Some of my recipes are attempts at recreation: I’ve eaten a dish that’s so good I simply must find out how to make it and put it on regular rotation in my kitchen. Others, however, start not as an attempt to recreate but to rectify, to do justice to what I thought something was going to be, before reality failed.

Such is the genesis of this tart. More than a year ago, my partner and went out for a hike and then stopped at a little French bakery outside of town. We picked up some bread and a pastry or two, and though my Chief Recipe Taster tucked into his choice before we’d even left the place, I waited. I was going to take my pastry—my pecan tart, you guessed it—home and savor it. The first bite would dazzle me. The cinnamon would supplement the toastiness of the pecans, offsetting the sweetness of the filling; the crust would crumble under my teeth. Sounds great, right? Except that that’s not what happened, not at all. I had my favorite chair and a good movie all right, but the tart was all wrong. It was too sweet, the filling a bit gloppy and the flavor cloying; the pastry didn’t shatter and didn’t really have much flavor, either. The best that could be said for the entire thing was meh.

I knew I could do better, so I set out to do so. My first attempts were uniformly meh as well. I’d decided to incorporate chocolate (because why not), but I couldn’t figure out the best way to do that. I couldn’t find a crust recipe that I liked. The fillings were all wrong—too sweet, not enough cinnamon, too thick. I got so frustrated, and so tired of eating trials and errors, that I put the recipe aside for awhile.

As soon as the weather turned cool this year, however, my thoughts turned back to the tart. “What if,” I wondered, “I coated the bottom of the tart shell with a chocolate ganache…” and because you can hardly ever go wrong when chocolate ganache is your starting point, I was off and running from there. A bit of research, a trial tart or two, and the recipe was done. After I’d baked the last trial tart, I sat down to give it a try. This time, it was everything I’d hoped for. Using a ganache, rather than just tossing chocolate chips into the filling, keeps the chocolate bitable; using a pate sucree, rather than a pie crust, keeps the pastry rich and finely textured, a nice counterpoint to the gooey filling. A judicious amount of salt keeps the sweetness in check, and the cinnamon makes it all more interesting. There’s no failure of reality here; this recipe more than does justice to what that original tart might have been.

Cinnamon Pecan Chocolate Tart

Sources: Crust adapted from, and filling inspired by, Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours

Makes 1 9-inch tart

Active time: ~60 minutes; total time ~90 minutes

Note: You can spread the work of this tart out over two days by making the tart crust and ganache ahead of time. If you do so, press the tart crust into the pan and cover well; store it in the refrigerator until you’re ready to fill and bake it. Likewise, cover and chill the ganache. Take it out of the refrigerator an hour or so before you plan to use it, or zap it on low power in the microwave until it’s spreadable again. Either way, give it a good mix to ensure it’s smooth and spreadable before using.

Crust Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 9 tablespoons butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes and kept very cold
• 1 large egg yolk

Ganache Ingredients

• 1/4 cup bittersweet chocolate chips (I use Ghiradelli 60%)
• 1/4 cup heavy cream

Filling Ingredients

• 3/4 cup light corn syrup
• 1/2 cup lightly packed brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled
• 3 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon salt

1–1 1/2 cups pecan halves (not pieces)

Make the crust: Put the flour, sugar, and salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse several times to combine. Sprinkle the butter cubes over the dry ingredients and pulse until the butter is cut in and is roughly the size of oatmeal flakes. Add the egg yolk and pulse for about 20 seconds several times. The sound of the food processor will change—this is your signal that the mixture is about to come together. Let it just barely do so, then tip the dough into a large bowl. Lightly toss it about a few times to ensure the ingredients are fully incorporated. Press about 2/3 of the mixture into the bottom of a 9-inch tart pan with a removable bottom and use the rest of the dough to line the sides. I like to roll my tart dough into logs and press those against the sides—I get a more consistent thickness around the edges this way. You can, of course, dump all of the dough into the tart pan and press it to cover the bottom and sides; baker’s preference. Let the prepared tart crust chill in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes or up to one day.

Make the ganache: Put the chocolate chips in a heatproof bowl. Bring the heavy cream to a simmer then pour over the chocolate. Let stand for a few minutes, then slowly whisk until you have a silky, homogenous mixture. If not making the ganache ahead of time, let it cool to at least room temperature.

Preheat your oven to 375°F degrees.

Make the filling: Whisk all of the ingredients together until smooth and well combined. Rap the bowl against your counter a few times to surface and pop any air bubbles. Set aside.

Put it all together: Remove the tart shell from the refrigerator and place it on a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper. Spread the bottom of the tart shell evenly with the ganache. If your tart shell is very cold, the ganache might freeze on impact; this is nothing to worry about. Gently pour the filling over the ganache. Arrange the pecan halves decoratively on top of the filling and carefully slide the tray into the oven. Bake for 30–35 minutes, until the top is puffed and the filling doesn’t jiggle much when you give the tray a shake.

Let the tart cool completely to room temperature—which will take several hours—before slicing. Enjoy with vanilla ice cream or fresh, homemade whipped cream. This tart is best eaten the day it’s made.

