Loving the Sablés...Still

My newest sablé flavor of choice is vanilla.  

I used my favorite sablé recipe as a starting off point (still Amanda Hesser's lemon sables).  I cut out the lemon, and instead added vanilla bean and Nielsen-Massey vanilla extract.  The leftover vanilla pod I stuck in about a cup of sugar.  The resulting vanilla sugar coated the outside of the sablés for an extra punch of vanilla.  

They have the same delightful sandy texture of the lemon, and the sweet intrigue of pure vanilla.  All around an excellent cookie. 

A Heavenly Breakfast

I know I keep raving about Spring Ridge Creamery and how good their milk is.  But, really, it's true.  So the latest experiment was making ricotta.  And, after a little cooking, a little citric acid, and a stint with cheesecloth it came out great.  Thanks to the Creamery's milk our ricotta was light, creamy, and flavorful. 

Luckily at the same time, Amanda Hesser published Recipe Redux: Heavenly Hots.  The contemporary recipe is Jody Williams' Heavenly Necci.  Necci, Italian, are chestnut crêpes.  Williams re-vamped version of traditional Necci are more moist with slightly extra volume. 

It just so happened that I have chestnut flour lying around needing to be used.  Even more coincidentally, Heavenly Necci are to be served with ricotta.  The Heavenly Necci were delicious, though not so heavenly to make.  They were so thin and delicate that they were difficult to flip; we had several casualties.

In the end we had a beautiful breakfast of homemade ricotta and Necci, and it just fell together.  That's how the best things in life happen.  

Sablés: A Special Cookie

The sablé is a very special cookie.  I'm not sure what it is exactly, the sandy texture, the rich butteriness, or the perfect half-dollar size.  Regardless this is a cookie that has a lot going for it.  I first encountered them while visiting Dijon, France, where sables were elevated beyond topic to subject--with twenty or more different kinds.


I forgot about them for awhile.  My interest was re-invigorated when I decided to make Amanda Hesser's Lemon Sablé from her book, Cooking for Mr. Latte.  (Her book, by the way, is purely delightful.  A must read if you eat and are a woman.)

Since Hesser's Lemon Sablés, I've taken up trying all sorts.  The latest experiment were cinnamon.  The recipe, supposedly David Bouley's favorite, were slightly disappointing.  Don't get me wrong, they're still great cookies.  But the wow factor is missing a little bit.  There are a couple differences between the Hesser and Bouley recipes, the most important, I believe is Bouley's uses half the egg of Hesser's and uses whole eggs instead of just the yolk as Hesser does.  There are other differences but I believe it is the yolk that elevates Hesser's recipe to sublime.

Next try will be cinnamon instead of lemon in Hesser's sablé recipe.  When it works, it works.