Pecan Brownie Bites for a Cookie Drive #ChristmasWeek

Need/want to make 8 dozen brownie bites for a cookie drive or a whole bunch of cookie plates? Look no further! My second recipe of #ChristmasWeek is well suited to mass production and full of chocolatey goodness as well. I share my 3 lessons learned so you don't have the failures I did.

Welcome to Day Two of Christmas Week. This event is hosted by Kim of Cravings of a Lunatic and Susan of The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen. We hope to inspire you to break out those holiday sprinkles and get your bake on!

Hanging in my house is a poster of Life's Little Instructions. On it are such gems as 'overtip breakfast waitresses' and 'when you borrow a car, return it with the gas tank full', but one of my favorite ones is 'never refuse a plate of homemade brownies'. I don't care if the ingredients for the brownies came out of a single box or from multiple containers in your pantry--to me, if the brownies come out of YOUR oven they are homemade.

What if you want to give homemade brownies to 1,500 single Airmen who are spending Christmas away from their families? Or, more realistically, if you wanted to contribute several dozen brownies to the Airmen's Cookie Drive? You need a few Mass Production Techniques to enable you to churn out tray after tray, and that's why I wrote up this post for #ChristmasWeek.

Making individual sized treats for a cookie drive is a Big Project. Making brownies for a cookie drive [is that even legal? I mean, they're not technically cookies, whatever the technical definition of a cookie is] is another level of hassle. You either need to cut your pan nice and even [no 'you cut and your sister chooses first' here] or you need to make individual brownies and get them safely out of the pan.

Lesson #1:  Use paper liners.
Trust me and the pile of failures I shared with my kids and on my FB page. [Perhaps the kids would prefer we skip this lesson and just have 8 dozen less-than-perfect brownie bites piled up around the kitchen.] To spray or not to spray the paper liners I leave up to you. I didn't spray, nor do I spray my brownie pan normally. There are 3 sticks of butter in there, for crying out loud!

Lesson #2:  If you're using nuts, GO BIG.
I like nuts in my brownies, but I'd never put nut-filled brownies in a cookie tray for my friends who have food allergies. While the Cookie Drive Organizers said that nuts were OK, I didn't want the volunteers to guess if my brownies contained nuts.  Instead, I went big and glued a big ol' pecan half on top of each brownie using a candy melt. You can see through the lid that these treats belong with the other nut-filled goodies.

Lesson #3:  Just do it. It will make you feel good.

Doing for others makes you feel good. If you love to bake, then baking for others is an exceptional way to feel good. You don't need an Airmen's Cookie Drive either--police stations, fire stations, animal shelters and hospitals would be glad to follow the instructions to 'never refuse a plate of homemade brownies'.

Are you trampled by turnips? Collared by kohlrabi? Buried in beets? For recipes using my usual suspects, please refer to my Visual Recipe Index until #ChristmasWeek ends and I return to my local food, mostly savory ways.  If you're tempted by sweets and looking for holiday ideas--yesterday I shared Finnish Pulla {Cardamom Coffee Braid}, tomorrow I'll share Scandinavian Fruit Soup, Thursday brings us Toffee Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies, and I'll close out the week with Norwegian Lefse on Friday.

Swing by all the #ChristmasWeek participants to see what they've been whipping up for the holidays:

Chocolate Shortbread Wedges with Pistachios by Cravings of a Lunatic

Turtle Hot Chocolate by  The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen

Rum Raspberry Tart by Cookistry

Chocolate Saltine Toffee (aka Christmas Crack) by Dinners, Dishes, and Desserts

Pecan Brownie Bites by Farm Fresh Feasts (that's me!)

Peppermint Brownie Cookies by Mind Over Batter

Bourbon Brownies by Cooking In Stilettos

Finnish Pulla {Cardamom Coffee Braid}

This is a recipe for Finnish Pulla, a cardamom-spiced lightly sweet braided bread. It is delicious plain or with butter, served alongside tea or coffee, or as an after school snack. The recipe makes three loaves which is terrific for gift giving during the holidays. 

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Baking: art or science? Discuss.

When I first saw this bread being made it was all art: building the fire in the wood stove, mixing the ingredients until the dough looked right then braiding, decorating, and finally baking the bread. To my young, fresh-out-of-college eyes Eila Akkanen's ability to create this bread was purely magic. [Looking back on that summer, Eila was doing her weekly baking in the the farmhouse kitchen where she'd raised her family and had probably performed that 'magic' thousands of times.]