Most every Labor Day, I set off to bike across Michigan with my father and my partner, usually a family friend or two. It’s one of my favorite events of the year.

The ride is DALMAC, a five-day, volunteer-run tour that’s been going on for 50 years. It’s a simple premise: you leave from Michigan’s state capitol, Lansing, and ride to the northernmost point of the lower peninsula, Mackinac City. The days are simple, too: you wake up, pack up, ride 70 miles, unpack, eat. You’re responsible for so little, just getting yourself from point A to point B, and there is great joy in that simplicity.[SF1]  There’s nothing more in the way of agenda, no long to-do list—just you, your bike, and Michigan.

In the good years, when the weather is fine*, DALMAC can convince you that Michigan is the most beautiful place on earth. The first two days take you through farmland, flat, green, fecund patches of earth. Then you come into the rolling hills of northern Michigan, with their foggy mornings and the sharp tangy smell of wild apples. By the fourth and fifth days, you’re skirting around the shore of Lake Michigan, catching glimpses of the clear blue water as you climb and dip and curve around vineyards and pastures and yet more farms. Every year, I catch myself wondering if there is any place more breathtaking than Michigan during the slide from summer into fall.

Michigan is indisputably lovely, but some of my sentimentality about DALMAC might also be due to the company of two of my favorite people (my dad and my partner) and some of it to the food, Midwestern cuisine at its finest. The food at camp might be utilitarian rather than gourmand, but the food along the route more than makes up for it. There’s the campground at Lake George with its huge, smoking grills full of brats, burgers, and hot dogs; the girls’ cross-country team that sells root beer floats outside of Marion; the Douglas Lake Bar and Steakhouse in tiny Pellston; the little church on the hilltop in East Boardman or the Good Hart General Store along the lake, both with endless rows of baked goods. And, last but not least, there is the thing that we ride for, the promise of which makes tired legs pump harder and any size hill seem manageable: the DALMAC molasses cookie.

Along every route, the tour organizers arrange a few rest stops along stretches where there aren’t many other options for food, and if you’re very lucky, the organizers will have cookies at a few of those stops. Let me tell you about these cookies: they are the size of your face. There are hundreds of them, in all the greatest-hits flavors—chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, peanut butter, and the sublime molasses. Your day’s riding might have been chilly or hilly; you might be close to bonking; your bum might be very, very, sore, but these cookies are magic. Bite into a thick molasses chomper and forget your woes; they’re soft, redolent with butter and spice; pleasantly but not-too sweet. These cookies are mythic: we talk about how good they are months after we finish the ride.

And if a cookie is that good, you’ve got to have it more than once a year, right? But frankly, I despaired of every making a molasses cookie as good as the ones I had on DALMAC. Fresh air, a ravenous appetite, and the golden glint of nostalgia make everything taste better. I tried here or there throughout the years, generally landing on something that was good but not great. Finally, however, I found the right formula: a generous but not overly so amount of spice; all brown sugar for deeper flavor, and just enough flour to give the cookies heft without impeding their buttery softness. They might not be quite as good as a DALMAC cookie eaten on an and-of-summer day in Michigan, but these come pretty close.

*For the sake of honesty, I must add that the weather is NOT always fine—there’s a reason we refer to the 2010 ride as “DALMAC of the damned.”

Molasses Cookies

Source: Adapted from The New Best Recipe

Makes ~9 or 10 four-inch cookies

Active time: ~30 minutes; total time ~45 minutes

Ingredients:

• 12 tablespoons butter, at cool room temperature
• 1/2 cup brown sugar (dark or light)
• 1 large egg yolk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 cup molasses (dark or light but not blackstrap)
• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar, for cookie rolling

Directions:

• Center two racks in the middle of your oven, then preheat it to 375°F. Line two baking trays with parchment paper; set aside.
• Cream the butter and sugar together until the mixture has lightened in color and texture. Add the egg yolk, vanilla, and molasses, and beat to combine. Scrape down the bowl.
• Add all of the dry ingredients (flour through salt), beating on the lowest speed to incorporate. Give the bowl a scrape to ensure that you’ve incorporated all of the dry ingredients, and mix again briefly, if needed.
• Portion the dough into 9 or 10 balls—it will be soft, so you may need to lightly wet your hands to prevent it from sticking. Roll the balls in the sugar, then transfer to the baking trays; give each dough ball plenty of space to expand.
• Put the trays in the oven and allow the cookies to bake for 5 or 6 minutes; rotate the sheets from top-to-bottom and side-to-side. Bake for an additional 5 or 6 minutes. When you pull the trays from the oven, the cookies should be set along the edges, lightly puffed and browned, but still a bit wobbly in the center. This is fine; a slightly undercooked cookie is always superior to a slightly overcooked cookie.
• Let the cookies cool as long as you can stand—I won’t advocate burning your mouth but they really are best when still warm. Anything you don’t immediately consume will keep well, covered on your counter, for a few days.