Clouds in my coffee...

In spite of my focused & clearly-seduced-by-the-marketing-strategies-of-Starbucks desire for a personalized gold card (hard earned by friends like Joe & Kellyn), I typically make my morning coffee at home. Sometimes (okay, most of the time) I'm in a bit of a rush and fill my travel mug as I head out the door, but lately I've been making a little more time for my addiction of choice and I owe it all to the Bodum battery operated milk frother. It's really a ridiculous little gadget and, in theory, I am opposed to having a bunch of little single task appliances taking up space in the kitchen. But the reality is (and I'm admitting it here for the first time) that I have loads of little, single task, but oh-so-useful kitchen tools. Sometimes they are so magical that it is completely worth the space that they consume, and this is one of those times.

Is it quite clear how much I'm enjoying my homemade hybrid latte-mistos? So much easier and less clean up than busting out the cappuccino maker... just a cup with an engineered lid that quickly foams the milk (I like a combo of low-fat with a splash of Boathouse Farms Vanilla Chai Tea for a little sweetness) to nearly double its volume, radically transforming your morning cuppa in a snap!* This is really going to throw a wrench in my Starbucks gold card aspirations...

The Bodum milk frother, in lime green: my new morning ritual.

The whole Bodum Bistro line is pretty fun, with it's scaled-up logo, LEGO-like texture and pop-y colors.*

* I realize that this is all sounding a bit advertisement-esque, but none of these companies pay me a penny to say anything about any of this!

In search of lost summers: Modernist Memories

For me, nothing says 'dreams of summertime' like a beach house. Preferably a simple little house, with large sliding doors that allow for indoor life to become out door life & vice versa... a very precious seasonal opportunity for us in New England!

Obviously and unsurprisingly this is not my own unique dream... the Northeast coast has a long history of seasonal beach towns and nostalgic summer settlements. But the airy, treading-lightly qualities of modernist architecture seem to result in a perfect romance when it meets the coast. Look for these simple retreats from summers past (still full of life in the present) on Long Island, Rhode Island and Cape Cod, where the Cape Cod Modern House Trust works to document and preserve the houses and their history.*

These beach house dreams have really got me in a
summer-state-of-mind...
Here's to a season of sun-filled days, sandy feet & salty sea air.

Happy Memorial Day!

*For more on Cape Cod modernist summers past & how they've survived into the present: a recent article on the Wellfleet Colony from the New York Times Magazine.

Hatch Cottage
Wellfleet Massachusetts, 1960

(Maybe a precedent for Steven Holl's Whale House on Martha's Vineyard?)

Images at top & bottom are from the book Weekend Utopia,
a dreamy ode to mid-century modern summer life in the Hamptons.

Listen Up!

I've been listening to the new Danger Mouse album, 'ROME', all afternoon (while CAD-ing interior elevations) and I'm still not sick of it. It's an edgy shout-out to the Sergio Leone soundtracks of yesteryear. For full atmospheric impact, I really think that it's best to do something that I so rarely do these days: sit and listen to the whole album in one go. And thanks to NPR's First Listen, you can! Don't be surprised if it leads to visions of imaginary Spaghetti Westerns in your mind.

Almond Cookies with Chocolate Sea Salt Ganache

Delicate & rich cookie sandwiches*

It's finally spring here in Boston after a very, very long New England winter. You'd think that I'd be switching up the comfort food & baking for lighter, healthier fare but, despite what it says on the calendar, we have been socked in by grey fog and rain for the better part of the past few weeks. The prolonged winter/delayed spring has kept me in baking mode, which is actually sort of fine by me because I still have so many recipes from Joanne Chang's beautiful flour bakery cookbook to test and taste. A couple of my favorites already are the beloved home made oreos (page 134 in the flour cookbook) and the so, so easy brown butter rice crispy treats, worth making if only to prove for yourself that brown butter is a bit of magic!

For a friend's baby shower a couple of weekends ago, I wanted to make something a bit more girl-y & refined and the Almond Macaroons with Bittersweet Chocolate Ganache (a combination of my favorite flavors!) seemed like just the thing. I have to say up front that my results didn't seem quite as 'macaroon-y' as I had hoped: the cookie was more like a thin almond crisp. Still delicious, but different, and the reason why I've renamed the recipe in this post. The only real adaptation that I made was too add sea salt to the ganache simply because I had sea salt on hand and I love the chocolate-sea salt flavor combination. In the end, these cookies were pretty delicious and much easier to make than I would have guessed when first perusing the recipe. So, don't be intimidated by the words 'ganache' or 'macaroon'... bake up a batch and let me know what you think!


