MRS. APPLEYARD'S BROWNIES...KIND OF: Guest Post by Ellen Byron

You know I love when my mystery and chocolate worlds cross. And now my cookbook world, too! My friend Ellen Byron has just started a new series: The Vintage Cookbook Mystery series. I, too, collect vintage cookbooks, so I can't wait to dive into Bayou Book Thief...and make Mrs. Appleyard's Brownies. More info and recipe below!

ELLEN BYRON:

MRS. APPLEYARD’S BROWNIES… KIND OF

My Vintage Cookbook Mystery series, which just launched with the first book, Bayou Book Thief, is inspired by my own hobby of collecting vintage cookbooks. Each book in the mystery series will include recipes I’ve adapted from my personal collection. I counted recently and I have just north of one hundred cookbooks, with publication dates ranging from the late 1800s to the late 1970s. I love the glimpse they provide into decades of American eating habits and how they’ve evolved.

One of the books in my collection is a 1942 tome titled Mrs. Appleyard’s Kitchen. I did a little research into Mrs. Appleyard and discovered that she, like Betty Crocker, doesn’t exist. She’s a humorous, gently opinionated fictional New England homemaker channeled through the writing of actual author Louise Andrews Kent. Apparently the character first appeared in a charming novel, which became a bestseller during WWII, and spun off into more than one successful cookbook. In fact, Mrs. Appleyard’s success spanned five decades, with a paperback edition of Cooking with Mrs. Appleyard published in 1993.

Like I said, I adapt every recipe I use in my series, adjusting each to today’s tastes and cooking styles. But culling recipes from cookbooks that go back eighty years, like my Mrs. Appleyard’s Kitchen, presents challenges. I have to weed out recipes utilizing ingredients that are hard to find these days or
cooking techniques calibrated to the time of publication.

For my second Vintage Cookbook Mystery, Wined and Died in New Orleans, which will launch on February 7, 2023, I landed on a simple brownie recipe from Mrs. Appleyard’s Kitchen. But not only do ingredients and cooking techniques change over the years, so do our tastes. Just by reading the recipe, I could tell that what was deemed chocolate-y enough in 1942 wouldn’t fly in 2023. So I doubled the amount of chocolate and added a teaspoon of ground coffee to kick up the flavor even more.

I think Mrs. Appleyard would approve – if she existed.

Brownies

(Adapted from Mrs. Appleyard’s Kitchen, 1942)

Ingredients:

¼ cup creamed unsalted butter

4 squares melted unsweetened chocolate

½ cup all-purpose flour

1 cup Baker’s (fine) sugar (or brown sugar; baker’s choice)

1 teaspoon finely ground coffee

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/8 teaspoon salt

½ cup chopped walnuts, pecans, or mini chocolate pieces (optional)

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter an 8” square baking pan.

In a medium-size bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, coffee, and salt. Set aside.

Mix creamed butter and melted chocolate together. Make sure it’s cooled, then beat in the eggs one at time, and then the vanilla.

 If you’re including nuts or chocolate pieces, add them now.

Pour the batter into the pan and bake for 15 minutes for chewy brownies. If they’re too moist, bake another five minutes.

Servings: 8 large brownies or 16 small ones.

***

SYNOPSIS: A new mystery series from USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award–winning author Ellen Byron.

Twenty-eight-year-old widow Ricki James leaves Los Angeles to start a new life in New Orleans after her showboating actor husband perishes doing a stupid internet stunt. The Big Easy is where she was born and adopted by the NICU nurse who cared for her after Ricki’s teen mother disappeared from the hospital.

Ricki’s career dream comes true when she joins the quirky staff of Bon Vee Culinary House Museum, the spectacular former Garden District home of late bon vivant Genevieve “Vee” Charbonnet, the city’s legendary restauranteur. Ricki is excited about turning her avocation – collecting vintage cookbooks – into a vocation by launching the museum’s gift shop, Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbooks and Kitchenware. Then she discovers that a trunk of donated vintage cookbooks doesn’t contain books – it holds the body of a cantankerous Bon Vee employee who was fired after being exposed as a book thief.

The skills Ricky has developed ferreting out hidden vintage treasures come in handy for investigations. But both her business and Bon Vee could wind up as deadstock when Ricki’s past as curator of a billionaire’s first edition collection comes back to haunt her.

Will Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbooks and Kitchenware be a success… or a recipe for disaster?

