cookieexchange.tumblr.com

We are moving to tumblr. We are still Giorgio stewmari but we hope the new URL will be easier to spell and therefore to share. I copied over the March posts plus added some multimedia goodies. We hope you will continue to read and comment and enjoy, and we hope to make you all cookies some day soon. See you there.

I spent all day inside. I have a new writing regime that's working out but basically consists of sitting in my desk chair all day long, so at quarter past twelve Aurora and I went for a midnight constitutional. When we got back our roommate had returned with three guests. Naturally, I broke out the big glass bowl, a stick of butter and the heavy unbendable fork I keep separate for mixing tough doughs. They had just returned from an opera and were headed straight for bed on the pull-out couch in our living room when I interceded. I mixed and chopped and gabbed their ears off. I told them about my recent cookie "business" ventures (see previous posts). I used white cane sugar, molasses and an egg. We had a little of everything lying around so I threw in semisweet chocolate chips, raisins, walnuts, coconut flakes and raw cacao nibs. The guests waited sullenly for the timer to tick out 14 minutes, but when the bell finally rang they were all smiles and thank yous. As soon as the plate was empty, they pulled out the couch and shut the lights so I didn't cook the second half of the dough. Instead, I put it in a yogurt container in the fridge, I rarely let dough proof, I'll let you know how it tastes tomorrow.

PS I might change our URL, what do you think of cookieexchange.tumblr.com?

Last night I met and made cookies for the proprietress of Cookie Couture (a friend of a friend) — needless to say I was a little intimidated. I didn’t have enough advanced warning to make apple sauce, but I made a half batch of the molasses coconut walnut dark chocolate chunk oat cookies with an egg instead. They came out well, nicely bitter, and I had enough to bring some to a going away party for my old roommate, herself an amateur cookie enthusiast.

Stewart asked me how I became such a wheeler and dealer?

Mast Brothers Chocolate, Brooklyn-based chocolatiers, just opened a shop in Williamsburg. I first came across their beautifully wrapped chocolate bars at the Coop, one design in particular with Tarot card imagery is especially apt in light of our current movie project. And because we keep talking about  trying to sell our cookies and maybe even opening a shop of our own, I made a half batch I think they'll like, of chocolate salty oat according to Stewart's recipe (course sea salt, lots of coconut and cacao nibs instead of chips or chunks). Tomorrow morning I am going to Williamsburg with five cookies in a yogurt container Stewart and I emptied in a breakfast or two on the island in Maine. I used Trader Joe's 72% dark chocolate and raw sundried organic cacao beans (chopped), I hope the brothers aren't too particular.

UPDATE: I didn't have a succinct idea about how to play the moment so I came off as kind of odd.  They appreciated the cookies as much as one could appreciate a leftover container full of dark brown biscuits (Stewart was calling cookies "biscuits" after spending four weeks in Spain with an Englishwoman) from a stranger (a friend saw them eating them later, which is heartening).  It was good to see their operation, how they use the space, the kitchen and the minimal "store."  They encouraged me to start with wholesale and I explained that I was waiting for my partner to settle down and start the business with me.  I bought a bar, "Dark Chocolate [70% Cacao] Single Origin Hispaniola, Domincan Republic," but I'm saving it until I decide to eat it as is, or chop it up or melt it down for cookies.

Stewart's absence is a much-lamented fact at the movie apartment. Much of what we shoot is a documentary of our real lives in the space, but it seems wrong to record the cookie-making process without his contribution. The cookies are good though. On camera yesterday, I made the original recipe (the one of the bag of Tollhouse semisweet chocolate chips) side by side with their latest incarnation:

Original (Latest)
Unsalted Butter (Unsalted Butter)
Brown Sugar (White Cane Sugar + Molasses)
Egg (Applesauce)
Vanilla (Vanilla)
All-Purpose Flour (All-Purpose Flour + Oats)
Baking Powder
Salt
Semisweet Chocolate Chips (Chunked 72% Dark Chocolate + Coconut Flakes + Walnuts)

I was surprised how bland the half batch of originals tasted -- experimentation continues to be fruitful.

