Yields 12 standard muffins.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Adjust oven rack to upper-middle position to heat oven to 400ºF.
2. Prepare muffin tins.
3. Bring 1 cup fresh blueberries and all dried blueberries to a simmer in a small saucepan over medium heat.
4. Cook, stirring frequently and pressing blueberries against the side of the pot, until berries have broken down and mixture is thickened, about five minutes.
5. Remove from heat and cool slightly.
6. Whisk flour, baking powder, and salt together in the large bowl. Set aside.
7. In a separate bowl, whisk eggs and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Slowly whisk in melted butter and oil.
8. Whisk in buttermilk and vanilla until combined.
9. Using a rubber spatula, gently fold in remaining one cup blueberries.
10. Gently fold in flour mixture until just moistened. Batter will be very lumpy.
11. Using a large spoon, divide half of the batter equally among the 12 muffin cups. Cups should be about a third filled.
12. Place a heaping teaspoon of berry mixture on top of batter.
13. Scoop remaining batter on top of berry filling.
14. Using a bamboo skewer, gently swirl berry filling into batter.
15. Sprinkle turbinado sugar on top of the muffins.
16. Bake until muffin tops are golden and just firm, 17 to 19 minutes.
17. Cool muffins in pan for 5 minutes, then transfer to wire rack and cool for five minutes more before serving.

P.S. For more amazing recipes, you should really go get a membership at Cook’s Illustrated. It’s totally, totally worth it.

Yields two 9″x3″ loaves. (can very easily be halved.)

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Preheat oven to 350ºF. Prepare two 9″ x 3″ loaf pans.
2. Whisk together flours, spices, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
3. Beat together sugar and oil until well blended.
4. Add eggs, vanilla, and chai (or water — the chai is just a way to squeeze in more flavor).
5. Beat until mixture is even and smooth, scraping down the sides of the bowl and the beater as necessary.
6. Add flour mixture all at once. Stir gently until just mixed.
7. Fold in pumpkin puree until uniform.
8. Stir in nuts or seeds, and cranberries, if you like.
9. Divide batter between the loaf pans and bake, about one hour, until a toothpick inserted in the center of the loaf emerges clean.
10. Cool on a wire rack about ten minutes, then remove bread from the pans and cool completely before slicing or wrapping.

To make these oddly addictive coconut-habanero scones, begin with this recipe for the strawberry almond variety. Omit the strawberries and the almonds. To the flour mixture in step one, add one cup of lightly toasted coconut and one habanero chili pepper which you have seeded and very finely minced.

First published in a 1950s Good Housekeeping Magazine, these candy cane cookies are tender and have a surprisingly complex and subtle flavor. I’ve made a small change with the fat, but otherwise these cookies are the same that my mother and grandmother have been making every winter for as long as I can remember.

I was going to make a cake. I was going to make a cake for my Squeeze’s birthday, the first of his birthdays that I will spend with him. I felt I had a precedent to establish, and that the bar would need to be set high. Stick with me, my confection would boast on my behalf, and you will be given a wild sugar high with every passing year. Or something. When I began two days ago I felt as nervous as I had before the first dinner I cooked for him. During our courtship, I advertised myself as a cook and baker and when it came time to walk that talk, it felt important to prove that I was the real thing. The dinner was an unqualified success. This cake, I assumed, would be one also.

I was. so. wrong.

• Here’s what I imagined:
• • Chocolate buttermilk sheet cake: dense and intensely cocoa-flavored, sticky and moist.
• • Coffee buttercream filling: sweet, fluffy buttercream with a light but obvious coffee flavor.
• • Shiny chocolate ganache glaze: nothing more than cream and chocolate melted together and slowly poured over the whole lot, creating a smooth case around the whole cake.

I have tested recipes for each component. I have made this combination before. I would, I imagined, take something I already knew to be good, execute each piece flawlessly, and make a really, really great birthday cake. When I set down with my a.m. coffee in my favorite mug, I felt unstoppable. I was about to use my baking to put my baking to shame. This cake would be Love in sugar form.

