Bake Wise: The Best Cocoa Powder

           About three years ago I made a switch from Shaw's Baking Cocoa to Ghirardelli Unsweetened Cocoa. However, Ghirardelli is expensive! So as a result I baked chocolate sparingly, but I least it was good quality and delicious when I did bake it. Right? Wrong. Taster's in a Cook's Illustrated study said that Ghirardelli had a "smooth but undistinguished" flavor. In conclusion their study recommended it with reservations. Even more of a surprise to me was the cocoa powder that got the best reviews and therefore the most recommended cocoa, Hershey's Cocoa Natural Unsweetened. At 44 cents an ounce it's 12 cents cheaper per ounce than Ghirardelli's cocoa.
          Hershey's nib roasts their cocoa beans, meaning they shell them before roasting them. In fact, the top three brands all nib roasted. Of the four recommended cocoa powders Hershey's came in first and third, with Hershey's Cocoa Natural Unsweetened and Hershey's Cocoa Special Dark, second was claimed by Droste Cocoa, and fourth by Valrhona Cocoa Powder. Powders by Ghirardelli, Scharffen Berger, Nestle, and Equal Exchange were recommended with reservations.

          Cook's Illustrated tested fat content, roasting style, price, particle size, and Dutched or natural. Not only were top brands nib roasted, they had smaller particles creating a larger release of flavor. Whether a powder was expensive, fatty, or Dutched did not make a significant difference.

On the Shelf: The Cake Cookbook

          Many cookbooks have good cake recipes, but few have exclusively good cake recipes. All Cakes Considered by Melissa Gray is one of those cookbooks. Melissa Gray is a staff member of the radio show All Things Considered, a year of baking cakes and testing them on her coworkers has produced this wonderful book. It’s small and thick, the kind of book that fits on a bookshelf, with carefully worded directions and stories this book quickly became one of my favorite baking books. Whenever I’m in the mood for a moist rich cake (which happens a lot) I reach for this book, and flip through the pages until a found the perfect cake.

Dark Chocolate Peppermint Patty Cake

Triple Chocolate Orange Passion Cake

Tunnel of Fudge Cake

         I love this book for many reasons. The first of which is that it is geared towards the baking beginner. It's directions are straightforward, easy to follow, and detailed. The difficulty of the cakes progresses with the book, the final cakes have as many as six layers. With each new technique comes an introductory paragraph explaining why, when, and how to use the new skill. As a woman with a full time job most of the cakes Gray has put in this book are not time consuming or complex. There are a exceptions such as the Heaven and Hell cake and the Dark Chocolate Peppermint Patty cake, but these are well worth the time, frustration, or both that it takes to make them.  
          Another reason to love this book is the diversity of the cakes. There is a cake for everyone in this book, from Sweet Potato Pound to Devil's Food with Raspberry jam to Rum Drenched Vanilla Cake this book has it all. With bundt cakes and layer cakes, with angel food cakes and fruity cakes, this book has a cake for every special occasion, holiday, and season.  It appeals with many different tastes and textures. Despite the different recipes there is not a multitude of special ingredients needed to make these cakes. Most frostings are milk, water, or cream cheese based, and most cakes use flavorings found in an ordinary kitchen, making these cakes affordable as well as delicious. There are also very few pans needed in this recipe, all but a few recipes call for either two eight or nine inch round pan, or a bundt pan.
With her witty personal stories about each cake and the troubleshooting tips this book is an entertaining read as well as a solid cookbook. Gray slips in bits of her life surrounding baking give you peeks of sexist uncles and cranky ovens, similar to the problems we all face. Through enjoyable accounts of sticky situations she offers advice on buying ingredients, finding good recipes, and traveling with cakes. With her sage insights, her book teaches you how to be a baker as much as it teaches you how to bake cakes.
This book is full of great recipes and stories, after owning it for just a few months the pages of my copy were already sticky and spattered with batter. It’s a book that’s easy to love and use. The cakes range from fancy and chocolatey to simple and spicy, and back again. This is one of the best gifts I’ve ever received, I unwrapped it on Christmas morning four years ago, and I never stopped baking from it.  

