Even if I tend to consider noon “time to roll out of bed and think about eating something” time.

A very serious breakfast.

Quite honestly, most “mornings” I end up just eating fruit alongside my morning cup of gunpowder, or occasionally getting a big, chewy, cream cheese-stuffed bagel from the neighborhood coffee shop. Or I eat leftovers. (Or just throw on some clothes and head into another ‘hood for awesome sandwiches or slabs of pizza or something.) Actually throwing something more than that together first thing is not really my style. I’m sure a lot of people feel similarly.

Something gooey this way comes.

You know who REALLY doesn’t wanna mess around with a complicated breakfast first thing in the morning, but probably desperately needs the warm comfort of a soft, chocolate chip-studded muffin? People with hangovers. Who, if they have some leftovers from the night before and tend to bake ever at all, should have the ingredients to build these amazing little lumps of barely-appropriate-for-morning baked goodness.

A non-fruity chocolate is best. Milk chocolate would be interesting.

These muffins are so easy and fast to throw together, you can have them baking while you make some coffee or tea (or chug a Gatorade with a couple aspirin, if it’s THAT kind of morning). They’re fragrant, fluffy and soft with crunchy tops, best enjoyed warm so the chocolate oozes with every bite. The recipe is also very easy to divide in half and forgiving towards sloppy cup-measuring. There’s really no reason not to have whiskey and chocolate for breakfast.

Breakfast is served.

Whiskey Chocolate Chip Muffins

1. 1 3/4 cup AP flour
2. 3/4 cup sugar
3. 2 tsp baking powder
4. 1 tsp baking soda
5. 1/2 tsp salt
6. 1 tsp cinnamon
7. 1/4 cup melted butter (or a neutral oil like canola)
8. 2/3 cup plain yogurt
9. 1 tsp vanilla
10. 1/2 cup whiskey
11. 2/3 cup chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 400F. In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon and whisk to combine. In a liquid measuring cup or other small cup, combine the melted butter, yogurt, vanilla and whiskey. Whisk or stir with a fork to combine well. Dump the wet mixture into the dry mixture and add the chocolate chips, then whisk just until there are no more large streaks of flour visible. Spoon into a paper-lined muffin pan and bake for 15 minutes, then rotate the pan and bake for 5 minutes more. Remove from oven and allow muffins to cool for at least 5 minutes in the pan before removing. Makes 12.

You could easily substitute another type of alcohol for the whiskey – rum would be nice, maybe with a little ginger added. Brandy would be tasty, too. You could also sprinkle the tops of the muffins with raw sugar and/or spices before baking, but they are fine as-is and get a nice crusty top without any extra help.

…Wait, cookies? Hm, maybe not so hard to think of things after all.

A whole tray of 'em!

Once cookie I just can’t get my head around is the snickerdoodle. I guess it’s because I never had one until a year or so ago, so I have no nostalgic childhood memories of buttery sugar cookies rolled in crunchy cinnamon sugar. (It was all ginger molasses, all the way for me!) Even though the first one I had was good, it just didn’t impress me. I figured there had to be some way to make it more appealing, and eventually I realized what that was.

They so pretty.

Pumpkin + spice = awesome. Plain old cinnamon would sure be fine, what with the spice grinder and whole spices I stocked up on for my Christmas cookie extravaganza, but since I’d already mixed up a batch of my gingerbread spice blend for marshmallows I decided to go with that.

The floating cookie?

Since the recipe I found for pumpkin snickerdoodles only called for white sugar and you can’t REALLY have anything gingerbread flavored without good old molasses flavor, I decided to add a little light brown sugar. Only a little, and only light brown because these cookies are soft like cake.

Slide them into your gullet!

The texture reminds me of the whoopie pies I made back in the day, nice and round and fluffy, just the way I like my whoopie pies. These would be excellent sandwiched with your favorite whoopie pie filling…cream cheese, chocolate, caramel, dulce de leche???

Freaky neon orange insides.

Oh yeah, they really are that orange inside. That means they must have a lot of beta carotene…which means they’re healthy, right? :D

Spicy pumpkiny goodness.

