Hang Me Anytime.

The Gallows may be my favorite South End restaurant - or, at least, it's the place I visit most frequently in that neighborhood. I dined there last week and realized that a blog post was long overdue! So, what do I love about it?

• The decor! Walls of rough-hewn, pale wooden planks contrast the smooth, dark stone bar and table surfaces. Mirrors line the walls and give the illusion of more space, and the airy, fully windowed bar area keeps you connected to the outside world.  Dim orange light filters through fixtures of bark and twigs, or shines brightly through oversized glass globes suspended in artful clusters. The occasional macabre detail, like a taxidermied raven, adds subtle character to the bar.
• The atmosphere! All the bustle, clang, and chatter of a vibrant brasserie - my favorite kind of restaurant environment.
• The drinks! The Chupacabra (tequila, elderflower, etc) has been my friend for several months, and the other house cocktails cover a lot of bases. They're flavorful but not too strong, perfect for accompanying the lingering meals I have here. 
• The poutine! I first tried this fries/gravy/curds phenomenon at The Gallows, and honestly, no other restaurant's can compare. The gravy is well-seasoned, and the curds are perfectly creamy. I usually go for the "out of control" variety, which adds surprise meats, vegetables, cheeses, and/or sauces to the standard poutine. A perfect must-share appetizer!
• The other food is pretty good, too. The poutine's considerable heft doesn't leave room for a full entree, so I'll split a small plate or two instead. Then, the small plates may change, but the course following them does not. You know I wouldn't be describing this restaurant experience in this space unless there were...

An amazing dessert! Which there is.

The Gallows has only ever offered one dessert in all the times I've been there. I was hesitant to order it at first, because half its contents are things I don't like, and I couldn't imagine that the resulting mish-mash would be more than the sum of its parts. However, we went for it, and it has since become the dessert equivalent of their poutine - something you can't live without, that's best when shared. This Fluffernutter Pie is baked in an oversized ramekin, and has four layers:

• Buttery, sugared mashed bananas at the base,
• Sweet peanut butter mousse,
• Gooey chocolate, usually thick like fudge but occasionally thin like syrup, and
• Caramelized Marshmallow Fluff on top.

Its initial appearance is underwhelming, like over-burned creme brulee. However, all you have to do is dip your spoon through its soft layers to expose and taste the wonder within. This image shows the caramelized Fluff at right and the mish-mash / spoonful of glory at left.

Every bite contains so many interesting flavors, and the fact that it's all so warm and soggy allows an unusual degree of layer-mixing. The bananas aren't overwhelming - the sugar and butter do a lot to improve their flavor for this banana-hater! - and are actually a welcome (somewhat-) solid presence in an otherwise soupy delight. Then, I absolutely love the peanut butter and chocolate. There's a lot of peanut butter in the mousse, as evidenced by its strong nutty taste, but it's sweet and light enough to be dessert-like. The chocolate is robust and bittersweet, and flows happily throughout the ramekin. Occasional fudgy nuggets happen, too! Lastly, the Fluff is a fun way to literally top it all off. I'm not a fan of regular marshmallows, but this runny essence thereof seems like a good way to get some lip-smacking, mouth-coating vanilla sweetness into the mix. The caramelized "crust" doesn't have too different of a flavor, and the rest of the goo runs into every nook and cranny of the dessert like the chocolate. The overall effect is like an ice cream sundae without the ice cream, or the uncooked batter of an Elvis-inspired cake. What's not to love? I feel like a giddy little girl every time I eat it.

There you have it! I look forward to "hanging" at the Gallows with this treat in the future; you should go and order it, too, or make plans to do so with me. :-)

Mac 'n' Cheese Tiki Room Throwdown Mintstravaganza

Tony and I wanted to redo our brilliant Bakestravaganza this winter, with a different theme. The pumpkin event had been a success, but it was time to try something new; fortunately, my suggestion of chocolate mint desserts also appealed to him. I found a plethora of inspiring recipes, from grasshopper brownies to peppermint hot fudge, with chocolate mint whoopie pies and several cookie varieties thrown in for good measure. I realized we'd need a day and then some to process all these items through the kitchen. A tall order...

...until Tony had a better idea! Enter a reprise of a social foodie/tippler gathering that long precedes any Bakestravaganza: the THROWDOWN.

