY. When it comes time to add the baking soda at just the precise moment, I add it and am prepared to stir quickly as the recipe reads, but I wasn’t prepared for a big VOLCANIC ERUPTION from my 3 quart saucepan. Fortunately my kitchen door was only 15 feet from the stove, I ran with the erupting saucepan outside and leaned over the porch rail JUST IN TIME for the blobby bubbly brown mess to pour over the edge of the pan and plop onto the beautiful WHITE SNOW. This brown blobby mess hardened in the once white snow immediately, AT OUR INN’S FRONT ENTRANCE, looking like someone had a bad case of the stomach flu (oh dear what if our guests thought it was from my breakfast? Oh the horror!) My husband tried to remove the hardened candy from the snow but it wasn’t as easy as he thought. So he covered the mess up with more snow. Out of sight, out of mind…so the blobby mess sat beneath a winter’s worth of snow. By spring there was no sign of it. That was my FIRST and LAST attempt at making brittle.

So YEARS LATER we’ve sold our inn…I decide to get the almonds out of the pantry a couple weeks ago and right away my husband knew where I was going with this. He said “uh oh”, but right away I said “no, you know what, I’m making my original toffee and I’m NOT going to rely on the thermometer. I know what color it should be.” And that’s exactly what I did. I used both thermometers just to verify what I thought all along, that my eye knew what would be right. The thermometers gave an inaccurate reading. And many chefs do things the same way, by touch, taste, appearance, smell, using the senses. MY TOFFEE TURNED OUT PERFECTLY DELICIOUS WITH JUST THE RIGHT TEXTURE.

SO HERE’S THE RECIPE with my coconut twist:

3 cups whole raw almonds (you can buy them already roasted but I prefer to roast my own)

2 cups shredded coconut

2 sticks butter

1 tablespoon water

1 cup white sugar

6 tablespoons corn syrup

1. roast almonds and coconut on sheet pan in oven on 300 degrees for about 15-20 minutes. Let them cool.

2. chop the nuts in a processor – stopping halfway to reserve about half the mixture leaving some larger pieces, then continue to pulse into small pieces.

3. put butter in 3 quart saucepan (we’re not adding baking soda so this size is adequate!) and add the water, corn syrup and sugar and heat to melt over medium heat.

4. Once melted, bring mixture to a boil over medium high heat, stirring with heatproof spatula occasionally for about 10 minutes (here is where the recipe calls for heating to 290 degrees) but I say heat it until it JUST gets to the right color of toffee (camel brown) and then remove from heat.

5. immediately add the large chop nuts and half of the small chop nuts and quickly fold to combine. The mixture will harden quickly.

6. spread onto parchment lined sheet pan with an offset spatula or heatproof spatula to the desired thickness.

7. top with 2 cups of chocolate chips (I prefer semi-sweet but you can use milk chocolate or a combination), let sit for a couple minutes, then spread the melting chips over the toffee.

8. top the melted chocolate with the remaining finely chopped nuts and let sit at least a few hours at room temperature. When completely set, break into pieces and store in an airtight container. Freezes beautifully!

If you can manage to part with some, it makes a great gift wrapped in a nice gift box with tissue…

Sunday September 25, 2009 was Harvest Brunch at Portland, Maine’s Danforth Inn.

Harvest on the Harbor is Maine’s preimer food and wine experience; a weekend event showcasing chefs and sustainable ingredients from Maine’s farmers, food artisans and fisherman, pulled together by talented chefs.

Chef Carmen Gonzalez of New York was sponsored by Danforth Inn and headlined Saturday evening’s Harvest on the Harbor’s Harvest Uncorked. Chef Carmen is known for her award winning Latin cuisine. Here for Harvest on the Harbor, she combined her love of Maine seafood with her Latin style, sending our taste buds off to cha cha cha.

