Let me set the record straight on these cookies before I go any further. I did not bake them. My boyfriend did. Yes, he bakes. Very well. He just doesn’t do it as often as he did before we started dating.

While I’m admitting that I didn’t bake these beautiful cookies, I’ll also admit that his standard double pastry crust fruit pies are probably better than mine. I do a great job with fancy pies and tarts or pies with crumb tops…but his normal apple or blueberry pies are superior to mine.

I did, however, take the photographs of his almond and raspberry thumbprint cookies. They’re a very slight alteration of the “Thumbprints for Us Big Guys” cookies found in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours.

The very slight alteration is the substitution of almonds for hazelnuts. We had hazelnuts in the house but the process of toasting them and rubbing the skin off of them and then grinding them was far too arduous for that particular evening. Almonds were the easy way out. Sorry, the easy – yet still delicious- way out.

Sometimes you have to do that. If I never took a shortcut in cooking and baking, I’d probably turn out way more delicious food…but I’d have a lot less free time on my hands. Running to the grocery store for something I don’t have wastes a lot of time…especially when I have a reasonable alternative for the item needed in the house. Sometimes the easy way out is okay (as it was with these cookies). Just don’t do it all the time. Sometimes you need to deal with the hazelnuts…time consuming or not.

These almond and raspberry thumbprint cookies were great. Delicate and crumbly yet somehow sturdy enough to make the drive with us to Myrtle Beach for our vacation.

The boyfriend made these cookies after a string of three or four bad batches of cookies baked in my old apartment. Yes, I know there are no bad (or ugly) cookies…but these were all terrible. After the first bad batch or two, the boyfriend joked that I’d lost my baking mojo. The jokes ceased after he baked a bad batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

We thought the problem was baking powder or baking soda…but they weren’t guilty. We eventually chalked it up to the terrible half-sized oven in my apartment that wouldn’t hold an even temperature. That oven liked to burn the bottoms of cookies well before the tops began to set yet it was incapable of getting much above 400 degrees and the broiler didn’t work at all. Is it any wonder we blamed it for bad cookies?

The problem wasn’t solved until a week or so ago when I baked another bad batch of cookies…the first batch in the new house. It was a cookie recipe I’d used the week before with great success so I was pretty sure the recipe wasn’t to blame. I was also pretty sure it was not the oven in the new house’s fault. Albeit it is a very cheap oven, it is still a brand new oven that works very well.

Because of the bad batch of cookies in the new house, we finally figured out the culprit: Food Lion butter. Cheap Food Lion butter that probably has too high an oil or water content for successful baking. If you’re not familiar with Food Lion, it’s a grocery store. A kind of chintzy grocery store. I tend to like high-end grocery stores and really only go to Food Lion for staple items. I usually don’t like to buy meat or produce there. Nor will I even buy butter there again. I’m back to Land O’Lakes for a while.

The recipe for these cookies can be found on the internet currently so I’m not going to type it out today.

Here’s a link to it at : Recipezaar. The only change that was made to the recipe was the substitution of almonds for hazelnuts.

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Quote from  American consultant, statistician and educator W. Edwards Deming

I believe that these pictures of my blueberry almond bread pudding officially mark the end of the blog posts about the goodies I made with all those fresh blueberries I picked earlier this summer. Took me long enough, eh?

The inspiration for this bread pudding came from a post at Food Gawker over the summer. I really like to use sites like Tastespotting and Food Gawker to find new food to make and bake. Anytime I’m bored by my own ideas and my own cookbooks, all I need to do is to turn to the food blogs for an endless set of options.

This particular recipe was adapted from a recipe at Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once.

As usual, I did make a few alterations to the original recipe. I used fresh blueberries instead of frozen as I had plenty of fresh ones available. I baked the brioche from scratch from a recipe in Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook. I did take a few shortcuts in baking it (as I really didn’t want to wait 24 hours to bake the brioche) and it probably would have tasted better if I hadn’t taken them.

The original recipe used a Meyer lemon marmalade in the filling. I skipped that entirely as I had no Meyer lemon marmalade and no way of obtaining or making any since Meyer lemons weren’t in season. Instead of the marmalade, I used copious amounts of amaretto and slivered almonds to add a little more flavor to the pudding.

I also used a lot more cream and eggs than the recipe called for as it seemed too dry otherwise…but maybe I made my bread pudding in a larger quantity than the original recipe?

This was the first bread pudding I’ve ever made but it certainly won’t be the last. Next time I may or may not go to the trouble of baking the brioche from scratch…baking the brioche wasn’t difficult but it takes a long time to prepare…and then I had to wait another day to assemble and bake the bread pudding. The anticipation of the eventual dessert killed me…enough so that the next time I make bread pudding, I might start with stale French bread from the grocery store to save myself a day.

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I should use Seinfeld quotes more often (this one is from “The Muffin Tops” episode from 1997). Between Seinfeld and The Simpsons quotes, I could have endless title material.

