For ToScho

One of my friends Tobi came for dinner on monday. I know a lot of Tobis, so we refer to them either by location (Tobi New York, for instance — though he has moved to London in the meantime) and Tobi Sch., whom I also refer to as Stabi Tobi, because I met him at the state library here in Berlin six years ago. We met because we were the only people in the library using Apple computers and thus we immediatly bonded over our mutual cuteness, geekiness and snobbiness!

So, he came for dinner and brought beer and icecream, upon request. I had the jar pictured above on the countertop, and was excitedly explaining that this was dessert. Somehow he totally failed to be impressed, and I was really not getting why: who wouldn’t get excited about SALTED!BUTTER!CARAMEL!! A sauce, that routinely makes me want to bathe in it it’s so good.

As I got ready to serve dessert, the salted butter caramel sauce poured over vanilla icecream* Tobi asked me why I was using salad sauce to eat with icecream… Mystery solved, sauce tried. blissful coma ensued!**

Over dinner, I helped him put together a dinner for this weekend using the sauce as one of the features, and promised I’d post the recipe for him to check. So Tobi, here you go:

Salted Butter Caramel

prep time: 5 min

adapted from Trish Deseine Ma petite Robe Noire et autre Recettes

100 g granulated sugar
2 tbsp water
70 g salted butter***
2 tbsp mascarpone

Put the sugar and water in a heavy saucepan over low to medium heat. Do not stir and wait for the sugar to melt. You can swirl the content in the saucepan until everything is an even light golden color.

Take the saucepan off the heat and add the butter. Make sure to drop it along the sides of the saucepan and not into the middle, or the mixture will spatter, bubble and BURN! Slowly incorporate the butter with a wooden spoon and keep turning until all is melted. Add the mascarpone in the same way.

You can eat it rightaway, or let the leftovers cool down. It will harden in the fridge, but you can heat it up in a waterbath or the microwave to bring it back to pouring consistency.

*confession: I didn’t have salted butter, so I added about a quarter of a teaspoon of table salt, along with the butter. This made the caramel curdle. BUT. I have an awesome remedy for that: Let the caramel cool a bit to prevent it from burning you and quickly whizz it in the blender until it has reached a smooth consistency. This trick also works for custards (crème anglaise) and other sauces using dairy which have the tendency to curdle.

** We also crumbled some cookies on top of the sauce for extra textural tastey deliciousness, becaue that’s the way our cookie crumbles!

***I hate german icecream. I don’t know what they do to it, but nearly every brand (save for Landliebe) is all slimy and airy and gooey. All in a bad way. I think they must whip their icecream under the guise of conching. But thanks to Tobi for bringing icecream anway!

Peanutbutter Cookies, replacing one bad habit with another?

Every saturday morning, my family and I go to the market in our neighbourhood to do our weekly shopping. On our way there, we pass by one of my favorite cafés in Berlin, Barcomi’s. Usually, the smell of coffee and baked goods wafting out onto the streets makes us forget our recent breakfast and forces the market expedition to a halt.

Because we try to be reasonable, we mostly just get a coffee and a cookie instead of say a cinammon roll, a monster brownie, a cream scone or a plain bagel. The cookies are big enough to provide satisfying elevenses without spoiling our appetites for lunch and are therefore the compromise of choice. I always choose the peanutbutter or peanutbutter-chocolate-chip cookie because it seems that it has proteins (peanutbutter!) and is thus a totally healthy cookie choice (HA!). I also had never found a recipe for a peanutbutter cookie that I liked. My quest finally came to an end this fall, when the founder of the café, Cynthia Barcomi, came out with a cookbook unveiling the recipes behind her pastries.

I received a copy of it for my birthday, and the cookies were first on my list of things to try. Since her recipe yields about 30 big cookies of a 7 cm diameter, and we were still recovering from the christmas feasts, I only made half a batch. I also subsituted half the plain white sugar with muscovado sugar, which gave the end result a lovely mellow caramel flavor. I am not sure if owning the cookbook will help break our saturday Barcomi’s habit though!

Peanutbutter Cookies

Adapted from Cynthia Barcomi’s Backbuch
prep time: 10 min, baking time: 10 min

180 g flour
125 g butter, softened
65 g plain white sugar
65 g brown or muscovado sugar
175 g peanutbutter
1 egg
1 tsp molasses (Grafschafter Goldsaft)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla sugar

makes about 40 small cookies

preheat the oven to 190° and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.
In a big mixing bowl, combine the flour, salt and baking soda. Set aside.
In another bowl, cream the butter with the two sugars. Add the egg, vanilla sugar, the molasses and the peanutbutter until thoroughly combined.
Beat in the flourmixture with a wooden spoon.
Drop by teaspoonful onto your cookie sheet, score crosswise with a fork and bake for 10 min, or until lightly browned.