***

BIO: Ellen’s Cajun Country Mysteries have won multiple Agatha Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and multiple Lefty Awards for Best Humorous Mystery. Bayou Book Thief will be the first book in her new Vintage Cookbook Mysteries. She also writes the Catering Hall Mystery series under the name Maria DiRico. 

Ellen is an award-winning playwright, and non-award-winning TV writer of comedies like Wings, Just Shoot Me, and Fairly Odd Parents. She has written over two hundred articles for national magazines but considers her most impressive credit working as a cater-waiter for Martha Stewart. An alum of New Orleans’ Tulane University, she blogs with Chicks on the Case, is a lifetime member of the Writers Guild of America, serves on the national board for Mystery Writers of America, and will be the 2023 Left Coast Crime Toastmaster. Please visit her at https://www.ellenbyron.com/.

PURCHASE LINK: Bayou Book Thief by Ellen Byron: 9780593437612 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

 

How Bean to Baked Goods at Real Chocolate Shops Inspired The Bean to Bar Mysteries: Guest post by Amber Royer

AMBER ROYER:

My Bean to Bar Mysteries series is my newest foray into the realm of all things chocolate.  Ever since I did the chocolate cookbook (my first chocolate-related project), I have made it a point to visit chocolate shops/factories whenever I travel (oh, pre-COVID travel, how I miss you!) so that I can Instagram my favorite flavors and wrappers.  As a result, Felicity’s shop is basically a combination of some of the coolest aspects of different shops I’ve seen – from the bean to baked good aspect, to the artistic labels that tell her story, to the coffee and dirty horchata station to keep visitors in the shop.

I acknowledge that in some ways this may be unrealistic.  For instance, I have her just starting out, but she’s already visited origin to purchase beans for one of the chocolates she’s working on.  But I gave her the funds to do so because I wanted to be able to write about the most interesting aspects of craft chocolate.  After all, it is those kind of visits – in person or virtual -- that allow craft chocolate makers to sell you a story, of the farm the beans came from, of the care that went into turning those beans into something special.

But once you’ve bought that special chocolate, how can you show it off?  Consider baking with it.

Although most baking recipes call for blended-origin chocolate, so that you don’t have to take into account a particular chocolate’s flavors to get the “chocolaty” notes people expect, you can intentionally use the specific flavor notes of single-origin chocolate to either reinforce or contrast other flavor notes in a dish.  This is why a chocolate with a lot of tannins, which often comes across as citrus, goes well with lemon or bergamot flavors.  Chocolate with bright, fruity notes can often be paired with – or even take the place of – raisins or cherries. 

If you’re going for contrast, pair a fruity chocolate in a crust for a more savory cheesecake base.  A bitter chocolate layer can be the foil for a super-sweet filling.

And look for unexpected ways to be playful.  A tip I picked up from one maker that also has a café: chocolate with smoky notes go great in anything s’mores-inspired.

In Grand Openings Can Be Murder, Felicity’s assistant Carmen makes baked goods from Felicity’s chocolate.  One of the things she makes is chocolate-chunk pan dulce – in this case Besos (the word is Spanish for kisses), also known as yo-yos, because that’s what they look like.  There are a number of variations on what they’re sandwiched together with, and how they’re coated. 

Here’s a snippet of the scene from the book, showing how Carmen makes hers:

Logan takes a mini chocolate-chunk beso off the plate that had been under the glass cloche. “If Carmen’s innocent, then Monaco’s our main suspect. Unless you think it was Paul.”

“I’m not sure it was either of them. . . .”

I pick up one of the besos too and bite into it. Besos are a traditional Mexican sweet bread, made from a raised dough baked as two half spheres. Carmen had added chunks of my fruity Sierra Nevada chocolate to the mix, and joined the pieces with home-made strawberry jam and rolled the whole thing in fine coconut that had been infused with lavender. Traditional, yet elevated.

NOTES: If you’re up for making your own jam, you can infuse it with vanilla bean, which Carmen would have done for added depth of flavor. If you plan well in advance, you can make proper lavender infused sugar by layering lavender and sugar in a jar and shaking it once a day for about a month, then sifting out the flowers.  What I’m detailing below is a quick version that grinds the flowers into the sugar.

Single Origin Chocolate Chunk Mini Besos

Ingredients

3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon active dry yeast

2 teaspoons baking powder

6 tablespoons butter

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 egg, plus one additional yolk

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 cup water

1 cup chocolate chunks

1 tablespoon food grade lavender flowers

1 tablespoon caster sugar, plus 2 additional tablespoons

1 cup coconut flour

3/4 cup strawberry jam

1/2 cup butter, room temperature

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the all-purpose flour, yeast and baking powder. Set aside.

