That’s the relationship between the overall stress of my week and the recipe I choose for the Smackdown.
No, that’s not cat hork; it’s Coco Lopez cream of coconut. More on that later.
In a magical week with no stress, which I assume will also be filled with flying cars made of solid gold and bowlfuls of tranquilizers on pedestals at every street corner, I might attempt a Thomas Keller French Laundry
In a high stress week – you may have guessed that this was just such a week – I rifle through my cookbooks looking for a recipe for Corn Flakes. I don’t mean a recipe for making my own Corn Flakes, I literally mean a recipe with the ingredients “Corn Flakes” and “milk.” (FYI, I haven’t managed to find one yet.) When I fail to find that recipe, I make dessert. Cake, cupcakes, ice cream, whatever.
If it’s an exceptionally stressful week then it’s a fairly easy dessert. Tonight: chocolate-dipped macaroons. Not just any macaroons, but The New Best Recipe’s
I’ll pause for a moment while you go buy the book. I know there’s no real reason for me to pause, since you’re not reading this in real time, but I like the fiction that you are and it gives me time to get my wits about me. My wits are specially scattered right now, so I’ll wait an extra few days while you receive the book and make the lemon bars.
I’ve made macaroons before, always with whipped egg whites but never with great success; they always spread and just…turn weird. Overly chewy. Gummy. Generally unpleasant. The NBR recipe is like no other macaroon recipe I’ve tried before. It’s got a mixture of sweetened and unsweetened coconut, unbeaten egg whites and Coco Lopez! I feel strongly that every time you say or write Coco Lopez! it should be with an exclamation point, and maybe also with a little booty shake. And if you’ve been reading the Smackdown for any amount a time, you know I’m not the booty shaking type; I’m a little uncomfortable even typing the words.
That should give you an idea of how strongly I feel about Coco Lopez! I have to get excited about it, because otherwise it would be too nauseating to work with. I assume you’ve seen the photo, so you know what I’m talking about here. It’s like what happens when your pet beagle eats a bag of marshmallows, several large candles, washes it down with a bottle of glue and then immediately throws it all up. Seriously, just look at the picture again and I won’t have to write things like that. If you’ve been fortunate enough to get to this point in your life without encountering a can of Coco Lopez!, it’s some kind of processed, sweetened food product used in pina coladas and, apparently, macaroons.
There are brands other than Coco Lopez!, but anyone who’s ever had to work with cream of coconut knows that Coco Lopez! is by far the front-runner in terms of how funny the name is.
As instructed, I mixed the wet ingredients (Coco Lopez!, egg whites and corn syrup) together and folded them into the two coconuts. Believe me when I tell you that whisking egg whites into a bowl of Coco Lopez! (1) makes it look roughly 65% more disgusting than it does on its own and (2) takes nearly an hour. That may be a slight exaggeration, but only slight.
I shaped the mixture into the required “little haystacks.” The NBR folks like a “dainty” macaroon and inform me that the batter should make 48 1-inch macaroons. I say fuck dainty, I might as well make ’em bigger because I’m just going to eat five of the little ones anyway. This way, I eat fewer and feel better about myself. Go go Gadget rationalization!
I’ve never been good at dainty anyway.* I suck pretty hard at demure, too.
While my haystacks baked** I pulled out one of the many free bars of chocolate with which I returned from BlogHer Food, along with an incredible number of free spatulas – never let it be said that Chef’s Catalog does not know how to court me. I chopped it and threw it into a double boiler to melt while the haystacks browned.
Ooh, I’m also awful at “unassuming” and “delicate.” I do, however, excel at curmudgeonly.
*I’ve also never tried really hard, although I’m sure that if I really put my mind to it I’d go down in flames BIG TIME.
**Would be an awesome euphemism. Someone tell me what for.
I pulled out my haystacks and let them cool for 20 minutes or so before dipping the bottoms into some 70% dark chocolate. (Coco Lopez! is really sweet. And it was the only chocolate I had in the house.) I probably should have let them cool a few minutes longer, but I’m also terrible with patience and time-biding.
The chocolate-dipping was meditative, where “meditative” means “I got the lyrics to that part of Les Miserables where Fantine has to sell her hair and become a prostitute stuck in my head for no good reason.” I had enough chocolate to get through all but two of my post-taste test macaroons.
I haven’t eaten any of the chocolate-dipped versions but I’ve eaten…more than one of the plain versions, there’s no reason to quibble over numbers. Damn it if those Best Recipe people haven’t done it again. These were perfectly crisp on the outside, dense and chewy inside, just sweet enough and with the most intense coconut flavor of any macaroon I’ve ever had. All that AND they didn’t spread and mutate in the oven. Gracias, Coco Lopez! ¡Usted salvó el día otra vez!* While this will be my go-to macaroon from now on, although I’m not sure how often I’ll actually make them, I don’t think any person should ingest more than one or two cans’ worth of Coco Lopez! in his or her lifetime. But if you’re going to take the Coco Lopez! plunge, it should definitely be in the form of these macaroons.
See, I TOLD you to get the book already. You’ve always been a stubborn sonofabitch, haven’t you?
*I used the MacBook’s widget to translate this sentence for me, so I’m sorry if it’s off and I accidentally insulted your mother.
Thursday Night Smackdown 
baking haystacks = getting high in deserted agricultural areas, clearly.
My grandmother’s cornflake oven-fried chicken has cornflakes and milk and makes you curl up and moan when you eat it.
Roll your french toast in cornflakes before frying it. Crispy, delicious, everything you ever wanted (short of having it stuffed, but you could combine the two).
cmb, i believe you are correct.
fuzzy, i bet it would, but that has more than two ingredients.
j-bird, i think the combo is definitely the way to go.
Recipe for Stressed-Out Holy God I’m Going to Kill Something Cornflakes.
You will need one (1) bowl, preferably something big enough to drown your sorrows in. If you don’t have that or aren’t very hungry, you could get a regular cereal bowl. Also, you’ll want some kind of spoon.
Get the box of cornflakes out of the pantry. “Cornflakes” might mean “Frosted Flakes, except I crossed out the Frosted and wrote Corn in Sharpie,” but I don’t judge and neither should you.
Pour cornflakes into bowl. Pour enough milk into bowl to cover most of the cereal. Think about slicing up a banana and throwing it in to make this healthy. Take bowl into living room, sit in front of tv, and eat cereal while ignoring any attempts your roommate/friend/husband/whoever tries at conversation.
Repeat if necessary.
Oh god please yes.
I somehow stumbled across your blog and I’m so glad I did. You crack me up. As I was reading about these macaroons they seemed vaguely familiar to me. When I checked to see who wrote the Best Recipe book and saw it was from Cook’s Illustrated, I realized it was the same recipe I have been making every spring for Passover. Coco Lopez! rocks. These are amazing macaroons.