I couldn’t find the cocoa buttermilk cake recipe. I looked in all of my files, called my mother, rifled through my cookbook library. When the recipe could not be conjured, I considered panic but then instead thought, fantastic! This is the hiccup! I’ll get over this small speedbump and then proceed unencumbered towards greatness! I have always admired optimism in the face of doom.

I searched around the trusty Internet and found a similar recipe to audition, expecting to make at least two batches (one to test and one to adjust) before generating a satisfactory result. I was disappointed that my recipe could not be found, but decided to cheerily press on and make the best of it. A lot of what happens in the kitchen is making the best of it.

I put the cake together and into the oven in nothing flat, spreading the batter out in a half-sized jelly roll pan so that I could punch circles out for each layer instead of having to slice a cylinder crosswise, which isn’t nearly as easy to do as it looks . Even as a raw batter, I recognized the cake as unacceptably flawed. It would be too spongy and not sufficiently chocolatey, but easily amended in the second batch. Once I’d scribbled some notes over the recipe, I got to work on the coffee buttercream. I figured I was home-free. This buttercream and I go way back, six years or more, and though I’ve read that buttercreams are finicky, I’d always had great results with minimal effort. I’d always had great results with minimal effort.

A buttercream frosting is a creme anglaise sauce – milk and eggs cooked like a custard but not nearly as thick – with whole butter whipped into it. At it’s best it is silky and rich and not-too-sweet. It is nothing like the stuff that is sold in cardboard canisters at the grocery store, and even less like the “white icing” that comes slathered on sheet cakes, just before the spray-on neon “Happy Birthday” is applied and the bright pink roses are globbered into the corners. Buttercreams are a little bit difficult to make because all of the ingredients must be the same temperature and because the cook must be patient. The Coffee Buttercream I tried to make calls for one cup of milk, eight egg yolks, and one and one half cups of sugar for the creme anglaise and a whole pound of unsalted butter. That’s a lot of butter. That’s a lot of butter that needs to be soft, but not too soft, as it gets slowly, gradually paddled into the anglaise, bit by bit, just like brioche. It takes forever and for the first three quarters of the procedure there is no visually-appreciaable progress with which to entertain oneself.

I knew all of this. I made my anglaise sauce, whipped it cool and full of air in my four-quart Kitchen Aid, changed to the paddle attachment, and began very gradually tossing in the pound of butter, bit by tiny nickel-sized bit.

And nothing happened.

And nothing happened.

And nothing happened.

And then it broke.

When a food item – usually a sauce or a batter – “breaks,” the fat that ought to be emulsified separates. It happens all at once: your sauce is smooth and then it is lumpy and greasy. Sometimes you can fix it and sometimes you can’t. Sometimes it doesn’t matter; sometimes the mistake is fatal. A broken buttercream is, as far as I know, fatal. And totally gross to look at. To be fair, I am prepared to admit that the butter might have been just a tiny bit cool and, OK, I might have been a bit over-eager in mixing. So I broke the stuff and there’s a first time for everything and it’s all right to make mistakes because how else do you learn? All right?

The buttercream washed down the garbage disposal, the flavorless cake wrapped in plastic to protect it from the cats (or the cats from it), I ran away to meet a friend for lunch at The Goose Hollow Inn. The Goose Hollow Inn is not, in fact, an Inn, but a completely adorable neighborhood pub locally famous for their Rueben sandwiches and mayoral proprietor. I had a cup of pumpkin soup, which cheered and bolstered me sufficiently to march back home and begin my cake project with spirit renewed.

I won’t draw this out. My second try for buttercream – when I followed the instructions letter perfect, when the butter and the anglaise were both the correct temperature, when I mixed in the butter so slowly I wondered if I might not be done by his next birthday – was also a failure. Smashed to smithereens, you might want to say. And you’d be right. I don’t know what happened.