I can't tell you how that word came to define this particular style of gathering, but I will share what a typical throwdown entails:

• Mac 'n' cheese - the ultimate comfort food, infinitely variable in ingredients and execution. Spicy varieties, made that way either via assorted peppers or unusual hot sauces, are especially popular.
• Tiki drinks - back when the Tiki Bar TV podcast had regular episodes, we watched the episodes ad infinitum and made the corresponding beverages. Volcano bowls were even pilfered from the Hong Kong (or was it Kowloon?) to make Tiki throwdowns more "authentic", which are still used to this day - as is my Drinkbot impersonation. Current beverages are not so podcast-driven, but no less Tiki-inspired.
• Dessert - obviously. I usually have free reign here.
• Electronica - the boys love their techno, and they taught me to love it, too. If you haven't whipped up batter to a throbbing dubstep beat, you haven't lived. 
• Campy entertainment - in this case, The Room! Oh, hi, Mark.

I hope this post's elaborate title now makes more sense. So, how did it go this time around? In a word, marvelously! T and Nick made two tasty mac 'n' cheeses, pictured below. Greg was Master of Cocktails as well as the creator of a tasty salmon appetizer. Tony provided the tunes. Randall came late, but his salsa and willingness to be krumped by yours truly made up for that. We all laughed at The Room. And I baked chocolate mint chip cookies! See, a little bit of the hoped-for Mintstravaganza happened after all.

The recipe appealed to me for several reasons:

• It requires nearly a cup of cocoa powder!
• There are no eggs to bind the dough together. Instead, you use milk.
• The mintiness comes from mint chips, as opposed to peppermint extract.

I have re-copied it here, with my commentary in italics.

• 1 1/4 C flour
• 1 t baking powder
• 1/2 salt
• 2/3 C Dutch process cocoa - Ghirardelli's cocoa always works well!
• 1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/2 white sugar
• 1/2 dark brown sugar
• 1 1/2 t vanilla
• 1/3 C milk
• 1 bag of mint chips - I used 1.5 packages of Andes mints since I couldn't find any mint chips. I chopped the mints into fine pieces for inclusion in the cookies, which I have pictured here in my favorite dessert bowl! (The text inside the bowl reads "mint chocolate chip with cookie crumbles", referring to an ice cream flavor.)

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F, and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
2. Whisk the flour, baking powder, salt, and cocoa together; set the mixture aside.
3. Beat the butter with an electric mixer until light, and add the sugars. Cream well. Add the vanilla, and beat until smooth. I eliminated the butter-creaming step, creaming the sugars with the butter from the start.
4. Add the flour mixture to the butter-sugar mixture in two batches, with the milk added in between. Mix well. The dough is sturdy, but not stiff.
5. Stir in the mint chips.
6. Let the dough chill for at least 15 minutes. 15 minutes was not enough. The dough was still warm and sticky when I took it out of the fridge. I would try chilling it for at least an hour, and the original cook even says that it can be made (and chilled) up to two days prior to baking. Such a wait would test my patience, but at least the dough would be easier to work with.
7. Scoop the dough onto the cookie sheet, and bake for 14-15 minutes. Let the cookies cool on the sheet once they're removed from the oven; they will set up at this point. I fit 9 cookies on each sheet, making 18 cookies total - a far cry from the recipe's estimated output of 3 dozen treats. Perhaps I just scoop a larger cookie than most folks? The cookies are still gooey when they come out of the oven, but they do solidify quickly as they rest on the sheet.

I love how these cookies turned out. First of all, they're so pretty! Note their deep chocolate color, with occasional bursts of bright minty green, and a rough, toothsome texture.

Secondly, they're really tasty! (I am not alone in thinking this; the boys gobbled them up.) The chocolate dough is rather intense. I expect that's due to the liberal amount of unsweetened cocoa, hardly any "regular" sugar, and the dark brown sugar's bitter molasses tang. These are not sweet cookies. It's also a surprisingly moist dough, considering that we only have butter and a small amount of milk to make the cookies wet; each cookie left an oily imprint on the parchment paper, and they didn't dry out too much when left in the open. The Andes mints melted nicely, and ran like little veins throughout the baked dough. They even remained gooey after the cookies had a chance to cool! Their mintiness managed to infuse the batter overall, so every bite had the pleasing duet of chocolate and mint even if there were no delicious Andes pieces within. Lastly, they're so easy! You get something extremely delicious with minimal effort. I'll definitely be baking these again.

So, yeah. We threw down, and it was good! I can't wait for the next one. (I also can't wait to make those grasshopper brownies...)