Tag: cookies

Lemon and Blueberry

What finer spring flavor combination is there than citrus and berry. So when a departmental get-together arouse, I decided to try the King Arthur Double Lemon Thumbprint cookies. They recommended either lemon curd or raspberry jam for the filling. with an optional lemon glaze drizzled over. My first thought was to make it a blueberry glaze for contrasting flavor/color, using powdered blueberries. But then I thought, what about a blueberry curd?  So I tried this recipe.

The first step was to boil the blueberries with lemon juice and zest to release the juice. 

The you strain it to remove the skin bits etc. You can see the strainer and bowl in the upper right of the right hand picture. I had a moment of temptation to buy blueberry juice, but the resulting “juice” was a thicker concentrate and I don’t think store bought juice would work, although it would have produced smoother results. Perhaps if one reduced it down by boiling. Once you have the juice, you cook it with the sugar, eggs, and a bit of salt, then pour the hot liquid over the butter. Nice taste but not as thick as I would like for this purpose, so I’d either try a different recipe or tweak this one should I make them again.

I made lemon curd to go on the other half the cookies and did contrasting glazes on both. You might be able to see below the difference in thickness between the blueberry curd chilled over night and the slightly still warm lemon curd. The lemon glaze ended up absorbed by the blueberry curd, but the blueberry glaze remained as pictured below. But both were quite tasty.

A little weekend baking

From the NYTimes comes this recipe for ridiculously large lemon rosemary cookies. As advertised, they had crispy edges, chewy centers, and a sense of polenta to them. They were quite enjoyable. But they’re ridiculously large. I weighed them out to the suggested 85 g and kept it to 3 to 4 cookies on a sheet pan, and they either grew together (not too badly) or went over the edge (I had some floor of the oven cleaning to do) or both. If I try them again, I am going to downsize them a little and see how they turn out at say 50 g per cookie. They also left quite the sheen of butter, both on the baking sheet and on the spatula I used to remove them after they cool five or so minutes. But my card group quite enjoyed them.

BTW, I recommend a good giant spatula for this sort of cookie. Also useful when moving large swaths of raw dough, such as a shaped or braided loaf from a work surface to a baking sheet. 

A little holiday baking

I love the NYTimes Cooking section. I’ve had this pistachio-almond cookies on my to-do list for awhile.  I made them with pasteurized egg whites (I had leftovers from making marzipan – indeed, this cookie is akin to a lighter, less sweet, baked marzipan; 66g egg whites = whites from 2 large eggs). I did whip the egg whites to frothy, but otherwise made it all in the food processor. Easy-peasy. Although the recipe says tablespoon-sized scoops, my teaspoon-sized scoop was the one that came out to 14 g. and matched better the cooking time (1st time I had done it with the tablespoon-sized; 2nd time, I weighed because I suspected the smaller was called for). Second time I also added 1/8 tsp. rosewater along with the almond extract (no vanilla). A fantastic cookie. A friend became a cardamon convert based on this cookie.

Cookie Season: Ginger Molasses Amber Ale

 This is one of my favorite ginger cookies. The recipe is from the King Arthur Baking site. You take the amber ale and reduce it from 12 oz. to 1.5 oz. It becomes almost syrupy and truly bitter, but then provides a marvelous under flavor. Golden raisins are added and you don’t really taste them per se (people with whom I’ve shared the recipe with have asked me if I skipped them) but I think add a lot to the chewy texture. I had been using a different recipe for years (with some balsamic and black pepper among other things – this one too has black pepper) but haven’t baked it since discovering this recipe.

Cookie Season: Chocolate Chip Oatmeal with Ras el Hanout

It’s cookie season, so I thought I would start posting a few of my favorite repeats. Ras el hanout, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a SWANA spice blend. Every ras el hanout blend is different (like chili spice blends). And like chili spice blends, ras el hanout is normally used in savory dishes. But this NYTimes recipe adds it to cookies and it really works. It adds a subtle warmth to the cookies and a complex under flavor. I used the blend from Stock and Spice in Portsmouth, NH. Here’s a gift link to the recipe (anyone by the paywall for a few weeks after I post).

A little Labor Day baking

School starts this week and I thought I’d whip up some cookies to welcome my advisees and colleagues back. I’m going to make three of my favorites: Chocolate Chip Oatmeal with Ras el-hanout (NYTimes Cooking; paywall warning), Ginger Molasses Amber Ale (King Arthur Baking), and Salted Rosemary Shortbread.

Ras el-hanout was a real revelation for me because it is usually associated with savory cooking, but lends such a wonderful warmth and depth of flavor to the Chocolate Chip Oatmeal cookies. Like chili powder blends, every one is a different. Literally, the name means “top of the shop,” i.e. a blend of the best spices a merchant has to offer. I like the blend from Stock+Spice in NH.

In the ginger cookies, no alcohol remains: you reduce the 12oz of ale down to 1.5 oz. by boiling. The reduced ale adds a little bitter under-taste that pairs perfectly with the molasses and ginger. People often can’t believe that the ginger cookies contain (golden) raisins, but it adds to the flavor and chew.

And the rosemary shortbread doesn’t have a specific recipe. I use the basic shortbread recipe from the King Arthur Cookies Cookbook (an old edition), but any basic shortbread recipe you like would do. I finely mince the rosemary and mix it with the sugar and butter and then put Maldon’s sea salt flakes (crushed between my fingers) on the bottom before baking. The idea came from some Lark cookies that my mother bought.

Pictures of all three (from past bakes) can be seen on my baking site.