For the sake of preserving my sanity and sense of self-worth, I shelved the filling and measured out the two ingredients for my ganache, chocolate and cream. I had been saving six ounces of Dagoba’s New Moon. It is so delicious. And, because it quite dark, it would have served as a nice counterweight to the so-so cocoa buttermilk cake. I chopped the chocolate and scalded the cream with some coffee beans and let it steep. I poured the strained hot cream over aforementioned chopped chocolate. I waited, then stirred.

And here is the place in my story, dear Readers, where yours truly basically comes apart. I won’t tell you what happened; I can’t. You know what happened. The story could not be otherwise. Ganache is the simplest thing in the world to make. Two ingredients, three steps. I haven’t the first glimmer of a notion about what when wrong how or where – all I knew then was that between the two broken buttercreams, one batch of passable cake and the inexplicably faulty ganache, it wasn’t looking like such a good day for birthday cakes.

When the Squeeze came home from work some hours later, I wrangled myself into a hug and faked sobbing into his chest. “I’m a failure,” I cried, “I can’t bake anymore! It was a fluke all these years and now” – sob, sob, sob – “the jig is up!” More sobbing, possibly real, and a hiccup. “We’ll have to get you a cake from Fred Meyer with a race car airbrushed on it!”

We decided to go out for some air instead, hoping to push some hidden Restart Button in my head or my hands that would get me back on track when I returned to the kitchen. I harped on and on about what a miserable baker I am, and how I had wanted so badly to make this flawless cake to commemorate his special-freaking-day. “I’ve never had my own birthday cake before,” he told me when I took a breath from my self-depreciating rant. He explained that his father’s birthday is a few days ahead of his, and that his family celebrated both birthdays together on the day in between. He didn’t tell me to make me feel worse; he was just thinking aloud. My only thought was to rush home and make thirty cakes, one for every year missed plus extras. I then remembered that I couldn’t even make one.

Of course, I did finish a cake. I took the perfectly decent sheet of cocoa buttermilk cake, by now the star of the show, cut out three rounds and layered them with vanilla ice cream. I spattered some warm ganache into the ice cream when softening it, creating little flaky specks of mocha-y chocolate. I poured a thin covering of slightly greasy ganache over the third layer and froze it, figuring that whatever happened to it in the freezer I could hide with a glaze, or not, when the time came. For icing, I whipped heavy cream and mascarpone cheese together with some confectioner’s sugar and coffee liqueur. I finished the cake with chocolate shavings and rosettes and shoved it back in the freezer to set, frustrated.

I feel like a kid who has had a very bad day on the playground. Maybe two broken buttercreams, a mediocre sponge cake and failed ganache doesn’t seem so awful to you. Maybe you have real problems, like an overdue mortgage payment or a blood clot silently making its way towards your brain. Maybe I am making a big deal out of trifles.

I have changed my mind about how I will end this post half a dozen times. I wanted to avoid cliché, or some sunshiny moral about how “the true measure of one’s skill in the kitchen may be gauged by how one moves forward after a mistake,” and that this is actually a testament to my ability in the kitchen, having created in a pinch a passable product. Last night I tried to make a soup out of a some leftover tilapia and the contents of my fridge and, while it was hot and edible, I wouldn’t say that it was good. I threw away the corn muffins I made to go with it; they weren’t even worth putting honey on.

If I weren’t already having an off-week in the kitchen, after having yammered on about it I surely will. Last night I seriously considered the possibility that I’ve used it all up, whatever it is that’s in me that knows how to cook. I’d just read a piece in Best Food Writing 2005 about a young woman who moved to France right after college to learn how to cook. She secured a job as a personal chef for a pair of aristocrats and spent the summer botching up dishes and learning French from the good-humored butler and maid. Towards the end of the essay, she wrote about the development of her skills: from having to write out and plan a menu beforehand, making notes about how long each dish would take to prepare and how she would know that the roast is done, to being able to sense things with her hands and her eyes. The passage was so familiar to me I almost teared up a bit. When I am in the Zone, that’s how I cook. I cook with my body, with the intuition and knowledge and rhythm that’s somehow tied up in my hands, my nose, my skin.

