i’m still sloooowly working my way through gourmet’s favorite cookies (from 1941-2008), and while i still have a long way to go, these chocolate coconut squares are going to be tough to beat. so tough, that i might just stop here and keep making batches of these instead of any other cookie, forever. they are so good.
adding powdered sugar designs is an easy way to make a dessert look fancy. i just made two quick stencils out of typing paper and carefully sifted some sugar over the top of each bar. it was a surprisingly easy (if a bit tedious) process, and while the small amount of sugar doesn’t really impact the taste, it’s totally worth it.
my baking dish is 8″ square instead of 9″, so they ended up a bit thicker. i think the consensus among everyone who ate these was actually to leave the bottom half thick and make the chocolate layer thinner. this one nitpick didn’t really stop us from finishing these off in a few hours though.
thanks to everyone who voted for me in the first Foodie Fight! i was up against some tough competition, but thanks to you all i was able to pull out a win!
it was a great experience and really fun to push myself in new way. if you might be interested, SIGN UP for another battle!
also, please please please check out the other blogs who competed in the first battle:
THIS FOODIE FIGHT IS ON! i’m a proud participant in the first ever foodie fight, a competition between 6 bloggers who all have to use the same 2 ingredients to put their best dish forward. it was created by nick of macheesmo and dan of the food in my beard (2 really awesome blogs). go check them out, then come right back here, because, oh, do i have something to show you.
as soon as i found out the 2 main ingredients for the competition were potatoes and lemon, my mind instantly went to potato wrapped fish. lemon works with both fish and potatoes, and potato wrapped fish = instant fish and chips. add a little spring veggie goodness, and it’s good!
i figured that the fish would be the most challenging part, but it was even harder than i thought. the key is to get the potatoes really paper thin so they’ll wrap around the fish and also fry up and stay crispy. using plastic wrap to pull the potato packet together was a huge help.
i love that the wrapped potato gives the illusion of giant scales on the fish. after wrapping all the fish pieces, i put them in the fridge to firm up and moved onto the veggies.
what’s better than asparagus and zucchini? how about grilled asparagus and zucchini? even cooking it up for just a minute or two really changes the taste. the veggies got tossed with a bit of lemon juice and lemon zest as well as salt and pepper. the slices were very thin, but even after they were cooked, they still had a healthy bite to them.
ok, back to the fish. unwrapping the fish packet from the plastic was pretty tough, but i could breathe a sigh of relief once it was in the hot pan. like anything you want to crisp up correctly, you have to actually walk away from the pan and give it a few minutes. the potato will naturally release from the pan once it’s got a good crust on it.
amazingly, the fish stays incredibly moist while the potato gets perfectly crisp. since the fish and potato were both seasoned before cooking, the only thing you have to worry about is getting it in and out of the pan carefully.
the last part of the dish that tied it all together was the aioli. i thought it would be a good sauce for the fish, and it really added a garlicky and lemony tang. finally getting to taste the finished meal just felt good. the best thing about this competition was that it pushed me to try new cooking techniques. now i just need to learn how to not have it take me 3 hours to prepare a nice meal. it’s an honor to be in this contest with the 5 other talented bloggers, and i can’t wait to see what they’ve concocted.