I can only post briefly because I am working on this movie. Stewart came by the set today and we made these cookies:

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup white cane sugar
1 overflowing tsp molasses
1 scoop of apple sauce (of 1 anjou pear, 1 fuji apple, 2 candycrisp, 2 pinklady)
1 capful homemade Stoli-based vanilla extract
1/3 cup coconut
1/2 cup oats
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup chunked 72% chocolate
1/2 cup walnuts

So soft, best cookies ever!

Yesterday, I put twelve cookies into the oven but when I took them out there were only eleven. My roommate says he got impatient. And as if that weren't enough, he dunked it in water before eating it, he said "to cool it off."

Stewart says, "not cool."

My good friend has lived on the Upper West Side for almost three years and I've lived in New York for a year and a half, yet until tonight I had never been to her apartment. It had become a point of contention between us and, for me, a symbol of the disconnectedness of the inhabitants of the city. There was only one way to start making things right, I brought my supplies in a yogurt container:

1 stick of butter (wrapped)
1 egg (in a plastic bag)

and in an empty cookie mix tin (ironically):

1/2 cup turbinado sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup oats
1/3 cup coconut flakes
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

[Sidenote: I did not bring vanilla because I am finally using the extract I began steeping in September, it is delicious, but in a 750ml Stolichnaya Vodka bottle with a loose top it is hard to transport, I need to keep a travel-size bottle for occasions such as this.]

I first mixed the butter and egg and then, in a fit of experimentation (if this works maybe we could market it), added all the rest of the ingredients from the tin at once. It did not combine easily, the large particulate ingredients getting between the flour and the egg/butter mixture. However, Aurora put her fork aside, washed her hands, and went at it, squeezing the dough between her fingers until we had a dense ball like pie crust. The cookies were a bit too grainy but nothing a little tinkering couldn't solve. My friend enjoyed them and I think we buried the hatchet over my long neglect -- we made a plan to meet regularly but when it came to actually setting a day, balked.

Stewart is spending four weeks in Spain. Just before he left, he and I made a triple half batch of chocolate chocolate chunk cookies for his elementary school class's second annual reunion get-together. Working with a tough oven and small baking trays, I burned my finger and not a few of the cookies, but the responsible substance using former classmates munched them happily through the foosball tournament, even with compliments and offers of financing for a bakery down the road -- one of Stewart's semi-former admirers asked us for a business plan, and so we are composing a poem. We added a Starburst candy to the center of one cookie, which we marked with an X and intended for David to eat, but to our dismay it circulated through the party and was picked up by an innocent bystander (sorry Anthony).

Five days later I was in Providence for New Years Eve, where I made vegan chocolate chip cookies with walnuts for the assembled revelers. I started with two sticks of Earth Balance. Earlier, at Whole Foods, I asked my friend if she had brown sugar and she said she uses molasses and sugar (her girlfriend refuted this claim but supported experimentation), so in the place of 1 cup of brown sugar I used 3/4 cup vegan white sugar and 1/4 cup blackstrap molasses (blackstrap, according to the baking science textbook I got for Christmas, is "inedible" but we beg to differ) -- I am convinced that this is a breakthrough, I would use maybe a different kind of molasses and less, but I have long been suspicious of brown sugar and hope that greater control and independence will result from the change. The dough turned dark brown and had a definite molasses flavor but after baking mellowed (in taste, not color, they were almost as dark as chocolate cookies). To replace the egg, I made an applesauce of five Golden Delicious, five Granny Smith, two Honeycrisp and two Bartlett pears -- the cookies had nice bits of peel showing and held together perfectly. And they were a hit. It was a good night for baking overall, including pistachio-fennel-apricot bread, cornbread, vegan carrot cake cupcakes and whole wheat dough veggie (cheese-less) pizzas.

Yesterday at the natural food store in Flagstaff, AZ, Aurora and I came upon Spirulina "cookies," mostly green, containing no flour or eggs or diary, they were square, squishy, refrigerated, wrapped in cellophane -- we didn't have the guts to try them (not at $2.99 per).

With stress on the momentary rise here because Aurora's parents had to prepare to attend a pot-luck mystery party (set in the 1980s financial crisis), I decided a half batch was in order. Again I was deeply satisfied by the reliability of the recipe. Unfortunately, Aurora's parents left before the cookies were ready and we ate them all (except for a token two out of eighteen) before they returned home.

