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Holy Crap, it’s Christmas! Cookies Part II: Soft Molasses Cookies

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Dec 20 2011

warm spiced cookies + a $5 bottle of blanc de blancs (thanks trader joe!) = enough holiday spirit to finally get around to decorating the tree

The Lovechild of a Gingerbread Man and a Snickerdoodle

Most of my Christmas standards are things I make because other people like them or because they’re my grandma’s recipes. In some ways, isn’t Christmas really all about grandmas? These are the one exception. They’re the cookies I make because I like them.

you could use cinnamon sugar if you want, but there's plenty of cinnamon in the dough and with the molasses making the dough darker, I'm not sure it would have much of a visual effectTexturally, they’re almost identical to snickerdoodles—they have the same ratio of butter : sugar : flour :  eggs and they’re also rolled in sugar before baking, so the outside gets crackly and has a little crunch. But flavor-wise, they’re all gingerbread: molasses and cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger and cloves. You can imagine how they smell as they bake.

The best part about these cookies is that if you don’t over-bake them, they turn out amazingly soft. And they stay that way even after they cool, even if you don’t store them in a perfectly airtight container, even if you want to make them a week before Christmas and savor them until New Year’s Day. I think it must be because of the little bit of oil in the dough. It does make them a little more prone to falling apart, but I think that’s a small price to pay for enduring just-out-of-the-oven softness.

If you like the kind of gingerbread that bites back, you might want to double all the spices. I think they’re  perfect as is: as much butter as you can possibly get into a cookie without it melting into a puddle of goo (which they occasionally do anyway, as you can see at approximately 3 o’clock in the picture above), just enough molasses and spices to be festive without getting too overbearing, and a little sparkle from the sugary coating. They’re also the easiest part of this year’s pared-down cookie assortment.

I don't know why they look so much darker here than above. Same cookies, I swear. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Read more

Dulce de Leche Macarons, Defense Catering Part II

Submitted by Margot on Tue, 05/03/2011 - 08:04

If cupcakes were typically glazed with dulce de leche instead of piled high with too-sweet buttercream, I might feel differently about them.

According Bon Apetit, NPR, Salon, and The New York Post, macarons are “the new cupcake.” I, for one, welcome our new, smaller, less frosting-dominated confectionery overlords.

Unlike the American macaroon, usually composed mostly of shredded coconut, the French macaron is a little sandwich cookie made from two airy disks of sweetened almond meal and beaten egg whites stuck together with buttercream or jam. The meringue-like shells usually aren’t flavored, although they are often tinted to match the filling. Traditional filling flavors include vanilla, chocolate, raspberry, and  pistachio. I decided to fill mine with dulce de leche, which I prefer to even the most delicious cooked buttercream. Dulce de leche is basically the apotheosis of the Maillard reaction—milk cooked down with sugar until it forms a thick, sticky caramel. You can start with fresh milk if you prefer, but most people just use sweetened condensed milk.

I baked the dulce du leche in a water bath this time; in the past, I've used the dangerous boiling-a-whole-can method. Both detailed below.

If you cover the dish, you won't have to pull off the burned layer...if you forget, like I did, don't throw it away. That part is almost more delicious than the regular stuff. 

I used a recipe from Tartelette, which appeared to be studded with some kind of caramelized sugar. That turned out to be a praline. However, it wasn’t clear from the recipe when the almonds were supposed to be added to the sugar or in what form (whole? chopped? all it said was “not blanched”). For my first attempt, I added whole almonds to the praline, but once I chopped it up in a food processor as instructed, it just looked like regular chopped up almonds, not at all like Tartelette’s pictures. So I made a second hard caramel without the almonds. That looked right…but then, in the oven, the bits sprinkled on the macaron shells melted and made half of the shells collapse.

I later discovered a much more thorough write-up on all things macaron at Not So Humble Pie. In the future, I’ll use that recipe and skip sprinkling the shells with anything.

The shells, before baking. As they bake, the meringue rises up and forms the little ruffled "feet"

Anyhow, despite being half-collapsed, they were pretty delicious, although they are intensely sweet. You can make them significantly in advance of serving—the quality doesn’t begin to degrade noticeably for at least a few days. We’re still enjoying the leftovers, a full week after the defense. Also, any leftover dulce de leche is incredible on ice cream, pancakes, apple slices, or just licked off a spoon. Read more

Old-Fashioned Sour Cream Sugar Cookies with Buttercream Frosting

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Dec 16 2010

A Modern Tradition

This my mother’s sugar cookie recipe, from her mother before her. I don’t know who my grandma got it from or when it acquired the name “old fashioned.” It can’t be older than mid-19th C. because it calls for chemical leaveners.These are not, however, the softest sugar cookies I've ever made. Click on the picture for the link to that recipe. The whole point of the sour cream is to provide an acid to react with the alkali baking soda and produce a tender, puffy cookie. That makes them completely unlike really “old-fashioned” cookies, which were usually unleavened and baked until they were completely hard and dry (for more on cookie history, see foodtimeline.com). However, now that chemical leaveners have been around long long enough to be part of recipes handed down for three generations or more, I suppose they can be “modern” and “old-fashioned” at the same time.