Place the softened butter and granulated sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer, and cream the mixture until it becomes fluffy. Add the eggs and the vanilla, then mix until well combined  Add the flour mixture, the water, and the vanilla extract.  Mix on low for 1 minute, to combine and then increase the speed to medium. Continue mixing until the dough takes on a soft, smooth texture (about 10-20 minutes). Add the chocolate chunks and work them into the mixture using your hands or a spoon.

Using a 2-ounce baking scoop or the palm of your hand, place half spheres of dough roughly 2 inches apart onto the prepared baking sheet. Bake until the spheres are browned (about 15-20 minutes). Cool completely.

Meanwhile, in a spice grinder or using a mortar and pestle, combine the lavender flowers and the tablespoon of caster sugar. Grind until you achieve a fine powder, then put the powder through a fine-mesh strainer. Re-grind any remaining solids. Discard anything that won’t go through the strainer. Place the lavender sugar in a medium bowl, add the remining caster sugar and the coconut flour and whisk to combine. Set aside.

Spread about 1 tablespoon of strawberry jam on the flat side of one cooled beso half. Place another half, flat side against the filling to create a sandwich with the jam in the middle.  Let sit for 10-15 minutes to stick better. 

Using your fingers, coat the cooled beso halves with the room-temperature butter. Roll into coconut sugar mixture, then tap off the excess coconut.

***

Amber Royer writes the CHOCOVERSE comic telenovela-style foodie-inspired space opera series, and the BEAN TO BAR MYSTERIES. She is also the author of STORY LIKE A JOURNALIST: A WORKBOOK FOR NOVELISTS, which boils down her writing knowledge into an actionable plan involving over 100 worksheets to build a comprehensive story plan for your novel. She blogs about creative writing technique and all things chocolate at www.amberroyer.com.

Chocolate Meringue Cookies: Guest Post by Bobbi Mumm

My mystery and chocolate worlds collide again! I guess lots of mystery readers and writers love chocolate! Today I welcome back Bobbi Mumm who answers the age old question of what to do with all those egg whites! Bobbi is a married mother of four children, a university administrator, and an occasional mystery writer. She’s excited to be going to China next month for two weeks and is expecting dynamite writing inspiration.

Bobbi Mumm:
Chocolate Meringue Cookies 

Every few months, after making puddings or custards, I find myself with unused egg whites. I’m not fond of scrambled egg whites so I tend to use them in baking. My family loves these cookies. They have a chewy, chocolatey centre that makes them irresistible. I also appreciate them for the fact that they are gentle on the waistline.
How do you like to use egg whites?

CHOCOLATE MERINGUE COOKIES

Ingredients 
• 3 large egg whites (at room temperature)
• ¼ tsp cream of tartar
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 tbsp unsweetened cocoa
• 3 tbsp semisweet chocolate chips

Instructions 
1. Preheat oven to 250F.
2. Beat egg whites, cream of tartar, and salt at high speed of a mixer until soft peaks form. Add sugar, 1 tbsp at a time, beating until stiff peaks form.
3. Sift cocoa over egg white mixture; fold in. Fold in chocolate chips. Don’t worry if you can still see some cocoa powder.
4. Cover 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Drop batter by teaspoonfuls (they're small!) onto prepared baking sheets. They can be close together as they will not spread much with baking.
5. Bake at 275F for 45 minutes. Use two large baking sheets and bake them all at once.
6. Yield: 40-45 small cookies.

Mystery & Chocolate: Katherine Hall Page: Chocolate Bread Pudding

Today Katherine Hall Page Guest Blogs as part of the continuing series of Mystery Authors & Chocolate. Be sure and check out Mary Kennedy's Guest Blog and her Killer Kahlua Brownies.

Katherine Hall Page is the author of the Faith Fairchild mysteries, the first of which received the Agatha Award for best first mystery. She has also won the Agatha Award for best novel with The Body in the Snowdrift and an Agatha Award for her short story, "The Would-Be Widower." Faith Fairchild is a caterer, so these recipes fit right in.

Make Mine Murder—And Chocolate! by Katherine Hall Page

It’s a conversation grabber—and sometimes stopper. “I write murder mysteries.”—the answer to the polite, “What do you do?” What follows has ranged from a perceptible move away to comments like, “You don’t look like you write about murder”—(and that would be what kind of face?)—and an enormous number of suggestions for killing without a trace, which continues to give me pause.

