high-bar baking

No matter how many times she re-read the series, her Hogwarts letter never came. Not on her eleventh, and not on any birthday after that. Even though she shared a birthday with Harry Potter. Still nothing came through the post.

And that’s ok with the rest of us. Because witches don’t go to college. They’re obviously fully trained and ready for the world at seventeen (what?). So I never would have met her. 

And what a tragedy that would have been.

These are peanut butter blossoms, and they’re for my best friend’s birthday. Once upon a time when we were roomates, my mom would send care packages filled with cookies, peanut butter blossoms among them. And I’d come back to the room after class and yell at my bestie. Because when I picked up the tupperware, all the stripped kisses would rattle around inside like a maraca. “No one likes the bad chocolate anyway!” “I know nobody does! I don’t either! But it’s part and parcel with the cookie, you have to suck it up!”, we’d banter every time. 

In years since, I’ve honoured that magazine-cutout recipe from my mom, but tweaked it to make things more palatable. Hershey makes dark chocolate kisses now; those helped. And this winter we both separately had the same idea — kisses are a convention. What if I topped the blossoms with actually good chocolate?

There was no reason I couldn’t. So here are pb blossoms topped with feves, Valrhona’s bean-shaped gems. Chocolate we both want to eat. 

I pressed them into the cookies a couple minutes before they were done, sliding them back into the oven to finish. (Before my oven handle fell off. Not a metaphor for the current state of my life, nope!). I wanted to be sure that the chocolate would melt completely. I needed to break the temper. 

Bar chocolate is tempered; it snaps when you bite into it. There’s a particular crystallize nature to its structure, giving it firmness and shine and a bit of protection against melting. It’s a highly prized state, and one lots of chocolatiers and recipe designers work for / make you work to replicate at home. 

But this is a soft cookie. I don’t want to have to snap into a harsh half inch of chocolate (we’ve all had blossoms where the kisses are hard). So I let the chocolate melt all the way through. It pooled gorgeously, if anyone’s keeping track.

I recommend splurging on feves if you’ve never lived before.

Mostly I recommend finding a best friend. Here’s to another year, my dude. 

“U2”