I like this particular recipe for Christmas cookies because it’s not as sweet or rich as most sugar cookie recipes—the ratio of fat : sugar : flour in the dough is 1: 1: 3. Compare that to the “Classic Sugar Cookies” in Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio, which are 1: 1: 2, or Dorie Greenspan’s Sablés, which are 4: 3: 8. I’d go with one of the other recipes if I were going to leave them plain or just sprinkle them with colored sugar before baking, but I think the slightly less-sweet base makes them a better vehicle for frosting.

Frosting presents bakers with something of a dilemma: either you can make something gorgeous, sleek, and stylish, or you can make something delicious. In the cake world, that dilemma is primarily represented by fondant vs. buttercream. In the cookie world, it’s largely royal icing vs. buttercream. Behold Royal Icing: 

If I thought I could actually do half as good a job as Olivia does, I admit I might be a little more conflicted. dorie greenspans cookies                           From the Kitchen of Olivia                                                  Chow.com

Even though those are really pretty, and royal icing also has the benefit of setting up hard enough to handle any amount of stacking or transport, when it’s a choice between butter or no butter, I’m almost always going to choose butter.

They're cute enough, right? Although the noses almost invariably get squashed before anyone can appreciate them. In retrospect, I probably should have done a garland on the tree instead of ornaments, which have a vaguely pox-like effect. Read more

Oatmeal Chocolate-chip Cookies: righting institutional wrongs

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Oct 12 2009

charming compensatory cookies and crumbs

I usually don't find the store-bought baked goods or catering tray pastries at University functions appealing enough to eat, not because they're likely to taste bad, but because they're so vastly inferior to their homemade equivalents it just doesn't seem worth it. Which is to say: I usually know better than to get excited about the food at campus meetings. But last Friday was kind of strange—it was grey and wet outside and I had eaten a pretty light lunch and was feeling generally tired and overworked. All of which added up to really wanting something, anything that would fall into the category of a "treat." And suddenly, the plastic bins of cookies next to the sign-in sheets and stack of auto-generated powerpoint presentation handouts at a late-afternoon meeting I had to attend weren't just appealing, they seemed potentially redemptive. For a moment, I was actually genuinely glad to be stuck on campus for this stupid meeting which was virtually guaranteed to be a waste of time. 

It didn't last, of course. The meeting was even stupider than I'd anticipated—consisting primarily of one person summarizing the contents of an article that had been attached to the e-mail demanding my presence, adding only that this information was "very interesting," and then another person summarizing a bunch of information covered in a different series of e-mail messages. Both of them made a brief  show of asking for "feedback," but thankfully had the good sense not to really let people give them any because there were 80+ academics in the room and if they'd let them start talking, we'd have been there all night. And through all of this, I'm nibbling at this cookie which turns out to be dense and floury and a little stale. It was sort of soft-but-not-fresh in the way that vending machine pastries are soft-but-not-fresh, and there was no hint of butter or brown sugar. All it did was make me want a better cookie.

So, I made some. As the disappointing cookie I happened to grab was chocolate-chip oatmeal, that's what I made—looking for a clean substitution, I guess. I used the first recipe google served up, halved because I didn't have enough brown sugar for a full batch and didn't need three or four dozen cookies to make up for one bad one. No chocolate chips, either, but I had some bulk Callebaut milk chocolate leftover from a candymaking project, so I chopped some of that up. Normally I prefer a darker chocolate in cookies, but I wasn't going for perfection here. My motivating principle was that basically any homemade cookie would kick basically any storebought cookie's ass. And these totally did.

The recipe calls for a relatively high proportion of butter to dry ingredients, so they spread out thin and lacy, almost tuille-like—definitely not the recipe to use if you prefer thicker or more cake-like cookies. They also contain twice as much oatmeal as flour, which makes them really chewy, but they stayed soft even after they cooled. If you're more a fan of the crisp, shattering type of oatmeal cookies, again, this is not the recipe for you. The best part, like with most cookies, is how the sugar and butter caramelize, and I think that's accented beautifully by the bits of chocolate and relatively high salt content. They couldn't quite give me back the hour of my life I lost to the stupid meeting, but they definitely fulfilled my desire for a "treat." And definitely a go-to recipe for anytime you want a lacy, chewy oatmeal cookie.

Recipe after the jump. Read more