While they were out and I was preparing tomato sauce and pasta, I received a phone call from David and Stewart, still on the road, staying at a boarding school where a friend works in the administration. They wanted to know a bread recipe, which we couldn't remember either, and the talk quickly turned to cookies and previous posts here in particular. David agrees with me, although I think his opinion is a little more vehement, that we've lost sight of our original intentions by focussing on the salty chocolate oat cookies. Stewart disagrees, he is doing soul-searching by continuing to experiment, he said, melting dark chocolate instead of using cocoa powder and substituting cocoa nibs for chips -- by a cosmic coincidence the nibs, given to him by his aunt, come from Theo Chocolate in Seattle, which I visited during my stay in the rainy city, before which I had never heard of nibs. He says, we are spreading the gospel on the two coasts, the finer points of which we will have to continue to debate over the Christmas holiday when the three of us will be in Boston. Stewart will be working at Clear Flour Bakery in Brookline and I hope we will be able to steal some time on the equipment to search our souls on a grander scale.

Last night I made a good old-fashioned half batch (with just white flour and minus white sugar), dee-licious! I had lost track of my values, trying to make those darned chocolate cookies -- I made them again the other night, this time with melted Callebaut chocolate (1/2 pound), and again they were crumbly and too salty (1 tablespoon of Baliene course). I'm putting the recipe aside for a little while to do some soul-searching.

Stewart called from the road in Maine (he couldn't remember the exits), he and David are at the house now, moving the deck furniture out of the elements.  They've started a band, figured out how to use the heat (two months too late), and I assume are enjoying an half batch themselves.

I have a cold and so tonight I made apple sauce (from a few different apples and a pear).  I discovered Aurora's mother's copy of the The Tassajara Bread Book, relevant to all cooking and baking endeavors, in it there is a poem that begins like this:

A COMPOSITE OF KITCHEN NECESSITIES

Bring food alive with your

loving presence.

To have compassion, to have respect

for fresh foods, for broken bowls,

for dirty napkins, and little bugs.

To take care of leftovers,

not saying, oh that's all right, we have plenty

we can throw that away.

Because everything is saying love me, 

have compassion, hold me gently.

Please hug me now and then

(we're really one, not two),

but don't get attached

(we're really two, not one).

The bowls and knives, the table, the teapot,

the leftovers, the molding vegetables,

the juicy fruit,

everything is asking this of you:

make full use,

take loving care

of me.

The cups, the glasses, the sponges,

the sticky honey jar,

all asking to fulfill.

Just to make deepest love all the time,

concentrating not on the food, but on yourself:

making your best effort to allow things

to fulfill their functions.  In this way

everything is deliciously full

of warmth and kindness.

I've been on the road for two weeks...

My first night in Seattle, I was going to make cookies but a friend of the friend I was staying with is allergic to gluten (flour, oats), dairy (semisweet chips), soy (Earth Balance), peanuts, corn, practically everything.  After consulting with Aurora, I made her mother's chocolate cake:

3 eggs

1 cup coconut milk (instead of buttermilk)

long squirt of honey

1-3/4 cup (gluten-free) flour

1-1/2 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup cocoa

2 tsp baking soda

dash of salt

The recipe calls for a cup of coffee, which provides most of the cake's flavor, but I didn't have time for it, and the end result was bland but happily devoured with a Dagoba Lavender bar. Despite my precautions, the allergic friend had migraines for the rest of my stay in Seattle and is maybe still having them.

My only other (not quite) cookie experience before leaving the rainy city was a delicious cone of bourgeois cookies and cream ice cream from Molly Moon's -- peppermint ice cream with Girl Scout thin mint cookies -- mmm!

 

Then I headed south to San Francisco, where I set up a mobile cookie unit, carrying all the ingredients for the Chocolate Salty Oat knock-offs around with me in my backpack (except the eggs and butter which I left in the knowing hands of Providence to make available to me).  I made them three times, first for friends at UCSF, then for a dinner party in Berkeley and last for my family in Sonoma on the night before Thanksgiving, when we celebrate Hanukkah (we also got a mint chocolate chip and oreo cookie ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins decorated with a menorah).  The only change worth noting was in the batch for my family, I used a Trader Joe's Pound Plus dark chocolate bar chopped into chunks instead of chips.  The next day, my cousins chatted me up about the idea to start a cookie business, maybe out of a truck in New York -- I tried to explain to them that the secret ingredient to any successful cookie venture is Stewart's charm and good looks.

