I’ve written about Bouchon Bakery several times.  (This entry in particular has some good pictures.)  Operated by Thomas Keller, considered the greatest chef in America, Bouchon Bakery offers some spectacular treats.  Our favorite item is probably the Nutter Butter cookie.  Although you can’t buy a boxed mix for that cookie, Williams Sonoma now offers a boxed mix of Bouchon Bakery’s chocolate chunk cookie mix.

It should shock nobody, coming from Williams Sonoma, that this boxed cookie mix is $18. That’s American dollars, not Australian dollars.

We see this mix every time we pop into Williams Sonoma, and we’ve always just chuckled. Who the hell is going to pay $18 for a box of cookie mix? We frequently buy the Barefoot Contessa cookie mix, and it’s incredible, but at $8 a box (enough to make about 18 cookies), it’s silly-expensive. We justify that the same way we justify most of our unnecessary purchases: well, it’s cheaper than having kids. Would $8 even get you a babysitter for an hour? Probably not. And these cookies aren’t going to spit up on my speakers, so the cookies win. I’m pretty sure that if we had kids, there would not be any more $8 cookies — not to mention the fact that I’d have to share my cookies with said kid, and I don’t share. I skipped kindergarten, so I never learned to share. Ask Loki.

But the leap from an $8 box of cookie mix to an $18 box of cookie mix is a big leap. I’ll spend money on all kinds of crap I don’t need, but this price is insane. But… it’s Christmas. All bets are off at Christmas. I was at Williams Sonoma over the weekend (Santa had asked me to check things out for him), and I saw the completely untouched shelf of boxes of this mix. What the hell, right? If I’m even considering a $16 garlic press when the bottom of a shoe would do, why not use Christmas as the excuse to buy this incredibly indulgent sweet treat?

I brought the mix home, wrapped it in festive Xmas paper, addressed it to AEJ — from Santa (of course) — and then suggested that maybe she should open that present early. Like, right away. She wanted to open every present right away, but I held firm (that’s what SHE said! Zing!) and she opened the “present” and we made cookies.

I think you get a single bag of mix in your standard Betty Crocker cookie mix, adding your own oil or butter and an egg. Barefoot Contessa’s mix has two bags — one of the mix, and one of the chocolate chunks. Well, for your $18, Bouchon Bakery gives you FOUR FRIGGIN’ BAGS OF STUFF! (Note that one isn’t simply chips, or chunks — but both.  Ooh-laa-laa, Mr. Fancy Pants Cookies.)

Whereas Barefoot Contessa’s mix is just fine for our easy-to-manage hand mixer, Bouchon Bakery insists on the stand mixer — which lives in a very high cabinet in our kitchen. Getting this thing down without dropping it on my face was a bitch.

Not only did we get to use the stand mixer, which we really never use anymore, but this was the first “recipe” we’ve had that also included alternate cooking instructions for our convection oven. Convection baking is amazing. It took our cooking time from 16 minutes down to 14.

The Barefoot Contessa recipe calls for a stick of butter. The Bouchon Bakery recipe? A sort of overly-specific 10.5 tablespoons. 11 would have been too many? (By the way — this Organic Valley stuff is the best, if you like your butter extra-creamy. Same goes for their milk, and especially their egg nog.)

The recipe calls for a single egg (not 1.25 eggs or anything like that, thank god).

After adding the various packets in the box (sugar, molasses, cookie mix, and the chip/chunk combo), you get this. The dough tastes… grown-up. I think it’s the fairly-strong molasses note. It was good, but the Barefoot Contessa raw dough is much better.

And of course the final cookie.  (The recipe specifies that you bake the cookies on parchment paper.  Barefoot Contessa has you rub the cookie sheet with butter, essentially frying the bottom of the cookie.  That’s good thing.  Parchment, by contrast, is kinda boring, and doesn’t make the house smell like you’re frying pancakes.  Point: Barefoot Contessa.)

The recipe calls for letting the cookie cool FOR TEN MINUTES. Who does that?! You’re supposed to eat a cookie within 15 seconds of it coming out of the oven, burned tongue be damned. Turned out, though, that the cookies really were better after about 10 minutes. The finished cookie is crisp on the outside, gooey on the inside — just like a good chocolate chip cookie should be. AEJ thought it was the first boxed mix that tasted like a real, homemade cookie, with no hints of preservatives or that “boxed mix” taste. She thought it was the best overall cookie we’ve made at home, especially once it was room temperature. (Barefoot Contessa’s cookies are best as dough, or hot from the oven, but the next day, they taste like they came out of a box. They get a little… mealy.) The Bouchon Bakery cookies retain their texture the next day.