Pumpkin Gingerbread Spice Snickerdoodles (adapted from For the Love of Cooking):

For the cookies:

1. 1/2 cup butter
2. 1/2 cup sugar
3. 1/4 cup light brown or demerara sugar
4. 1 egg
5. 1/2 tsp vanilla
6. 1/2 cup pumpkin
7. 2 cups AP flour
8. 1 tsp gingerbread spice blend*
9. 3/4 tsp baking soda
10. 1/2 tsp salt

For the Sugar Coating:

1. 1/2 cup sugar
2. 2 tsp gingerbread spice blend*

In a stand mixer or with a hand mixer, cream together the butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla, scraping down the bowl to ensure that it’s fully incorporated. Beat in the pumpkin and scrape down again. Combine the remaining dry ingredients and whisk or sift together (if your baking soda or flour has clumps definitely sift). With the mixer off, add all the dry at once and mix on low speed until almost completely incorporated. Scrape down the beater and bowl (especially the bottom) and briefly mix on low speed until everything is fully combined. Cover with plastic wrap and chill for at least 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350F. Prepare two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats. Combine the sugar coating ingredients thoroughly in a small bowl. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and form into balls slightly smaller than golf balls. Thoroughly coat each one in the sugar coating and place at least 1 1/2″ apart on the baking sheets. Flatten each slightly with the heel of your hand. Bake for about 10 minutes, turning the sheets halfway through. Remove from oven when the cookies are firm to the touch on top. Cool for about 1 minute on the sheet then move to a rack to finish cooling.

Makes about 24.

*I make my own blend of gingerbread spices. It’s phenomenal when made with freshly-ground spices (which is why my cookies have bigger specks of some spices and little ginger fibers here and there) but is also really nice with pre-ground spices, too. I usually measure one part as a teaspoon when I make a batch.

1. 2 parts cinnamon
2. 2 parts ginger
3. 1 part nutmeg
4. 1 part cloves
5. 1 part allspice

Snowball?

I had fun though, and was rewarded with reports of happy snarfing from around the country. Among a couple of old favorites I included some new treats, many of which were variations on recipes I use at work.

Cute!

You won’t be seeing posts on the triangle-shaped biscotti, salted bitter brownies or experimental fudge cookies; though they all came out delicious I considered them to be sort of works-in-progress.

But these cookies? They’re pretty much my ideal.

So nibbular!

A crunchy, chocolatey twist on the classic Mexican Wedding/Russian Tea Cake. Shortbread dough, classically mixed with toasted chopped nuts, instead is peppered with cocoa nibs. Texturally fun to eat, with a sophisticated bitter flavor, these are among my very favorite cookies that we’ve done for the cookie plate at work.

Making them at home, I wanted to give them my own personal twist, something cute and clever and tasty that would make these cookies even more interesting and unique. So I thought about cocoa nibs…and what goes with cocoa nibs? Cinnamon and spice. Perfect! I took a little artistic liberty on the name and added a little cinnamon and cayenne to the outer layer of powdered sugar. And then I baked them and packed them and sent them with love.

Smells so good.

Oaxacan Wedding Cakes:

1. 12 oz. butter (not cold but not soft or melty either)
2. 3/4 cup powdered sugar
3. 1 tsp vanilla
4. 2 cups AP flour
5. 1 cup cornstarch
6. 1/2 tsp salt
7. 1 cup cocoa nibs
8. More powdered sugar, for rolling
9. Cinnamon to taste
10. Cayenne pepper to taste

In a stand mixer or with a hand mixer, cream together the butter, powdered sugar and vanilla. You will probably have to scrape your bowl and beater(s) a few time. Make sure there are no stray lumps of butter in the mixture. Add the flour, cornstarch and salt all at once and beat on low until the mixture comes together, scraping down as needed to create an even mixture without overmixing the dough. Gently mix in the cocoa nibs and pack into an airtight container (makes about one quart of dough). Seal the container and refrigerate the dough overnight.

Preheat the oven to 325F. Use a spoon to scoop chunks of dough and roll them quickly into roughly 1″ balls in your hands. Place at least 1″ apart on parchment-lined baking sheets and bake for 5 minutes, then rotate the sheets and bake for another 5 minutes or so, until the cookies are very lightly browned on the bottom and slightly cracked on the top. Allow to cool completely on the sheets before removing. Combine powdered sugar with cinnamon and cayenne pepper to taste (you want a cinnamony smell and a slight bite from the pepper, neither should be overwhelming). Once the cookies are cool, roll thoroughly in powdered sugar mixture, more than once if necessary to get an even opaque white coating.

Makes about 6 dozen cookies.

September marks the anniversary of the release of one of my most very favorite books, The Flavor Bible! Last year I did a post about it and this year Karen and Andrew (the authors) were kind/terrifically sweet and generous enough to send me a copy of The Flavor Bible’s companion book, What to Drink with What You Eat, as well as a few bottles of wine to play with. There was a bit of a snafu with the delivering of said book (though the wine showed up quickly, at 9 p.m. from a refrigerated UPS truck…odd) which FedEx decided to send straight back after I wasn’t home to receive it, but Karen and Andrew just arranged to have it sent to me at work and all was well! So that explains why this post is just barely still in the month of September. It was frustrating having the wine around and no book to glean ideas from, though!