The Chocolatevore's Dilemma

          There are so many recipes for chocolate chip cookies out there. All resulting with different textures, flavors, and ratios of chocolate to dough. Everyone likes a different recipe, and there are some recipes that no one likes at all. So I created an experiment, on Sunday my friend Fiona and I baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies using the recipe on the batch of the Nestle Chocolate Morsels package, then after Fiona left I baked three more batches, using a different recipe for each one. Through out the course of Sunday I made a batch of chocolate chip cookies from One Girl Cookies Cookbook, a batch from King Arthur Flour's Cookie Companion, and one batch using a recipe adapted from foodnetwork. Most of the batches turned out fine, but then in the eleventh hour, tragedy struck. As I was taking the final batch of cookies out of the oven (they were of the King Arthur Flour batch), one of the baking sheets and I got into a fight. In the end I came out victorious, but not before the sheet claimed the lives of sixteen innocent cookies and burned my arm and wrist. So what was a successful day was tarnished in the final hour. 
          Overall the cookies came out well, some a little more golden than called for, but overall well. The Nestle's, One Girl, and foodnetwork recipes started out the same, with a fat and sugar base. The King Arthur Flour had a fat and sugar base as well, but in that base also has vinegar and light corn syrup. What I learned about chocolate chip cookies on Sunday was that most recipes are pretty much the same with slight variations. The amount of flour will variate from 2 1/4 cups to 2 3/4 cups, vanilla extract changes between one teaspoon and one tablespoon, and the amount of butter or vegetable shortening will be between 1/2 cup and 1 1/4 cup. Generally the cookies with more flavor have more vanilla and more dark brown sugar than granulated sugar. All the cookies baked for the same amount of time, and cooled for the same amount of time. So what I learned is that most chocolate chip cookie recipes are mostly the same.

From left, King Arthur Flour, food network.com, Nestle's, and
One Girl Cookies.

          There was one exception however, the most difficult cookie to make was by far the King Arthur Flour Essential Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies. It started with having to put in corn syrup which is a pain even if you grease the spoon your using to measure. After mixing the batter together I realized that this dough is much stickier than the other three were. While the cookies baked they slide together since my baking sheet was a little warped. Then while I was rotating them, I burned myself and dropped half of them. However the most annoying part of these cookies is getting them of the pan. Instead of popping off like the other batches these had to be peeled up with a spatula, most of them broke into pieces. Even if these were the unanimously  best chocolate chip cookies I don't think I would make them again. 
          Because they are so hard to make, it is unfortunate that the KAF recipe got the most votes. However, since I only got 31 on votes, and all the cookies were within 3 votes of each other, I can't draw any conclusions. I will redo the experiment soon with a larger amount of people.
Until then here is the data from this time:
One Girl Cookies: 8
King Arthur Flour Essential Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies: 9
Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies (adapted): 8
Nestle's Chocolate Morsels Recipe: 6
I did learn that my teacher's favorite kind of chocolate chip cookies are King Arthur Flour's, which will come in handy when I need someone to write a college recommendation letter. In the end, the only conclusion I can make is that I need to do more research and test my cookies out on a larger crowd. I can however, say, that the King Arthur Flour cookies are the hardest to make. Until I finish my experiment I'll give my favorite recipe, adapted from the food network. 


My Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:
2 3/4 cup all purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tbsp. espresso powder
1 ¼ cup unsalted butter
1 1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 granulated sugar
2 whole eggs
2 tsp. vanilla extract
2 ½ cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees
2. Dry whisk flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and espresso powder  in a medium sized bowl.
3. In large bowl, with an electric beater mix the brown sugar, granulated sugar and butter together on medium to high speed for 2 minutes or until mixture becomes pale and fluffy.
4. Add eggs, one at a time. Combining thoroughly between and after.
5. Add vanilla, and continue mixing for 1 minute.
6. Add in flour mixture all at once, and beat until combined.
7. Stir in chocolate chips by hand.
8. Drop heaping tablespoons of dough on greased cookie sheets 2 inches apart.
9. Bake for 12 minutes.

Tip: If using two racks in the oven, switch baking sheets halfway through.

10. Let cool for 15 minutes and transfer to cooling racks.