ALMOND COOKIES

3 1/4 cups (520 grams) blanched almonds**
2 2/3 cups (540 grams) sugar
6 egg whites***
2 teaspoons almond extract
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

CHOCOLATE GANACHE

8 ounces (228 grams) bittersweet chocolate (about 70% cacao), chopped
1 cup heavy cream
2 teaspoons sea salt (or more, to taste)


Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or Silpat liners.

In a food processor, pulse the almonds until ground to a fine powder. Stop grinding once they are powdery but before they start to clump together and become more of a paste. Remove about 1 cup of the ground almonds from the food processor and set aside. Add the sugar to the almonds left in the food processor and process for 10 to 15 seconds, or until the sugar is completely incorporated. Add the egg whites and continue processing for about 30 seconds or until well combined.

Transfer the almond paste to a medium bowl, and fold in the reserved ground almonds. Fold in the almond extract and salt.

Use a small spoon to make walnut-sized rounds of batter to the baking sheet. It's a bit tricky to get such small rounds, but it's important to keep them small and spread out (about 2 inches apart), because the batter flattens and spreads quickly!

Bake for 20 to 25 minutes (keep an eye on them... timing can really vary!) until the cookies are a light golden brown around the edges. Let cool completely on the baking sheet. They are very sugary, and it is much easier to transfer them from the pan to the rack if they are cooled.


For the ganache:
While the cookies are cooling, place the chocolate in a medium heat-proof bowl. In a small saucepan, scald (bubbling around the edges, but not boiling) the cream over medium-high heat
and pour over the chocolate. Let sit for 30 seconds, then slowly whisk the chocolate and cream together until it is completely mixed and the mixture is smooth. At this point, I stirred in about 2 teaspoons of seasalt. It's important to taste test, as sea salt intensity can really vary! Let cool at room temperature or in the refrigerator for at least an hour... the ganache should be thick and spreadable. The ganache can be made ahead of time and stored in the fridge for up to two weeks (and probably would be delicious melted over ice-cream!).

Remove the cookies from the rack. Spread about 1 tablespoon of the ganache on the flat side of one cookie. Top with a second cookie, flat side down, to make a cookie sandwich. You should have over 20 cookie sandwiches, total.

The cookies can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days.

Enjoy!


* The grey weather is not helping to get an appetizing image of these cookies... trust me: they taste better than they look!
** I didn't have enough blanched almonds, but I did have raw and so I googled methods to blanch my own: easier than I would have imagined!
***You can use the left over egg yolks to make ice-cream to serve with the delicious little cookies!

On the bookshelf...

Though my post-grad school reading pace is not exactly what I would like it to be, I live with quite a lot of books and, occasionally, I actually read them! I also like to know what others are reading and what you've loved & devoured or couldn't put down or couldn't get through and what you've thought about what you've actually made time to read. So I've added an 'On the bookshelf...' column just over there to the right, with a list of what I've been reading and links that are somewhat related to those books. What's on your bookshelf these days?


The library above is from the blog Bookshelf Porn, a great site if you're someone who loves to live surrounded by books.

Dame Liz

Goodbye to one of the last grande dames. Her appeal, beyond the obvious beauty & glamor? A tenacity like you just don't see anymore and a tendency to dive head first into the messy passion of it all... "You might as well live" was one of her favorite sayings. And live she did: a life of big loves, big roles & big rocks.

Words, to live by...

Some friends and I recently had a conversation about writing, the internet and, more specifically, thoughtful content. With all of the blogs and online news outlets that we're reading daily we have found ourselves craving carefully edited writing that isn't just sent out into the world willy-nilly to be quickly digested, words that are thoroughly considered and, occasionally, painstakingly chosen. As wonderful as the all-info-all-the-time world wide web is, it can tend to be short on the well-chosen word. To balance all of that free flowing information out, I've felt a gravitational pull toward poetry. It began, innocently enough, by listening to Garrison Keillor's daily podcast The Writer's Almanac, a lovely full five minutes a day to consider a writer's life and to listen to Keillor read a single poem. But wait, there's more...

If you're feeling a similar pull toward a bit of old-school word play, turns out there's an app for that. The Poetry Foundation has it's own iPhone app that is a perfect marriage of technology and text. You can select a hybrid of subjects manually or via a roulette wheel-like spin, bringing together such classic combos as passion & love or the less expected optimism & aging. And so, after scanning through an endless stream of new posts and status updates and tweets, via the very same gadget, you can enjoy a few quiet moments of good, old-fashioned written words. Ain't modern life grand?

Happy Valentine's Day ♡