How dramatic!

Luckily it took me almost no time at all to decide what to do with the first wine. I’ve had an idea for a red wine-chocolate chip sorbet scribbled in my idea notebook since I moved to New York (actually I think it was scribbled in there as I was brainstorming to pass the time on the trip down) and I was excited to put it to use! I’m not much of a red wine fan – dry whites and the occasional rosé are more my speed (and, ok, hard liquor over everything if we’re really getting down to it) but one of the bottles I received was a gorgeous, deep purpley-red Cabernet-Sauvignon. Not very sweet but not overly tannic either, the added sugar and spice in this sorbet really helped the wine achieve its maximum dessert potential, I think.

Of course you have to serve it in wine glasses.

I hope I’m  not insulting any wine purists by dumping the whole bottle (minus a few sips to taste test it) in a pan with sugar, water and spice, but this is how I roll. You give me a foodstuff, I make said foodstuff into dessert. It’s what I do. It would be very good on its own, without the little bits of bittersweet chocolate throughout, maybe with some fresh cherries or other red or blue/black/purple berries…but then it would be more of a palate cleanser than a dessert. And I like dessert.

The booziness never really goes away completely.

Let’s talk about those books for a bit. You all know how much I love and rely on The Flavor Bible to spark my creative process. If I’ve convinced you to pick up a copy and put it to use, good! I hope you love it as much as I do…though if you do, you’re going to need What to Drink with What You Eat as well. Really. I can’t believe I’ve gone for so long without it. In addition to being an excellent way to learn a lot of the basics about wine quickly, it also covers EVERYTHING you could possibly drink. Including water. There’s even a nice, thorough tea section. As someone who seeks out flavors in unusual places, this just adds another dimension to what I can potentially do with flavors in my dessert experiments.

The chocolate is a little big but it still tastes awesome.

The spices in this may seem overpowering at first, even when it’s freshly churned, but will mellow out once it’s had a chance to set up. The only improvement I can suggest is to use bittersweet chocolate shavings (the chocolate MUST be bittersweet…I’ve decided this, don’t question it) or do it up straciatella-style, as it’s hard to balance big chips in bites of quickly-melting alcoholic sorbet.

Happy birthday, Flavor Bible!

Cabernet-Sauvignon Chocolate Chip Sorbet

1. 1 bottle Cabernet-Sauvignon
2. 1 cup sugar
3. 1 cup water
4. 1 medium cinnamon stick, roughly broken up
5. 1 tsp whole cloves
6. 1 tsp whole black peppercorns
7. 1 cup bittersweet chocolate chips

Place the wine, sugar and water in a deep saucepan. Add the spices and bring to a boil. Keep on a low boil for 5 minutes, until most of the alcohol has cooked off and the spices are apparent. Remove from heat. Remove as much of the spices as you can find with a small strainer and allow to come to room temperature (or chill over an ice bath if you’re in a hurry). Strain completely into a medium-large bowl and place in the freezer for about 5 hours, until the mixture is slushy. Churn in an ice cream maker, mixing the chocolate chips in at the last few seconds of churning. Remove to a chilled container and freeze several hours, until firm and scoopable.

Yes, you do really need to pre-freeze the base until it’s slushy. And eat it in small quantities (or just very quickly).

Nutty goodness.

The first thing I’m going to show you is brought to you in part by Oh Nuts! of Brooklyn. I was contacted by them and asked if I’d like to try some of their bulk nuts and dried fruit for use in a recipe. Of course I said yes! It took me a while to decide what I wanted to try (they have a HUGE selection, and I’ll definitely be placing future bulk orders through them), and eventually I decided on raw macadamia nuts (because they are generally not something I would buy due to their price) and dried candied kiwi (which I’d never had before).

Kiwis: now in technicolor.

The kiwis are honestly kind of a better snack than an ingredient, but I did use a few alongside candied pineapple and papaya (from the store downstairs) in my first creation, some coconut macaroons topped with macadamias.

Both nutty & coconutty.

Where is the fruit, you ask? It’s a surprise!

Hey, fruit!

However, that is not one of the recipes I will be sharing today. I wasn’t overly thrilled with the way they came out and they were a pain in the butt to shape without them falling apart. They were tasty, but I thought the macadamias deserved a little something more special. So I made something else.

Crunchy & soft.