Chocolate, on the other hand, happily produces predictable responses. (The sure way to tell the villains in my books, which feature caterer Faith Fairchild, is to look for anyone not willing to drive a mile for a Hershey’s Kiss.) I’ve spent many happy hours debating the merits of Burdick’s cardamom dark chocolate salt caramels versus the blood orange ones Vosges makes. My books include original recipes at the end and there’s always something chocolate. To do otherwise would be sinful.

There was never any question that when I was given a gift of time—leaving my job during my husband’s sabbatical in another country—I would write the novel in my head as a mystery. Since childhood, I had read anything and everything, but it was mysteries that posed the wondrous challenge of trying to guess whodunit before the final page. And here I am so many years later trying to keep readers from doing just that.

Agatha Christie set the bar. As I write, it’s one I gaze upon from below with admiration, longing, and very occasionally a glimmer of recognition. I think of Jane Marple as a kind of Great Aunt to my own series character, Faith Fairchild. Jane Marple was—and remains—the quintessential female sleuth, relying on her own intuition and keen powers of observation as the basic tools for detection. She, and Dame Agatha, would scorn the current use of the Internet to ferret out information, having no need for Google. Instead, Miss Marple displays an uncanny ability to make connections between apparently disparate individuals and events, past and present. Human beings are much of a type, as are the situations in which they find themselves. The classic village mystery, of which Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage may be the best example, is the genre into which my series falls. However, I do not limit the locale to a place like St. Mary Mead or in my case, Aleford, Massachusetts, a fictitious Boston suburb. I’ve broadened the definition to include New York City; Lyon, France; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and locales in Maine, Vermont, and Norway. What motivates individuals to commit murder, knows no borders. And this also gives me an opportunity to explore many different cuisines!

Here are two of my favorite chocoholic recipes, which have been favorites with readers as well.. There are more on my web site and Have Faith in Your Kitchen, a Faith Fairchild Cookbook, will be out from Orchises Press in September.

Chocolate Bread Pudding
(From the current book, The Body in the Sleigh)

5 thick slices of chocolate bread, cubed
4 large eggs
1 1/2 cups milk
1 1/2 cups half and half or light cream
1/4 cup white sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
Pinch of salt
Butter to grease the pan
1 cup dried cherries
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate morsels

Mix the eggs, milk, half and half, sugar, vanilla, and salt together. Faith likes to pulse this in a blender, which makes it easy to pour over the bread cubes.
Put the bread cubes in a large mixing bowl and pour the egg mixture over them. Use the palm of your hand to gently push the bread into the liquid to make sure it absorbs evenly. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.
Butter a Pyrex-type baking pan, approximately 12”x8”. Set aside.
Preheat the oven to 350°.
Mix the cherries and chocolate chips together in a small bowl.
Put a layer of the bread mixture in the pan, sprinkle the cherry/chip mixture over it, and cover with the remaining bread mixture. Again, use the palm of your hand to press down, so the ingredients are evenly distributed.
Bake for 40 minutes.
Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or frozen yogurt.
This is a very rich dessert and this recipe will serve 12 easily.

Neither Faith nor I have ever met a bread pudding we didn’t like. It’s comfort food. Many bakeries make chocolate bread. When Pigs Fly, the bakery company mentioned in the text is based in Wells, Maine, but their breads—including the chocolate bread—are sold at many Whole Foods and other markets. They also sell the bread—you bake it in your own kitchen for the last 30 minutes—online at www.sendbread.com. They also sell a kit to make the chocolate bread.
A reader also recently wrote that he had used chocolate muffins from his local bakery and the result was fantastic.

Glad’s Brownies
(From The Body in the Snowdrift)

4 squares unsweetened chocolate, Valrhona is a good choice
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter
2 cups sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup sifted flour
1 cup dried cherries
1 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
1 cup chocolate chunks or chips (milk or semi-sweet)

Preheat the oven to 350°. Grease and lightly flour a 13”x 9” pan. Melt the chocolate squares together with the butter. Cool it slightly and beat in the sugar, eggs, and vanilla. Stir in the flour. Mix well, then add the cherries, walnuts, and chocolate chunks or chips. Put the batter in the pan and bake for about 35 minutes. Be careful not to over bake. Cool in the pan and serve. Makes a very generous1 1/2 dozen.
You may vary this recipe by substituting dried cranberries, golden or dark raisins for the cherries and pecans for the walnuts. Attributed in the book to Faith as a child, it is actually the creation of the author’s dear friend, Gladys Boalt of Stormville, New York.