These blueberry muffins, like all of the other blueberry baked goods I’ve showcased this summer, are from the plethora of blueberries I picked in July.

Even when I didn’t particularly care for blueberries as a fruit, I liked blueberry muffins. This might stem from my general love of muffins. My favorite blueberry muffins have a crunchy top…as a child, teenager and young adult, I was a sucker for the Duncan Hines muffin mix with the can of wild blueberries and the crumb topping. Nowadays I’d never consider using a mix…so I made these from scratch from a Martha Stewart recipe found in Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook. Are you tired of me praising the recipes in this book yet?

These were very good. Way better than average. For the topping, I simply sprinkled turbinado sugar over the batter. The turbinado sugar provided a nice crunch that regular granulated sugar wouldn’t have.

I loved the advice in this recipe to toss the blueberries with a little bit of the dry ingredients in order to prevent the blueberries from sinking to the bottom as the muffins baked.

Blueberry Muffins

Recipe from Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook

Makes 1 dozen muffins

Ingredients

• 1 stick unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups fresh blueberries (I used fresh this time but I’ll probably use frozen next time I make these!)
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1-2 tablespoons turbinado sugar (optional)

Preparation

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line a 12-cup muffin pan with paper muffin cups.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt.

In another bowl, toss the blueberries with about 1 tablespoon of the flour mixture.

Set aside both the flour mixture and the blueberries.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter and sugar on medium-high speed until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating until combined after the addition of each egg. Mix in the vanilla extract.

With the mixer on low speed, add the flour mixture. Beat just until combined. Add the milk and beat just until combined. Do not overbeat. Lightly fold in the blueberries using a rubber spatule. Divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups. If you’d like a little crunch on the top of the muffins, sprinkle a small amount of turbinado sugar over the batter in each muffin cup.

Bake until the muffins are golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center of one of the muffins comes out clean, about 30 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool for about 10 minutes. Remove muffins from pan and let cool. Serve warm or at room temperature.

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Quote from French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Remember a couple of months ago when I went crazy and picked 13 pounds of blueberries one day and 10 pounds a week later? These tasty blueberry and peach crisps were made with those blueberries…when they were still fresh. Yes, I’m still catching up on my posting.

I make individual cobblers or crisps pretty frequently and usually make the same oatmeal walnut crumb topping. This time, I branched out. At the time, I’d just gotten my copy of Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food and really wanted to make a recipe from it.

I had lots of blueberries and some local peaches in the fridge. I also needed a dessert that could be made quickly since the boyfriend’s sister and her husband were coming for dinner. Crisps and cobblers are a great choice when you don’t have a lot of prep time for dessert but really want to make something from scratch. I can get a batch of individual cobblers in the oven in about 20 minutes. It’s a lucky coincidence that they’re one of my favorite desserts to eat.

I’m not going to write out a full recipe for these because I seriously have NO clue how much fruit I used to make them. I think I made a batch of 8 individual crisps but I really didn’t measure the fruit at all.

I can, however, type out the crisp topping recipe.

Crisp Topping

Recipe from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters

Ingredients

• 2/3 cup nuts (I used walnuts)
• 1 1/4 cups flour
• 6 tablespoons brown sugar
• 1 1/2 tablespoons granulated sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 12 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Toast nuts for about 6 minutes. Let them cool and chop them coarse.

2. Mix together chopped nuts, flour, brown sugar, granulated sugar, salt, and cinnamon.

3. Mix the butter into the flour mixture with a pastry blender until the mixture is crumbly.

4. Chill until ready to use. Sprinkle topping generously over fruit filling of your choice. Bake at 375 degrees until bubbly and golden brown.

This recipe yields about 3 cups. If you don’t use it all, it can be frozen for future use. I do that rather frequently myself. That way the 20 minutes of prep time is reduced to about 5 minutes.

I should make some other things from The Art of Simple Food…even if we did buy the cookbook for Alice Waters’ countless manifestos about food more than for her recipes.

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Quote from Saturday Night Live’s old “Coffee Talk with Linda Richman” skit…

I’ve got a lot of blogging and picture posting to catch up on…the move to the new house and lack of internet for most of August made it difficult for me to keep up with all of the food pictures I’ve taken.

But I’m back…and hopefully not going anywhere for a while. I should probably set a goal of at least a few posts a week for a while.

These peanut butter sandwich cookies are from Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook (which I now own thanks to my thoughtful boyfriend). The cookie itself is made with chunky peanut butter. The cookies alone tasted a little boring…but when you added the creamy peanut butter filling, they became pretty darn good.

They do need to be stored in the refrigerator as the filling is essentially peanut buttercream frosting. Delicious but not really meant to sit at room temperature for a couple of days.

I’ll definitely make these again…even if the dough was a bit difficult to roll and cut. I chilled the dough for the prescribed length of time but in the future, I’d chill it for a bit longer.

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