You know what I like about Thomas Keller’s recipes (aside from everything)? His simplicity. Yeah, he’s got intricate recipes with ingredients not readily available to many home cooks, but when he gets the chance to be simple, he’s good at it. Especially when we’re talking about recipe titles.

For the most part, Keller takes a no-frills approach when naming his recipes. His brownie recipe from ad hoc at home is simply titled “brownies” — minus any capitalization and all the other things you can add to a title (i.e., “double chocolate brownies” or “best brownies in the whole freaking world”). Things many of us do to try and make our recipes stand out from the rest of the pack. He doesn’t need all that.

ad hoc at home, Keller’s latest installment, is by far my favorite.  It’s also the first Keller book that I’ve seriously cooked from, unless you count the time I made Bouchon’s onion soup. Though fantastic, it came at a steep price: Cooking the required 8 pounds of onions for 4 hours made my tiny apartment smell like I had a Funyun party the night before. With each passing day the intensity of the onion scent diminished, but the actual scent got worse. It went from smelling like sweet caramelized onions to the inside the mouth of a halitosis sufferer. But I’d spend another 4 hours of my life stirring a stock pot full of onions for that rich, buttery onion soup.

The wafting aroma of baking brownies is much easier to stomach than that of 8 pounds of slow-cooked onions. And in winter, a house smelling of chocolate and warmed by an oven is one of life’s pleasures. A simple pleasure, just like Keller’s brownies. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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(Note: Giveaway rules appear right under the recipe.)

Friends, the gods are totally smiling upon me today, for today is a double holiday. Not only is it Thanksgiving, but it’s also (Drumroll! Fanfare!) Furey & the Feast’s first birthday. Which means there’s turkey, pie AND birthday cake. I might add that it’s not just any birthday cake, but it’s a chocolate cake.

A microwave chocolate cake. (Are those crickets I hear?)

Normally I’m not too keen on using the nukebox as a cooking method, but this is a special case.

I was 9 or 10 years old when I bought my first cookbook, which I ordered from the pages of that Scholastic book club newsletter you get every month when you’re in elementary school. “Hershey’s Fabulous Desserts” had this beautiful chocolate cake on the cover, all done-up with chocolate curls and strawberry garnishes. What a cookbook was doing in an Scholastic newsletter I have no idea, but I remember thinking something along the lines of holy crap, I can make that?

Among the 140 recipes in this cookbook, there were only a handful of them that a child could make without parental know-how and knowledge. One of them was this cake. My mom had banned sweets from the house long ago, so this cake was, in my eyes, the greatest of mankind’s achievements. I could have cake every single weekday of  summer while my mom was at work, thanks to the ease of the microwave. She’d never know.

So in honor of these childhood and blog firsts, I wanted to “bake” this cake again. Back then, each forkful of cake laced with deviousness was especially delightful. Without that element, would it taste the same after all this time?

(Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe and giveaway)

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Once upon a time, there was a young(ish) food writer who wanted nothing more than to go to a cooking club potluck. Sadly, each month on the day of the meetup, there was always something that got in the way. Usually, it was the same thing.

“I have to work.”

While she tackled her workload, visions of au gratin pans and Corningware platters danced through her mind, always in theme with the cooking club’s genre of the month. Once, it was Chinese food. Then Italian. As she wrote (and wrote and wrote), she thought wistfully of what she was missing out on.

“How I wish I could go,” she would say.

Then one day, she got her wish. Her absentminded fairy godmother had come back from a long vacation, tanned and ready to jump back in the game. It was time to go to the potluck.

This time, the theme was 1950s food.

“So, what are you going to make, muffin?” her Valiant Boyfriend asked.
“Hmm,” she pondered for a few moments. “Baked Alaska!” she declared, disregarding that the party location was a 45-minute drive on the freeway, and that the local news had declared it the Hottest Weekend of the Summer.

No, in this fairy-tale world, transporting a Baked Alaska in a steaming-hot car down the 405 on The Hottest Weekend of the Summer wouldn’t be a problem at all. So it began.

First, a batch of brownies came out of the oven and cooled on a rack. Then, chocolate mint, chocolate and vanilla ice cream was smooshed into a plastic wrap-lined bowl, layer upon layer until the bowl was full. Then, the platter of brownies was placed on a plate, the bowl inverted and the excess brownies trimmed. A cloud of egg whites and sugar haloed the ice cream, and a mini-torch containing the fires of hell singed the meringue with a brown crust.

The baked Alaska was finally ready for its entrance at the party. All three piled into the car to begin the trek, with Valiant Boyfriend at the wheel.

But oh, what a perilous journey it was! The Baked Alaska, tried as it might, seemed as if it was no match for the harsh, stagnant heat. It melted. A lot.

Knowing that the poor dessert was on its last leg, Valiant Boyfriend weaved in and out of lanes, dodging slow cars and crammed interchanges, while food writer scanned the horizon for signs of lurking police cars. It seemed as though the journey would never end, but at last, all three made it to the party. As for the Baked Alaska, its health was grave: A gaping hole and melting ice cream pooled at the bottom of its plate. Into the freezer it went for a recharge, and (much) later, it was as good as new. It was a showpiece dessert, and everyone lived happily ever after. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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