I brought the mobile cookie unit with me on the plane to Arizona, smuggling the 4 oz. bottle of vanilla in my back pocket through the security check.  They searched my backpack, feeling my flour for anything I might have hidden in there but without opening my Quaker Oats tube, where I hid my chips and baking powder.  I was nervous and talked a mile a minute about how a friend and I are looking for a space to open a bakery in New York.  Nothing was confiscated.

My family had many opinions on how to improve the recipe, some methodological, others about ingredients and proportions.  On Sunday in Flagstaff, where I am now, I made the recipe again with an extra 1/4 cup of butter.  They came out better but still too crumbly.  Next, I'm going to try replacing coconut flakes with coconut milk and/or try using melted chocolate instead of cocoa powder.

Back in Brooklyn, Stewart showed up at our apartment on a comically small bicycle. I brought a bag of Chocolate Salty Oats by Kayak Cookies back from D.C. for him to try and for us to reverse engineer from the ingredients list, our half batch recipe and the recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies on the Quaker Oats package. Here's what we used:

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup turbinado sugar
1 egg
2 capfuls vanilla
Hershey's Cocoa till it seemed right (not enough)
1-1/2 cups oats
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of coconut flakes
3/4 cups semisweet chocolate chips
Baleine course sea salt to taste

They cook differently than flour-based cookies -- longer -- and they need to be shaped more as they do not settle. They were a little sweeter than the originals (Kayak must use darker chocolate, the package only says "my favorite Belgian chocolate") and were better after cooling than when still warm and gooey (we inadvertently let one cool off before eating it). It's heartening to think we got so close on our first try, I want to try imitating other cookies now, especially since the bag of six cost $12.

It's been a month since we finished painting in Maine and parted in Boston. I returned to Brooklyn and Stewart went out to Ohio. This week he returned east, but we just missed each other in New York -- I left for D.C. yesterday and he arrives in N.Y.C. today.

Last night, with my friends in Washington, I made a half batch, with questionable brown sugar (dried out, we added water and distilled some syrup, don't know how much, not a lot) and only a little, maybe a quarter cup, white sugar, a mugful (no measuring cups) of bleached all-purpose flour, Ghiradelli 60% cacao bittersweet chocolate chips and baking soda, no vanilla, no salt, no oats, no nuts. The dough was not very sweet, but I thought tasted good. In the oven, rather than settle, the cookies puffed up and came out cakey -- too much flour to sugar/butter. I like the chips a lot, better than Ghiradelli's semisweet chips, which are among my least favorite. This morning, my friend took two cookies in his lunch to work. All in all: positive results.

Today, I'm going to get the salted chocolate chocolate chip oatmeal cookies I had when I was here last -- expensive and excellent. When Stewart and I next rendezvous, I hope to recreate them.

We're done.

We said goodbye to the island painter on Sunday night, after the unfortunate Red Sox finale. We watched the last three ALCS games with him, bringing a half batch each night; like the players on screen, sports viewers fall easily into superstitious routines. Game 5 was such a fortuitous come-back that our presence and the cookies that came with us were partly credited. We were invited back and for game 6 the cookies worked again. But for game 7 our luck and our white flour had run out (we made them with all whole wheat flour) and the painter's parting words had an edge of resentment -- the beer had run out the night before and I think the cookies less well-suited the sober outcome of the series.

And then yesterday, we put the finishing touches on the deck, the trim, a screen door and the banister we've been painting, with interruptions, since August. We said goodbye to our neighbor, a man in his seventies or eighties who we'd only spoken to a few times briefly but who said he would miss us. I thought the people on the island were secretive, loners who kept to themselves, and in many ways they are, but there grows a certain companionship in proximate isolation. Watching our neighbor walk by, looking for his dog, waving from the top of the ladder, admiring from a distance the stained shingles he hangs to dry on clotheslines on his porch, and his admiring our work, calling out an encouraging word from the road or just stopping to look, we've become friends of a sort. I will miss him too.