I decided to make macadamia-topped banana mochi cakes. I couldn’t find an actual recipe for banana mochi cakes, just one for Hawaiian mochi banana bread. It sounded great but contained Bisquick, something I definitely don’t keep in my kitchen, so I found a recipe for a Bisquick substitute and replaced the flour with non-glutinous rice flour to keep them gluten-free. I also added what I believe to be the banana’s best friend: Chinese 5 spice powder. And to give another slight dimension to the flavors, I used a splash of sesame oil.

Oh them banana speckles.

But that’s not all. Oh no. You see, I thought that banana and macadamia weren’t quite enough. I wanted a third flavor. I asked on Twitter. The responses were basically all cries for chocolate and coconut. But I had no chocolate in my possession (or else I’d have added cocoa nibs, I’m sure) and I didn’t want to mess with the texture by adding dessicated coconut. There was a third flavor that kept floating to the top of my brain – CARAMEL – but for a while I just couldn’t figure out the best way to add it to the batter without compromising the recipe. So I took a step back and thought about all the things that went into the recipe. It quickly became obvious that I just had to caramelize the bananas first! So I did. And the cupcakes were amazing.

Pretty cake!

Caramelized Banana Mochi Cakes with Macadamias

1. 4 medium bananas, ripe
2. 1/4 cup sugar in the raw
3. 5 g baking powder
4. 2 g sugar
5. 48 g rice flour (not Mochiko)
6. 23 g vegetable oil
7. 8 oz. Mochiko
8. 2 tsp baking soda
9. 1/2 tsp salt
10. 1/4 tsp Chinese 5 spice
11. 3/4 cup sugar
12. 3/4 cup vegetable oil
13. Splash of sesame oil
14. 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
15. 2 1/2 eggs (scramble one egg and add half the weight to the other two)
16. 1/2 cup roughly chopped macadamia nuts

Slice the bananas in half lengthwise and place on a foil-lined sheet or broiler tray. Sprinkle the raw sugar in a thick layer. Broil or torch until the sugar is melted and well caramelized. Allow to cool, then puree thoroughly in a blender and set aside.

Preheat the oven to 350F. Combine the 5 g baking powder, 2 g sugar and non-Mochiko rice flour in a medium-large bowl and use a pastry cutter to cut in the 23 g vegetable oil. You want the mixture to be in tiny crumbs…crumblets, if you will. Whisk in the Mochiko, baking soda, salt, 5 spice and sugar. Stir in the oil and vanilla, then the eggs, then the bananas. Allow the batter to rest for a couple of minutes, then spoon it into lined muffin tins. Sprinkle with chopped macadamias and bake for 20-25 minutes, until the edges of the cake tops are browned. Makes about 16 cupcakes.

These cupcakes, unlike most mochi cakes, are actually really good while still warm (like most banana baked goods), though a bit oily. They don’t get quite as chewy as a normal all-mochi cake, but they are extra soft and crazy fragrant. I declared them possibly the most banana-y thing EVER. Z likes them with a schmear of cream cheese.

***BONUS RECIPE Y’ALL***

I know I promised two recipes, so here’s the second one! It does deserve its own post but I only got one decent picture so I decided to just tack it on here. Prickly pears have a pretty short season so get a bunch while you can (discounted bruised-looking ones are the way to go; the outside looking yucky doesn’t mean the insides aren’t fine) and make this fast! It’s a great thing to have on hand in the early fall if you’re going through a final heat wave like much of the country is now. Just be careful and don’t touch them bare-handed – the worst pricklies are invisible!

Hard to capture the insane magenta color.

Prickly Pear Sorbet

1. 12 medium prickly pears
2. 6 Tbsp sugar
3. Juice of 2 limes
4. 1 Tbsp tequila or vodka

Wearing gardening gloves or holding the fruit with an oven mitt or other form of prickle protection, slice each prickly pear in half lengthwise and use a spoon to scoop out the pulp. Combine the pulp and the other ingredients in a blender and puree thoroughly. Strain out the seeds and chill. Once cold, churn in an ice cream maker and freeze until solid and scoopable. Makes about 1 quart.

Prickly pears come from cactus plants and as such are indigenous to the American southwest, Mexico and Israel. They come in a variety of colors ranging from yellow to magenta, with magenta being the most common. They’re full of little stone-like seeds, so they’re most often consumed blended and strained into Margaritas. Both the fruit and sorbet have a simultaneously sticky and slimy quality to them that isn’t unpleasant, it just makes for some tricky scooping sometimes. It tastes at first like unripe banana, then like lime, then not at all like either of those things, and is very tasty and addictive.