The Dorie's Cookies group recipes for October are Chocolate and Walnut Bars (page 45) and Cherry-Nut Chocolate Pinwheels (page 245). This week I chose to make the Chocolate and Walnut Bars.
Ingredient list: bittersweet chocolate, walnuts, flour, butter, sugar, salt, eggs, cream, sugar, and water.
Dorie Greenspan is releasing a new cookbook this month entitled Baking with Dorie, Sweet, Salty, & Simple. The Tuesdays with Dorie group is going to bake/blog the book beginning at some yet undetermined (but soonish) time. I’ve been baking/blogging with the group on and off for the better part of 13 years and decided it was time to dust off the blog writing keys and get back into it, so back into the current Dorie’s Cookies group I go. It will be nice meeting up with and baking with dear friends again.
Mark suffers greatly with "the disturbing lack of homemade chocolate offerings here at the house" at times…I’m not a chocolate fan so it’s usually last on my list of Fun Interesting Tasty Nutritious Favorite things to make…therefore, it’s always a good idea for me to be in a group where they REQUIRE you to bake outside your comfort zone. This week’s chocolate recipe was a good place to jump back in…highly encouraged by my husband.
There are a lot of bowls, utensils, appliances, and such to execute this recipe…not a complaint, just an observation. (After all, I already have these things, so I might as well be using them, right?) The process is a lot of “hands on” but none of it is complicated, there are no exotic ingredients involved, it goes together easily in a decent amount of time, and you end up with a nice sense of accomplishment. I made half of a recipe in an 8"x8" pan and baked it for 25 minutes. It netted 9 manly sized bars...you know, "What's the point of needing to go back twice or taking two when you can just have one really nice big bar?" Oh…and the taste…well, you get to hear about that from Mark as you all know how I feel about chocolate. He loved these bars, apparently they were nice and chocolatey, like a brownie, and satisfied that chocolate craving most pleasantly. He would like them repeated, praise enough. And here, making the guy happy is what it's all about, especially with chocolatey things.
The Tuesdays with Dorie group is baking from Dorie Greenspan's book, Dorie's Cookies. The posts are the first and third Tuesdays of the month and can be linked at the Tuesdays with Dorie website here. You can also find the information on joining in and/or see the posts from those in the group baking along at this location. (I don’t publish copyrighted recipes, so if you’d like to bake along, buy the book, it’s well worth it.)