Then I realized: I haven’t been cooking like that lately. And I miss it.

    
Inspired by a certain shortbread cookie at a certain local bakery, I have been adding peanuts to just about everything lately. Behold, a very simple, chocolatey brownie, dressed up with the unlikely but delicious peanut. Above, mine are looking a tad underdone, but no less tasty.

I do not often bake cakes. Cake, somehow, has become dessert of higher order. Cakes mark birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, graduations – and evidently conception – and these are no ordinary events. Cakes signal extra-specialness. I’m more of a cookie girl myself. I’m big on breakfast pastries and quickbreads. I like me a real nice tart once in a while. But I only make cake when someone else is having a party and I am asked very nicely to provide dessert.

There are two noteworthy results of this trend: One: Whenever I do make a cake, I am always eager to test a new recipe that I’ve been sitting on for weeks, maybe months. Two: Since I get such little practice, I’m not terrifically good at it.
I have picked up a few tricks over the years, though – most from the Infamous Frenchman – and this handful of techniques has served me relatively well. Attempting to be sensible, this time around I only altered one piece of the cake puzzle and stuck with the rest of my usual construction. There was little chance that the fillings, frosting, or decoration would go awry – the only wildcard this time around was Sally Schneider’s Nut Cake recipe. But it isn’t as if I found the Nut Cake recipe stuck to the underside of a MAX seat, Ms. Schneider seems to know what’s what (far better than I).

J9′s Nuts and Berries Cake, for Julia and Skippy

Components:
• Berry Compote (I used cherries and marionberries and a little bit of sugar, cooked down until very thick.)
• Fresh raspberries
• Fresh blueberries
• Candied hazelnuts
• Lemon Chantilly (chantilly = heavy whipping cream + confectioner’s sugar)
• Edible flowers
• Sally’s Nut Cake (mine was almond and hazelnut)

     In an undergraduate class at Portland State, straightforwardly titled Persuasion, I formally learned that scarcity makes things more desirable: eclipses of the sun and moon, real Love, Mason Jennings’ acoustic album, Simple Life. For me, more pressing than astronomical events eternally playing hard-to-get, however, are the Fruits of Summer: the berries, the stone fruits, the figs (oh, Lord, the figs). Remember how all of this wonderful produce we love to munch year-round actually has growing seasons? Maybe you can get overpriced, under-ripe strawberries in May, but they’re not worth it. They are only placeholders for summer strawberries. Those out-of-season imposters are white in the middle, unripe, and juiceless. They have no scent and do not yield to the teeth. They look enough like a strawberry to jog something in your brain, maybe fooling your palate into thinking that you’re ingesting the real thing, but you’re not. They are a sad waste of resources. Therefore, in my life as a cook and eater I have resolved to eat what’s in season – as best as I am able (I am powerless for the rest of the day without my apple in the morning, I’m afraid) – and then move on as the weeks roll by. Accordingly, lately I have been gorging myself on summer berries.
     I’ve made two trips to Sauvie Island, where the nearest U-Pick farms are around here, and come home with around fifty-five pounds of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, marionberries and cherries. The night I brought my first batch home (which was followed by a flurry of processing, though I did not get through the whole lot right away) I had nightmares – proper nightmares with screaming and everything – about not getting to my loot fast enough and letting some of them go moldy. My concern in the dream wasn’t so much that I had lost money or missed out on eating those delicious gems, but more so that I had allowed something intrinsically valuable go to waste, that I was responsible for the mishandling of an important gift. In my dream I heard myself say, Oh, I was such a fool to have taken so many when there are others who would have used them up. This is really how I talk in my dreams sometimes.
     I did not, in reality, lose a single berry to the Musty Fuzz. Rather, I have taken my treasure, washed and dried, chopped and mashed, boiled, dehydrated, canned, and bagged and turned my sixty-plus dollar investment into small jars and bottles of priceless, distilled Summer.
     Project, First: Jam. I have some very strong feelings about jam, and these I shall presently share.

