Chocolate-Covered Matzo

I first made chocolate-covered matzo for Easter. (I was still channeling Passover and thinking about a recipe I original saw on sfgate.com.) It’s a delicious dessert that works any time of the year, is great for sharing, and can easily be adapted with any flavor combinations you want.

Also, it’s incredibly simple to make and doesn’t require any measuring at all.

Chocolate-Covered Matzo

Ingredients:

Unsalted matzo

Olive oil

Light brown sugar

Dark chocolate

Sea Salt

Method:

1.) Preheat oven to 350 F. Place matzo on a cookie sheet in a single layer. Brush lightly with olive oil then sprinkle with brown sugar. Spread the sugar into the oil and matzo with fingers until evenly distributed.

2.) Place the cookie sheet with matzo in the oven and bake for 8 minutes. In the meantime, chop the dark chocolate.

3.) Remove the cookie sheet from the oven. Sprinkle with sea salt (but be sure not to overdo it). Next, sprinkle with chocolate.

4.) Place the cookie sheet with matzo in the oven for another 30-60 seconds to melt the chocolate.

5.) Spread the chocolate evenly across the matzo and all the way to the edges. Freeze for three hours or more.

6.) Once the chocolate is set, break each matzo into approximately nine pieces. Serve or keep in fridge or freezer in an airtight bag or container (or wrap up and give it as a gift!).

Get creative with this recipe. Skip the salt and sprinkle with crushed red pepper flakes (again, do not overdo it or it can wreak the recipe. Note: The amount of pepper flakes on the matzo shown in the top picture is too much. Keep it sparse!). Zest an orange or a lemon and sprinkle the zest on top of the chocolate. Add your ideas to the comments!

Dad’s French Toast

Dad's French Toast

It’s Father’s Day so this one goes out to my amazing dad. I woke up yesterday realizing I had all the ingredients for French toast so made breakfast the way my dad used to make it. Here’s how to make my favorite French Toast.

Ingredients (that you often already have on hand) for making Dad’s French Toast for two (double, triple, quadruple recipe as required): 4 slices bread (a loaf you can cut yourself is best, like a big French loaf or I used a fresh loaf of nine-grain bread), 2 eggs, splash of milk, cinnamon, butter (for greasing pan), sugar, and real maple syrup.

Here’s how you do it: In a bowl (ideally with a large, flat bottom), whisk together eggs, splash of milk, and a pinch of cinnamon. Heat frying pan over medium heat and add butter so the toast doesn’t stick to the bottom. Cover two pieces of bread with the egg mixture by putting one slice in the bowl and turning it over, then use a fork to lift it out and onto the pan. Repeat with second piece of bread. Cook until each side is golden brown. Repeat with other two pieces of bread.

Fresh nine-grain bread

Mixing the eggs, milk, and cinnamon

Making Dad's French Toast

Serve French toast with a cinnamon-sugar mixture of about 1 part cinnamon to 3 parts sugar (adjust as needed) and drizzle with real maple syrup.

Serve with cinnamon-sugar mixture and real maple syrup

Everything about making this (picking the bread out of the bowl with the fork, making the cinnamon-sugar mixture) reminded me of breakfasts with my dad and made me smile. We’re heading back East to visit family at Christmas so I’ll have to add this to my list of requested meals we eat while we’re there. =)

Mmm... 🙂

Apple Cheddar Biscuits

A plate of apple cheddar biscuits with fresh picked oranges, limes, lemons, and kumquats from our friends houses

There’s a cookie tube one block from my office. Yup, a cookie tube. It used to be a corner, flower shop but the approximately five-foot-diameter, glass-enclosed tube is now the home of Batter Bakery, hands down the best place to get a scone in San Francisco. My colleagues and I frequent Batter way too often and in an effort to keep my budget and diet in check, I decided to bake my own breakfast snack in the form of apple cheddar biscuits.

Working with How to Cook Everything

I was going to bake scones until I opened How to Cook Everything and read Mark Bittman‘s description of them a “really just ultra-rich biscuits, with cream as the primary liquid ingredient.” That sounds delicious every once and a while but not everyday. Thus, I went with the biscuit recipe (also probably not an everyday always kind of snack but hey, I’m in marathon training and this recipe is not that egregious). My favorite scone at Batter of late is its Apple Cheddar Scone so I added a handful of apple cubes and grated cheddar cheese to Bittman’s recipe (and also substituted the “yogurt or buttermilk” with cottage cheese cause that’s what I had at home and I was curious how it’d turn out, which was well). Here’s how it went down.

Insides of an apple cheddar biscuit

Apple Cheddar Biscuits

(adapted from Mark Bittman’s Yogurt or Buttermilk Biscuits from How to Cook Everything)

Yield: 6

Ingredients:

1 cup cake flour plus more as needed

Scant 1/2 teaspoon salt

1-1/2 teaspoon backing powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

2 tablespoons cold butter

1/2 cup 2%, small curd cottage cheese

1/2 apple, peeled and cut into small cubes

2 ounces cheddar cheese, cut into small cubes (I grated the cheese, which made it get lost in the mix. Cutting the cheese into small cubes should fix this)

Ingredients, plus butter (which was staying cold in the fridge)

Method:

Heat the oven to 450F. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Cut butter into bit and blend into dry ingredients by rubbing butter with dry ingredients between fingers. Thoroughly blend all butter into dry mixture before moving on. Add cottage cheese, apple cubes, and cheddar cheese cubes to mixture and stir until a ball just forms. Turn out dough on a lightly floured surface and knead 10 times. Roll into a log and cut into six circles. Place on ungreased baking sheet and bake 7 to 9 minutes or until golden brown. Enjoy.

Cutting the dough into biscuit circles

Ready to put the biscuits into the oven

Mmm... a hot biscuit (They were good all week eaten at room temperature too. Store in an airtight container.)