Chocolate Chip Cookies

I'll admit it---I have a sweet tooth. I love desserts of all sorts, ranging from western desserts like Prolific Oven's divine Swedish Princess Cake to Ben and Jerry's ice-cream to Indian desserts like rasmalai and gulab jamun. But above them all is the humble chocolate chip cookie, served warm with soft melt-in-your-mouth chocolate chips! It's a dessert I have a very hard time resisting.

So you can imagine that I was quite thrilled to read this recent article in the NY Times entitled Perfection? Hint: It's Warm and Has a Secret. It's all about baking the perfect chocolate chip cookie, complete with a recipe. The author talks to a number of bakers to get the recipe. But why talk to bakers when:

... almost everybody say[s] they prefer homemade to bakery bought?

Mr. Rubin smiled, having already figured out the answer. “It’s the Warm Rule,” he said. “Even a bad cookie straight from the oven has its appeal.”

I certainly subscribe to this view. But there's more to it than serving it warm. Mr. Rubin provides two secrets to baking the perfect chocolate chip cookie:

First, he said, he lets the dough rest for 36 hours before baking.

It seems this allows

... the dough and other ingredients to fully soak up the liquid ... which bakes to a better consistency.

The second secret is apparently to bake large cookies. The reasons for this are more complex and worth reading, at least for a laugh; not unlike the description of a fine wine (that claims to have hints of things that I can never sense), it involves phrases such as "flavor similar to penuche fudge" (what the hell is penuche fudge any way?!).

Nonetheless, it all sounds very exciting. I'm going to try the recipe one of these days and I'll report back on whether it lived up to the billing. (And maybe I'll figure out what penuche fudge is like!)

500 Mile Chai

This Thanksgiving we had family visiting from the East coast, so we hosted a small Thanksgiving party. I volunteered to make dessert---a delicious mango pie. I started putting the pie together on Wednesday night and proceeded to mess it up.... Suffice it to say that it had something to do with gelatin not dissolving properly and becoming lumpy, to the point where Mala absolutely refused to serve the resulting "pies" at Thanksgiving!

So it was that I was prowling the aisles of Andronico's on Thursday morning looking for an appropriate Thanksgiving dessert. And this is where I encountered 500 Mile Chai from The Tao of Tea.


It is a masala chai---a blend of organic black tea with ginger, cloves, cardamom, and cinnamon. As to the origins of the name, it:

... originates from the many late night truck drivers stopping at small Chai stands 'Dhabas' on the highway and asking for really strong, sweet Chai to help them drive long distances (... another 500 miles).

But what really clinched it for me was the description of the choice of leaf:

The grade of tea commonly used for Chai is known as 'Cut, Tear and Curl (CTC)', representing a heavily rolled leaf pellet with very low moisture content. It is ideal for boiling...

Growing up I remember buying CTC tea for my mother, without any real understanding of what CTC was! So I had to buy this tea. We served it after dinner, and it was delicious!