cookies (recipe by Luca Montersino)

After the Christmas festivities, let me make a simple recipe: the cookies by Montersino, that I worked as a pastry dough instead of using a pastry bag to make little circles on the baking tray, as suggested by him.

HAPPY 2012 TO ALL OF YOU !!!

Ingredients for about 50 cookies

• 300 g butter at room temperature
• 225 g brown sugar
• 120 g free range eggs
• 30g honey
• 200 chocolate drops
• 450 g all purpose flour
• 6 g baking powder
• 1 vanilla bean
• 1 g salt

Preheat the oven to 180° 

Whip the butter with the brown sugar, the vanilla seeds, the honey and the salt. Pour the eggs one by one while the mixture is whipping at low speed; then add the flour sifted with the baking powder and finally the chocolate drops. Roll out the dough between two baking papers, flatten with a rolling pin into the desired thickness and then give the biscuits the shape you most prefer. Bake at 180° for about 15 minutes. Let cool on a rack. 

divine chocolate cake with coffee cream

I could not think of any either title for this post: the image of the tempered chocolate dripping from the bowl on the sponge cake, is one of those images that well represent the deepest and ancestral desire, which binds us to the chocolate as a substance that releases endorphines and produces multiple visions like in a dream. Just like here.

Divine sounds perfect. None not even the most recalcitrant to the sweet can remain indifferent to this heavenly vision, chocolaty, liquid but consistent, scented like a dream; delicate as the snow that melt on our tongue and permeates everything. From the taste buds to amygdala the step is short, because chocolate is emotion.

Here is the recipe!

creamy cappuccino cheesecake

Going forward with the experiments of the recipes of the book Divine Chocolate by Linda Collister...this is a really particular cheesecake, has a taste of cappuccino and an aftertaste of coffee and hazelnut together; infact I don't like cheese in the "cheesecakes" so I use goat cheese and yogurt. A good compromise even for children: for them it's like licking an icecream!

 

tart with chestnut flour and quince jam

For those who like the rustic and ancient flavors, which pervade the mouth without leaving a too sweet trace, permitting the taste to re-learn something of the past, that does not belong to the affectation of the small coloured and too sweet pies, but instead evokes the natural colours of the woods, where the taste memory , after battling against a flavour that is not instantly familiar, abandons itself completely to it, recognizing something bound to some old aunt or grandmother, who lived in an uncontaminated nature...only then...this tart is for you.