Recipe: Bouchon Bakery's Shortbread

Bouchon Bakery, p. 44-45
Shortbread
4.5 stars

I'm not a shortbread kind of person unless it's dipped in chocolate!  If I'm going to eat dessert calories, I'm not going to waste them on a cookie that I personally think is boring and on the dry side.  Shortbread and pecan sandies just aren't my thing.

However, I made this recipe for my co-worker who loves shortbread.  Thought it was going to be super easy (the ingredients include just butter, sugar, salt vanilla paste, all-purpose flour), but I had issues after making the dough.

It says that the dough can be refrigerated for up to 2 days or frozen for up to 1 month.

The recipe then says:  "Unwrap the dough and place it between 2 pieces of parchment paper or plastic wrap.  With a rolling pin, pound the top of the dough, working from left to right, to begin to flatten it, then turn the dough 90 degrees and repeat.  (This will help prevent the dough from cracking as it is rolled.)  Roll out to a 9-inch square.  If the dough has softened, slide it (in the parchment) onto the back of a sheet pan and refrigerate it until it is firm enough to score."

Sounds easy enough.  But do you know how HARD the dough was?  It was like beating a freakin' rock with the rolling pin.  Perhaps he should've said to let it soften just a tad to where it's somewhat malleable.

Anyhow, I like regular sized cookies, so I made a dozen though the recipe says it produces 2 dozen.

My co-worked and people at work raved about the shortbread and asked for the recipe, so I'll take their word for it that it was good!

Recipe: Bouchon Bakery's Chocolate Chunk and Chip Cookies

Update!  Here is what 150g cookies look like.
Note the quarter in the middle so you can see
how huge these cookies are.

Bouchon Bakery, p.34-35
Chocolate Chunk and Chip Cookies
5 stars

This is THE BEST CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE RECIPE EVER!!!!
Soft, chewy, chocolatey.  Perfect.

Two super interesting things about this recipe:

• It uses dark brown sugar, granulated sugar and molasses (unsulfured blackstrap molasses which I found in our regular grocery store).
• These cookies are supposed to be HUGE.  150 grams of dough ball huge.  In fact, the recipe states, "The cookies are very large; bake only 3 on each pan."  I opted for the smaller cookie variant which is stated as 75 grams each.  They're still very large as you can see in the photo above.

Note/tip:

• Bake time of 17 min in a standard oven was perfect for the smaller version of the cookie.

Recipe: Bouchon Bakery's Devil's Food Cake

Blog contributor the grandcruman surprised me one day and gave me Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bakery book.  So sweet!  (Maybe it was a hint that he wants me to bake more!)

Wanting cake, I made my first recipe out of the book -- the Devil's Food Cake on p.116.  As you can see, I used mini bundt pans (aren't they cute?!).

It was pretty good, but here are some thoughts:

• The recipe says that it should take about 10 minutes to bake.  It took more like 18 min.  At 10 min, it was nowhere near being done.  I checked on it every 2 min, so beware of the timing.
• I was shocked by how little batter it produced.  I was able to make 4 mini bundt cakes plus 1.5 cupcakes.
• Originally, I had planned to make the Palet d'Or which is the recipe right next to this one in the book and uses the Devil's Food Cake along with chocolate mousse and a chocolate glaze.  At some point, I'll make the cake -- I just didn't have time to run out and get silver sheet gelatin.  (I didn't even know silver sheet gelatin existed.)
• The cake itself is ok.  It's a good consistency and has pretty good chocolate flavor, but it NEEDS the chocolate ganache that I drizzled over it -- as well as ice cream which we added.  I think the Ina Garten chocolate cake recipe actually tastes better on its own.  Sorry TK!

More baking to come from this book!