I think baking used to be considered an art, or perhaps more accurate, a series of crafts. Building a fire to the proper baking temperature is as much a learned skill as kneading dough or even beading bracelets. Nowadays I don't need to know much about building a baking fire--I use the keypad on the oven to type in the precise temperature I'd like, and double check it with my oven thermometer. I could re-learn the chemical equations which describe the reactions of a pile of ingredients turning into a loaf of bread, but I don't need to know how it works--just that it does.

I braid one side towards the middle, then the other, then finish by pinching the end pieces together.

My approach to this recipe is a mixture of science and art. Because my kitchen temperature averages 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, I use my bread machine to mix the dough [don't worry if you don't have a freezing kitchen and a bread machine, I'll provide directions for mixing the dough]. When the machine is finished, though, my experienced eye takes over and shapes the dough until it looks right.

The inspiring recipe came from Beatrice Ojakangas' book Fantastically Finnish. Instead of starting with whole cardamom pods I use the ground spice, and because I first had this while working on a dairy farm I like to use a richer milk. I have made this bread using all cream--very rich dough, very tender crumb, great way to use up 2 cups of heavy cream--as well as half & half and even 2% milk. Normally I'll say 'use what you have on hand' but if you've only got fat free milk please go grab a pint of half & half before making this. It is the holidays after all. 

Speaking of holidays, I'll be sharing sweet recipes each day during #ChristmasWeek. Tuesday I'll be sharing 3 lessons learned making Pecan Brownie Bites for a Cookie Drive, Wednesday it's back to Scandinavia for Fruit Soup, Thursday we're keeping things simple with Toffee Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Friday I finish getting my ethnic on with My Mother's Norwegian Lefse. 

If you're not into sweets, check out my Visual Recipe Index for more savory ideas for what to do with the produce from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share, farmer's market, and garden.

Salami Alfredo Pizza (Pizza Night!)

Gooey cheese and spicy salami on top of creamy Alfredo sauce for a hot mess of a pizza.
A subtitle could be: where to find the tools you need for successful pizza at home.

Almost as many times as I've shared a Friday Night Pizza Night recipe here I've also said to preheat a pizza stone if you've got one [one glaring exception would be deep dish pizzas which I cook in cast iron skillets]. Now I'm going to say that if you like to make pizza at home and don't already have a stone, GO GET ONE. I took my stone out to make room for the turkey last month and didn't even notice it was gone when I made a deep dish Thanksgiving leftover pizza [with green bean casserole--who knew?]. Last weekend I preheated my oven while I was dithering over what kind of pizza to make for my birthday**. I assembled my pies, opened the oven door to slide the first one off the peel onto the . . . . oops.

Well that was unexpected. I ended up using a cookie sheet and my crust was no where near where it usually is crispness-wise.  The stone really makes a difference. I even wrote an ode to mine.  Here's a link to King Arthur Flour where I bought my stone, and an Amazon affiliate link for good measure. The shape shouldn't matter, but I like how my rectangle fits in my oven and how I can easily fit multiple dishes on it when I'm baking. 

My stone is broken, but unlike a casserole dish I can just push the edges to close approximation and rock on. Compared to the cost of buying a couple of pizzas every weekend, it paid for itself 15 years ago. Ditto on the pizza peel [Amazon affiliate link to my sanity-saving pizza peel] which makes getting the pizza in and out of the oven terribly easy. Triple ditto the parchment paper, though I keep on buying that stuff so it's not like it pays for itself [silicone mats do not work in this instance]. My kids just don't hear such a wide array of colorful language when I use parchment paper.

There is a pizza recipe here, I promise. This was a hot mess of a pizza, but boy did it taste good. The pictures are lousy, but I decided to share it anyway because of the flavor. We had salami left from an antipasti dinner, prepared alfredo sauce because I cannot resist a magical markdown sticker, and mozzarella because people don't make a lot of caprese salads in the winter so there's marked down mozzarella at the fancy cheese counter. You'd think that I'd know better about using thawed mozzarella slices, but you'd be wrong. This pizza made a gooey, drippy mess all over the back of the oven when I lifted it up to broil the top (photo at the end).  It was worth it.

For general hints, tips, and photo collages please check out my Pizza Primer post, a brain dump of all things related to making pizza in my home kitchen.  For a photo album of pizza dough troubleshooting tips, please see my FB page.