At Harvest Brunch on Sunday, Chef Carmen started the event with a local Maine sparkling wine paired with her Lobster and Avocado Relish on Tostones and a Guisado of Crab and Plantain. We then sat down at individual tables with baskets of a trio of fried root chips served with a smoked haddock spread. Then the apple and mango fritters…can I please have two dozen of these sweet and airy morsels of fried dough?

Next we were treated to three delectable dishes: Maine Cod Eggs Benedict, Sausage, Oyster and Roasted Tomato Casserole and Pulled Pork and Braised Pork Belly with Quail Egg, (to be honest, I was too quick to eat the oyster and tomato dish that I forgot to photograph it!). Each course was paired with a wine.

And to finish, we indulged in a trio of sweets: Silver Dollar Pancakes with Warm Green Papaya, Crispy Churros dusted with Cinnamon Sugar and a Warm Chocolate Drizzle and Torrejas (similar to French Toast) with Fresh Maine Pears and Requeson (a type of cheese).

This was an epicurean event that I was fortunate enough to attend. Thank you, Chef Carmen.

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These are a decadent cookie inspired by a Good Morning America Christmas cookie contest winner many years back. I’ve put my spin on it by adding Nutella to the recipe! Don’t omit the malted milk powder; if you don’t have it, wait until you can buy some to make these cookies. King Arthur Flour is a good source.

Cream the following:

13 oz jar Nutella

1 C butter, softened

3 T sweetened condensed milk

3/4 C white sugar

1/2 C brown sugar

1 T vanilla

Add 2 eggs once fluffy and mix until smooth

Then add and mix well:

1 C malted milk powder

1/4 t salt

1/2 t baking soda

2 3/4 C flour

Fold in:

2 cups chocolate chips

Bake 350 for 10 minutes, allowing only the edges to lightly brown. Then let sit on cooling rack 4-5 minutes before moving. These cookies will come out soft but will become a bit harder when cool. They should have a little crunch on the outside with a chewy inside. They do soften in an airtight container. They were a huge hit when we had the inn…but make sure there are no nut allergies – Nutella contains ground hazelnuts.

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I visited Ann’s Point Inn and Spa on a beautiful October morning. This inn offers a unique secluded waterfront spot amongst a peninsula of residential properties. With just four rooms, the innkeepers can really concentrate on personalized, detailed service. The rooms are very large with gorgeous views of the harbor. Bathrooms are proportionately large with spacious vanities and very large two person, glass-enclosed ceramic and tumbled marble showers.

There is a large lap pool and a Finnish spa for self pampering. Add a handmade Cappuccino by the innkeeper and warm cookies delivered to your room and you feel cared for.

Breakfast is beautifully served on crystal and china and is as beautiful as delicious. The innkeepers use local foods when at all possible, including local cheeses, herbs, coffee beans, wine and more. I enjoyed photographing the food as much as tasting it!

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It’s October 1st, and the foliage at Moosehead Lake in interior Maine is at its peak. These are a few shots that Dana took from a seaplane (what a treat!) and on the ground. At my house in coastal Connecticut, to the south, it’s still mostly green, although a few trees have started to turn. New England autumn foliage almost makes the winter worthwhile!

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My husband and I stayed at Inn on the Harbor this past February and had these wonderful Maine Blueberry cookies at their Espresso Bar one late afternoon. The texture is soft, moist and a cross between a cookie and muffin and are great with coffee or tea. I’ve made them at home (and with fresh berries because they were in season, but frozen would work fine) and wanted to share them.

Cream the following ingredients:

1 stick of butter (1/2 cup)

3/4 cup sour cream

1/3 cup white sugar

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 egg

1 t vanilla

1/2 t baking powder and 1/2 t baking soda

Add in:

1 cup thick cut oats (not instant)

2 cups flour

1 1/2 cups white chocolate chips

GENTLY FOLD in blueberries to avoid breaking them and turning the dough purple.

Place small scoopfuls (I use a small ice cream scoop) on a heavy duty cookie sheet lined with a silicone mat and bake at 350 for 12-14 minutes until the very edges get slightly light brown. Let cool. Keep in airtight container to keep the cookies soft.

ENJOY!

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