• 1. Jam should taste like the fruit from which it is made.
• 2. Jam should be strong enough to hang together on a piece of toast, but should not at all remind one of gelatinous substances such as flan or Jell-O.
• 3. The purists use all sugar and no pectin when making jam, which requires a whole heck of a lot of sugar and a great deal of heat. Made this way, the jam’s more sugar than it is fruit. I prefer a little bit of pectin and a whole lot less sugar.
• 4. Jam should not have too much junk in it. It is tempting, I know, to want to add ginger and vanilla and raisins and walnuts and wine and SweetTarts to give your jam a signature flair. Of course, there are exceptions to this persnickitiness (red wine with strawberries, for example; and toasted, ground walnuts with figs), but generally I very firmly believe the simple and plain is best. Go figure.

     I have thus far made two batches of raspberry jam, blueberry, strawberry, drunken strawberry, blueberry, marionberry and a rasp-marion mix. The recipe, included in the Pomona’s Pectin box, is roughly four cups of mashed berries, between two and four teaspoons of pectin, some calcium water (to activate the pectin) and between three-quarters and two cups of white sugar. The pectin makes it easy to gel, and home canning isn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.
     Project, Second: after the jam came a cobbler or two. I’m not sure what’s tastier than baked fruit topped with a sweet biscuit. As far as I can tell, the cobbler camp divides into those who would cook the biscuits separately, and those who would cook the biscuits with the fruit. I grew up in a house that believed in baking the biscuits with the fruit, spreading the eventual topping on the bottom of the baking dish, pouring the fruit mixture over, and letting the cakey biscuits rise to the top in the oven. The other method, with which I have only recently begun experimenting, is to par-cook the two components separately – fruit on the stove and biscuits in the oven – and unite them only in the dish’s final minutes in the oven.

Berry Cobbler, two ways
Upside-down Method

ingredients:
1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons (2 ounces) salted butter
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup milk
2 1/2 cups stewed berries with juice*

procedure:

• 1. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt.
• 2. Cream 1/2 cup sugar and butter until smooth and fluffy.
• 3. Stir in sifted dry ingredients alternately with milk.
• 4. Pour batter into prepared pie tin or casserole dish.
• 5. Put drained berries over batter.
• 6. Sprinkle remaining 1/2 cup sugar over.
• 7. Pour 1 cup berry juice over all.
• 8. Bake 45 minutes @ 375ºF, until topping is golden and edges are browned.

Serves six.

**Stewed berries = fresh or frozen berries + desired amount of sugar + flavorings (also as desired: vanilla, wine, ginger…). Heat until berries are just cooked. Simple as that.

Separate Biscuit Method
Biscuit recipe borrowed from The America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook

ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons white sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into half-inch cubes
1 cup buttermilk

Stewed berries, as in above recipe. Cook longer for this recipe, allowing the liquid to thicken a bit. You may choose to add some cornstarch.

procedure:

• 1. Preheat oven to 425ºF.
• 2. Prepare baking sheet with parchment paper or Silpat mat.
• 3. In the workbowl of a food processor, fitted with the metal blade, combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Pulse to combine.
• 4. Sprinkle butter cubes over and process until the mixture resembles a coarse meal.
• 5. Transfer to a medium-sized bowl, add buttermilk, and toss (with your fingers or a rubber spatula) to combine.
• 6. Scoop batter (with a measuring cup, ice cream scoop, large spoon) onto baking sheet. The original recipe says 1 1/2″ ice cream scoop will yield 12 biscuits.
• 7. Bake until lightly browned on tops and bottoms, about fifteen minutes. Do not turn the oven off.
• 8. Put filling into your pie tin or casserole and arrange par-baked biscuits over.
• 9. Bake the whole lot for about ten minutes, until the biscuits are a deep golden brown.

     While I am not a convert over to the separate biscuit camp, I think my loyalty comes from time and conditioning rather than thinking that one method is intrinsically superior to the other. I have been an upside-downer all my life and to make such a drastic change in my cobbler consumption twenty-something years in might just be too big a shift for this old gal. Try both – goodness knows there’s enough fruit around – and tell me what you think.

