- Dan Goldberg
- Mindy Segal’s Brownie Krinkles
There have been (and are about to be) a lot of good new cookbooks released by local authors lately. I’m going to try to excerpt recipes from each of them as they come out. First up is Cookie Love, by pastry superchef and Hot Chocolate proprietor Mindy Segal (with Kate Leahy, a food writer based in Oakland, California). This is simply a lovely book, chock-full of cookie porn, with some 60 recipes broken down into categories like drop cookies, shortbread, sandwich cookies, bars, spritz and thumbprints, etc. Yes, there are basics like the simple chocolate chip, which yielded some of the best ever produced in my household, but there’s also lots of wild stuff like smoked-almond shortbread with orange-blossom framboise, kolachkes with red-wine-and-ginger-pear butter, and graham cracker-passion fruit whoopie cookies. The recipes are built with enough flexibility to allow experimentation, but it’s hard to imagine wanting to mess with something so elementally satisfying as brownie krinkles, which was the second recipe attempted by the aspiring pastry chef in my house. The great thing about this recipe—and about quite a few of the recipes in the book—is how Segal uses salt to intensify already deep and powerful flavors.
In a heatproof bowl set over (but not touching) barely simmering water in a pot (see “Using a Double Boiler,” page 280), melt the chocolate, stirring occasionally with a rubber spatula. Keep warm. Crack the eggs into a bowl and add the vanilla. In a bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and salts. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, mix the oil and sugar on low speed for 1 minute. Add the melted chocolate and mix to combine, approximately 30 seconds. Scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl with a rubber spatula. On medium speed, add the eggs and vanilla, one egg at a time, mixing briefly to incorporate before adding the next, approximately 5 seconds for each egg. Scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl with a rubber spatula to bring the batter together. Mix on medium speed for 20 to 30 seconds to make nearly homogeneous. Add the dry ingredients all at once and mix until the dough comes together but still looks shaggy, approximately 30 seconds. Do not overmix. Remove the bowl from the stand mixer. With a plastic bench scraper, bring the dough completely together by hand. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate until the dough is firm, at least 30 minutes or overnight. Heat the oven to 350°F and line a couple of half sheet (13-by-18-inch) pans with parchment paper.
