Selected recipes

that I have enjoyed making and sharing with friends – mostly from Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz.

• Tahini chocolate chip cookies – recipe from David Lebovitz. According to my records, I made these on March 5th, 2018. They are fantastic!

  It’s a very soft and sticky dough, and the cook­ies ex­panded dur­ing bak­ing quite a bit more than I an­tic­i­pated. The re­sult is not ac­tu­ally such a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent cookie than you might sup­pose from the typ­i­cal choco­late chip cookie;—the tahini just adds a lovely nutty and slightly bit­ter shade, with­out chang­ing the tex­ture much. Will def­i­nitely make again.

• French apple cake – also from David Lebovitz. This was very well received when I brought it to a party once. Unfortunately I started it too late (the party was right after a concert – should have planned ahead), and for the sake of the cake was much absent from the party.

• Italian bread, a bread made with a biga! A biga is a kind of pre-ferment – the recipe explains it well. This is a very delicious and thoroughly fermented bread that takes a long time and a lot of kneading to make.

• Magic apple & plum cobbler – Jocelyn and I have made this I think almost every time we have had friends over to our apartment, and it has always been received with delight. It is the kind of ingenious recipe that is completely trivial to make and invariably completely delicious.

  You can use just apples (and more of them) if that's all you have (as was the case with us when we made it the other night), or, probably, any fruit – originally it used peaches, says Deb, and that sounds like it would be particularly excellent. We scattered some pecans on top just before baking it, with a good result.