We were pretty much out of food but in the hour before the ferry Stewart scrounged together the last of our peanut butter, a half stick of butter and apricot jam for the egg (flour, sugar, baking soda too) to make a small batch of crumbly peanut butter cookies. We ate them off the tray, finished the milk and that was it. I turned off the power to the stove and hot water heater, we shut the lights and locked the doors. It was too dark to admire the paint job as we walked away, dragging our ladders on a cart to the dock. On our way, we stopped at the island handyman's house to tell him we were going and to ask him to turn off the water in our house for the winter.

We return to the island tomorrow afternoon for the final stretch of work, it's taken a lot out of us, I think the stress is making me sick, my stomach has been hurting for the last three weeks. Someone tried to blame all the cookies I've been eating.

We are off-island for the morning to pick up supplies (Home Depot, Maine Paint Store, Hannaford's); and since the General Store closed there is no internet on the island. We are finally working full days -- scraping, sanding, priming, painting. We run in the evening before dinner, make bread every day or two (recipe below). We've made cookies three times:

1. I was pondering our recipe, trying to decide how to improve it. Emboldened by our success at the vegan coop, Stewart (guru-like) recommended that I eschew measuring and make a batch by what looked and tasted right. I had wanted to try less butter and sugar, maybe increase the oats, but what I ended up with had in it (I think, we'll never know for sure) less sugar and flour, and the same amount of butter, which means they came out sizzling in a puddle -- fried, not sweet, chocolate chip biscuits.

2. I went to town for vegetables and left Stewart alone, during which time he resolved to stop eating cookies and to exercise more. He immediately made a 1/2 batch (adding poppy seeds and his trademark dash of cinnamon) and we have started running double what we used to (3-4 miles now).

3. I made cookies with only 3/4 of a stick of butter and a whole cup of oats (see above). They came out well, maybe a little too dry. Stewart ate and enjoyed them.

BREAD
2 tbsp sugar (brown, white or honey)
1 cup warm water (it helps to warm the bowl too)
1 tsp yeast
wait for bubbles
1 cup white flour (we try to keep the ratio of white to wheat flour 1:2)
rise 15-20 minutes (called "the sponge")
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp salt
little things to taste (seeds, nutmeats, raisins, cinnamon)
add approx. 2 cups whole wheat flour gradually as you knead
cover with a damp cloth and let rise for 30 minutes
knead again
place in pan on a bed of oats and let rise for 30 minutes
bake at 350

By popular demand we remade our vegan cookie recipe for the coöpers tonight. We quadrupled the 1/2 batch, filled three sheets and made a cookie pie. The pie we pressed down so it came out denser than usual. Also, because Stewart went to play soccer and I went to an experimental film screening, we left someone else to supervise the baking. Stewart's van is officially busted, with broken brake lines that will take hundreds of dollars and at least a week to fix. So we are leaving it to the wasps and returning to Maine with my parents car -- loan generously extended. We should be painting by Saturday if the weather along the coast of Maine is anything like the Hudson River valley.

UPDATE: The same "someone else" mentioned above saved us three cookies which she delivered to our car-side as we were leaving this morning. Thank you thank you. In a contentious decision, I ate two and Stewart had one.

We are at Bard to pick up Stewart's van. It had been sitting in a lot all summer and wasps had built twelve nests: in the exhaust pipe, the roof rack, under the hood and around the hinges of the doors. We literally used a ten foot pole to swat them off -- a frightening operation. Then we pumped up a flat tire with a bike pump, mostly Stewart because I don't have near his strength.

We are staying the night at a vegan coöp and made two batches with this variation on our recipe:

approx 1/2 cup whipped earth balance
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 squirt of agave nectar
2 capfuls vanilla extract
splash (amount equal to 1 egg) homemade peach jam
1 cup white whole wheat flour
1/2 cup oats
1/2 cup coconut flakes
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup chilled vegan chocolate chips OR 4/3 handful dried cherries

Both the chocolate chip and cherry batches came out surprisingly well and were a hit with a boisterous group that arrived just as the pans were coming out of the oven.