In nut brittles, cookies and ice creams, extra salt gives definition to the flavor of the nuts and cuts down on their fattiness, if only deceivingly.
The waiter would tap on the door before entering with each course: egg-drop soup, fried rice, chicken chow mein, black tea and, at meal's end, brittle fortune cookies whose sometimes inscrutable pronouncements I always took to heart.
But for gooey chocolate chip cookies, peanut brittle or strawberry pie — the kinds of things that appealed to a teenage sweet tooth — I turned to my Great Aunt Maida.
For those who aren't, pastry chef Ann Kirk of Little Dom's Deli in Los Angeles created a hilarious scotch-and-chocolate to-go box featuring a Johnnie Walker Blue nip, personal-sized dark chocolate cake with layers of hot fudge, salted caramel buttercream and cocoa nib brittle, and cardamom sugar cookies.
In addition to the panettone, Leonetti's holiday specials include centerpieces of croccante ($26), or almond brittle, marzipan baskets filled with cookies ($18 for the basket, and cookies at $13 a pound), and molded chocolate sleighs ($18.50 small, $45 large).
Perry's dessert recipes aside (peanut butter cookies with bacon brittle, anyone?), I have the sneaking feeling that both the professional and nonprofessional joie de vivrists out there can agree on Perry's thesis -- she's onto something.
With the holidays upon us, the Great Sugar Rush is on: we're gorging ourselves on sugar-dusted cookies, nibbling at peanut brittle and devouring plump chocolates oozing with caramel or raspberry liqueur.
Cookies, fudge, bark and brittle are everywhere during the month of December.
Then there is ice cream akin to a sundae in a pint container: so full of nutty brittles, veins of fudge and chunks of cookie or brownie that the ice cream itself becomes pretty much secondary.
There are the many Mother Moo ice cream flavors made in the Sierra Madre production kitchen — orange blossom and cardamom, salty chocolate, raw honey, salted Meyer lemon, organic cornflakes, organic triple milk — plus a case filled with cookies, jams, brittles and pies, which Klemens and her bakers make using an all-butter crust, organic flour from Central Milling and farmers market fruit. .