     Hang around for Red, part two, in which I shall discuss freezing, drying, snacking, and winemaking.

In a recent conversation with an old friend and former boss, I mentioned I was working in food again, playing with large batches of everything, laminating doughs and re-learning how to make large-scale bread. He offered that he was jealous of our dough sheeter, a twelve hundred dollar machine that is, essentially, two rolling pins and a couple of circular conveyor belts. We use it to make lumps of dough – up to twenty pounds – into long rectangles down to two millimeters thick. It’s very handy in speedily and uniformly processing the massive amounts of pie dough and puff pastry we use every day, and it’s essential in the creation of our from-scratch croissants and danishes. A croissant, I am sure you know, is a laminated item, meaning that the “dough” is actually layers of alternating dough and butter, eighty-one of them – and all, ideally, perfectly even. It begins with one slab of dough and one chunk of butter and ends up…well, laminated. (I tried to find an existent picture of raw croissant dough on the internet but, apparently, no one is interested except me. And hopefully now you.) It’s doable by hand in small batches, but that way isn’t any fun. Care has to be taken to keep both dough and butter at the same temperature, and as cool as possible. Rolling something out by manual rolling pin makes for a much warmer affair, both because it takes longer to do and because you have to make many more passes with the rolling pin, thus creating that much more friction and therefore heat. The couple of times that my friends have asked how they might make homemade croissants, I’ve told them that it’s not really worth it and, for the home cook, I think that’s true.

So my dear friend – a pastry chef in the Midwest – wishes that he had a sheeter. Sometimes he makes from-scratch danishes for brunch, he said, and does the whole show by hand. Danish dough is even more a pain in the tuckus than croissant dough as it is stickier – owing in part to a substitution of milk and eggs for water in the basic formula – and has more layers of butter and dough than its more straight-laced cousin. When he makes danishes, he laminates the dough by hand, forms them, and then proofs the pastry in a rather slap-dash “proofbox” that is actually a plastic tent with a pan of hot water at the bottom.

Proofing in the process by which yeasted doughs, once formed, are set to rise just before they are put in the oven to bake. Proofboxes are used in bakeries to regulate this process, maintaining a constant temperature and humidity so that, no matter the conditions outside, the baguettes, for example, will always need forty five minutes in the proofbox before baking.

My reaction to his jealousy surprised me. I would have expected to feel smug, I think, that I get to use a neat piece of machinery that he lacked and wanted, that I was making a product that he couldn’t, or couldn’t make as well. But I didn’t feel that way at all. Instead, I felt jealous of him. While we talked, I imagined him at home in the evening, standing in his own kitchen with a notebook on the counter, composing the brunch menu for the coming week and brainstorming how he could come up with a danish, that oh-so classic breakfast pastry. That swirl of sweet, buttery dough filled with glop – fruit or cheese… How to make an evenly laminated, presentable product without throwing labor costs out the window? How many days would it take to make the dough and laminate it? Could it stay cool enough? What size recipe would fit in the mixer? How many would go in the oven? How to rig up a proof box? How warm or cool would it have to be given the average temperature of the restaurant’s kitchen during the day? Then I pictured him at work, assembling the plastic sheeting over a rack of baking pans, perhaps, boiling a saucepan of water to steam up the plastic and warm the dough to rise.

He works – most people work – with disadvantages right out of the gate. Small operations rarely have money or space for sheeters or proofboxes. Sometimes the equipment in pastry kitchens is little better than the appliances I have in my cupboards at home. Or maybe I’ve just been working in threadbare kitchens this whole time. Maybe my perspective is skewed.

There is an ease in working for the well-outfitted kitchen. You rarely have to make up a special procedure or custom tool to compensate for an item or appliance that ought to be there but isn’t. It’s easy to do your job when you are given the right tools and so that is just exactly what you do. And while this way of working is generally less frustrating and certainly more efficient and predictable, it is much less fun.