So, good stuff, but not worth $18 for a box of mix. The box makes 18 cookies, but after you add in the cost of the butter ($6 for 4 sticks, so a little over $1.25 for the 10.5 tablespoons we used) and the egg, you’re over $20 for the cookies. That’s pretty damn silly. If you’re spending $20 on a box of cookie mix, just put that towards a trip to Vegas or NYC and visit the real Bouchon Bakery and buy the real cookie. (I may not be your best source for sound financial advice.)

This has nothing to do with music (well, except that the video has a lot to do with the use of the MacGyver theme song), but I had to share this video.  I know it’s saying a lot, but I think this is the best cat video I’ve seen.  (At least it’s the funniest.)  This guy made this video for the intro of his bad-ass cat’s TV show.

Last Friday night, Joe Alessi gave the premiere of my Trombone Concerto (now officially called “Harvest: Concerto for Trombone”) with the Ridgewood Concert Band in New Jersey. Reaction so far has been good (whew!), with Joe saying that he now plans to play it “all over the place.” (He also said, days after the performance, that he couldn’t get the tunes out of his head, which is probably the nicest compliment I could hear from him.) The piece is in a single 18-minute movement, broken into three connected sections that function essentially as traditional concerto movements (fast-slow-fast). There’s a big arrival point that happens in the first movement, and apparently the audience burst into applause at that moment — even though the piece still had 14 minutes to go, and the band was still playing. I haven’t experienced that since a performance of “Juba” with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, where the audience started clapping about 10 seconds before the end of the piece, and that was because of Robert Battle’s choreography and the incredible Ailey dancers. This time, it was all Alessi, who, by all accounts, played the hell out of the piece. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to see and hear it in person, but I’m excited to work with him on the piece (hopefully frequently!) in the future.

(Another funny thing was that when I talked to Alessi a few days before the premiere, he said the solo part really wasn’t too difficult. I was a little disappointed. I mean, yes, he’s possibly the best trombonist in the world, but I don’t want him to be bored and unchallenged by the concerto. When I talked to him after the premiere, though, he said, “rest assured, the solo part is plenty challenging enough.” Which means, I think, it’s probably unplayable by anybody else. This made me much happier.)

You can read the program note for the concerto here.

It’s been a crazy week here at the house, with the switching-over from Time Warner Cable with TiVo to AT&T Uverse (TiVo still has the best interface by far, but it’s become a hardware kludge with external drives, cable cards, a “tuning adapter,” and who knows what else, so when it started crashing, there was no easy way to figure out the culprit — but Uverse is fine so far), then a day soliciting bids to replace our furnace and air conditioner (the blower has been making a crazy shrieking noise since we bought the house, and it’s gotten much worse lately — not to mention the $408 electric bill we had in July), then a full day for the actual replacement of those units (so much money is gone, but you can barely hear the blower now, so I’m no longer woken up every 20 minutes when the thing cycles), then a day spent cooking Beef Burgundy (not Ron Burgundy) for dinner guests last night (it turned out mighty tasty). Today, there are lots of errands to do — fun stuff like picking up dry cleaning and packing up a dozen music orders — as I get ready to head to Chicago on Tuesday.

Tuesday is the start of the Midwest Band & Orchestra Clinic. It’s always a good time, seeing friends and making some new ones. It’s the biggest band music convention in the world — I think something like 18,000 people attend every year — and there are concerts and clinics and most important, the bar at the Chicago Hilton. I’ve gotten a lot of work at that bar — invitations or performances, residencies, and even commissions have been initiated there. Plus, it’s a bar, and since they made Chicago smoke-free, it’s a pretty pleasant place to be.

I have two performances at Midwest — “Aurora Awakes” with the San Jose Wind Symphony on Friday at 5:30, and “Asphalt Cocktail” with the Central Winds on Saturday at 11:15am. Although I haven’t heard Central Winds yet, I heard a recording of San Jose playing Aurora Awakes, and it was great weeks ago, so I think that’s going to be a fantastic performance. I hope people come!

And, just because, here’s a picture of one of our new Christmas ornaments: disco nutcracker. (He isn’t actually labeled that way, but come on. Look at him. He’s disco nutcracker.)

See you in Chicago!