Lordy, is it so much less fun. In teeny tiny kitchens, you have to dance around your coworkers. You squabble over who gets to use the one and only scale. You negotiate for oven and rack space. In small operations, you often run out of ingredients. Sometimes, you can’t put a produce order together that is large enough to make it worthwhile for the produce distributing company to give you an account. It is the case either that you don’t use enough in a week, or you don’t have the refrigerator space to store it all at once. When you can’t get the produce company to deliver to you, you send your grunts out to the nearest grocery store with petty cash in their pockets or you make trips to Costco on your afternoon off. Maybe you don’t have a mixer large enough to hold a full batch of cookies, so you mix it by hand in a large white plastic tub. Or, you don’t have a proofbox, so you make one.

And when your shift is over, and you are mopping up the space at the end of your shift, you feel a much greater sense of accomplishment and connection to your product and your customers than you ever could have if things had gone more smoothly.

It could be that I can never be happy working in a kitchen that is not my very own. If I were employed in the other sort of place, I might use these pages to complain about how hard it is to constantly run out of currants or lemons. I might write about my frustration at using half of my time compensating for the equipment that I lack with half-effective and haphazard improvisations. From this vantage point, however, it seems to me that these things are part of the soul of cooking for which I have begun to ache.

I grew up eating Nabisco’s Nilla Wafers. They were a snack cupboard staple and I loved them. I loved them fresh and crisp, all rich butter-snap and artificial vanilla flavor. Sometimes, I would put an entire disc in my mouth, place it vertically between my teeth with my mouth open wide, seal my lips around the edges and breathe through the cookie, like a gas mask: Nilla Air. I also loved them stale, and soft. I’d suck on them until they disintegrated and I could press the crumbs into a ball with my tongue. I ate them right out of the box, by the handful. Sometimes, though not often, I’d dunk them in milk.

Maybe eight years ago or more, Nabisco changed the cookie’s recipe, and my love flagged a little bit. I don’t know what they did to the Nilla, and by now I doubt I could tell the difference. I only remember feeling awfully disappointed when I first realized they were different. I threw the whole package away. Perhaps my own tastes changed, but I don’t think so. The first few years were pretty rough, but, predictably, I got over the loss, stopped crying in the supermarket. I even forgot about them for a stretch. Now, I buy a box maybe once a year and I can appreciate them for what they are. The NewNilla isn’t so bad; it’s perfectly passable in fact.

I have come to believe, however, that I deserve a cookie that is more than passable. Imagine, then, how my little heart fluttered when I came upon a recipe for “Whole Wheat Vanilla Wafers” in my newly aquired Bob’s Red Mill Baking Book. I am still on the fence about the Baking Book, so I was eager to try out another recipe. And what better test than a potential Nilla-replacement? A Nilla for grown-ups.

I followed the recipe exactly as outlined in the book. This alone is a congratulatable feat for me. Halfway through mixing, I thought that adding some almond extract might be a good idea – or rolling the dough in sesame seeds before baking, or – - – I like to fuss. I think I know better. (and I do, but this is immodest.) In order to judge a new recipe, however, you really have to make it their way at least once, just to know what you’re working with. It would be a shame to set to improve something that’s already exactly what it ought to be. And, though most recipes are never even close to what they ought to be, I am making an effort to give them at least one shot to show me their stuff.

The verdict: I will never recapture the NillaLove of my youth. In order to make a facsimile of the original Nilla Wafers, I would have to use more sugar and more hydrogenated fats than I am prepared to put into a cookie. But this cookie, this Whole Wheat Vanilla Wafer that Bob’s got in his book, is pretty good. I don’t think I would call them “wafers,” but the vanilla flavor is right on, and the addition of whole wheat flour adds a level of complexity to both flavor and texture absent the Nabisco cookie. Bake them until they are just browning on the edges for a softer cookie; bake them until they are golden for a crisper one. Flatten them a little before you put them in the oven and they might be passable as “wafers,” but I think the little cookie mounds that I made are just fine.