Like a Snickerdoodle in New Clothes: Giant Chewy Lemon Sugar Cookies

My good friend Kristina writes the "In the Kitchen With" column on Design*Sponge, where each week she shares a new recipe from a designer or blogger.  A recipe she featured for "Giant Chewy Lemon Sugar Cookies" from Cara and Phoebe at Big Girls, Small Kitchen recently caught my eye.  I think the simplicity of the cookie is what appealed to me -- the batter calls for only a few ingredients (butter, sugar, lemon zest, an egg, flour, salt, and baking soda) and the cookies can be baked immediately without the need for any chilling or waiting.

I followed the instructions for the cookie batter exactly as written, although I wanted to make smaller cookies than the "giant" ones specified in the recipe, so I used a #50 scoop to portion out the dough.  I also rolled each cookie in a mixture of sanding sugar and lemon zest before baking.  The recipe doesn't call for zest in the sugar used to coat the cookies, but I love lemon flavor and I generally think that more lemon is better.

Although the cookies in the photos accompanying Kristina's post are completely uncolored and the recipe says that the tops of the cookies should remain pale, I found that the cookies were a little underbaked unless I left them in the oven until the tops were just slightly golden.  I didn't flatten my cookies before baking, but they spread beautifully.  I also spread on a little more lemon sugar while the cookies were cooling (since sugar mixed with zest is slightly damp, it actually sticks to the cookie even if you apply it after baking). 

My finished cookies were 2.75 inches in diameter, and I got 36 cookies from one batch of dough.  If you made only the 20 cookies per batch as specified, they would in fact be giant.  These cookies have a moist chewy texture and they are just delicious -- buttery and lemony, with a nice sweet crunch from the sanding sugar.  I'm glad I added the extra zest into the sanding sugar; the bright lemon flavor in the cookies comes through beautifully.  My first reaction when I took a bite is that these cookies taste like snickerdoodles that are flavored with lemon instead of cinnamon; the dough (minus the lemon zest) is basically the same as a snickerdoodle.  I also think that these cookies would probably be excellent if made with lime instead of lemon.

This cookie is just lovely, and it provides a great return on very little effort.

Recipe: "Giant Chewy Lemon Sugar Cookies" from Big Girls, Small Kitchen, as featured in In the Kitchen With on Design*Sponge.

A Fudgy Favorite: Recchiuti Brownies

I have been making the Recchiuti fudgy brownie recipe ever since I saw it featured in the Los Angeles Times Culinary SOS column back in 2004.  Last weekend, my cousin Cindy mentioned that she had recently tried the brownie at the Recchiuti store in the San Francisco Ferry Building and that it tasted exactly like my homemade version, which reminded me that I haven't made them in a while.  I have mentioned this brownie multiple times on this blog, but for some reason have never featured the recipe in a post... until now.

This brownie is ultra-fudgy and one of my favorites.  It is actually very easy to make -- you simply beat together eggs and salt, incorporate a mixture of sugar and melted unsweetened chocolate and butter, fold in sifted flour, and stir in bittersweet chocolate chunks.

The Times' Daily Dish blog recently published the recipe again after receiving a request from a reader, and this online version includes a photo.  I find the photo baffling, because I have made this recipe countless times, exactly as written, and my brownies have never looked anything like it.  Granted, I accidentally overbaked my brownies a bit this time, so they were not quite as fudgy as normal.  However, my brownies usually look just like the ones pictured in this post. 

Because these brownies are so fudgy, I chill them to make them easier to cut and then bring them back to room temperature before serving.  They are not very sweet, and are pure fudgy chocolate indulgence. 

Recipe: "Recchiuti Fudgy Brownies" from the September 29, 2004 Los Angeles Times.

Baked Sunday Mornings: Cowboy Cookies

This is going to be a brief post, because I previously blogged about the Cowboy Cookies from Baked Explorations before they were added to the Baked Sunday Mornings schedule. 

The last time I made these cookies, I liked them, but I also thought that they could have used more pretzel.  I thought that adding pretzels more substantial than the thin rods I used before might help, so this time I incorporated broken Pretzel Crisps into the cookie batter, and I also used about twice as many pretzels as the recipe called for.  I love Pretzel Crisps (although I rarely eat the plain variety, since the Buffalo Wing flavor is my favorite) because they are in fact much crisper and crunchier than regular pretzels.  I also used chopped Hershey's Special Dark bars instead of chocolate chips, and stuck a whole pretzel on the top of each cookie before baking.

I am sad to report that even these pretzels still were not very crunchy in the baked cookies (except for the one pretzel on top) -- I suspect this may have had something to do with the fact that I refrigerated the cookie dough for about 24 hours before baking (the recipe specifies at least 4 hours), and I think that the pretzels spent that entire time in the cookie dough getting soggy.  Perhaps my decision to use Pretzel Crisps actually backfired, since they are thinner than regular pretzels and might actually be more susceptible to getting soggy. 

I'm pretty sure that one way to solve the soggy pretzel problem would be to use Pretzel M&Ms, which I use in the recipe for Monster Cookies in Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, to great success.  In general, I prefer the Baked Monster Cookie to the Baked Cowboy Cookie (probably because the peanut butter in the Monster Cookie makes it extra tasty), so I think that I will probably stick with that recipe over this one.

Recipe: "Cowboy Cookies" from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

Previous Posts:

• "Yeehaw!: Cowboy Cookies," April 6, 2011.
• "The Cookie That Has Everything: Monster Cookies," August 24, 2010.
• "A Prize-Winning Peanut Butter Pretzel Treat," August 27, 2008.

Long Live Peanut Butter and Chocolate!: My Own Buckeye Battle Cry

Having been born and raised in Nebraska, I had never heard of buckeye candies until after law school, when a friend who was working in Ohio brought some to D.C.  These little peanut butter and chocolate confections are an Ohio specialty, made to resemble the nut of a buckeye tree -- the buckeye being both the Ohio state tree and the nickname for Ohio State's sports teams.

My friend Adam makes delicious buckeyes, and the other day I wanted to finally try making some myself -- but I had misplaced the buckeye recipe that Adam gave me some time ago.  However, I knew that there was a buckeye recipe in Baked Explorations, and so I decided to give it a try.  The peanut butter centers are a mixture of cream cheese, peanut butter, graham cracker crumbs, powdered sugar, and melted butter.  You form the mixture into balls (I know the recipe makes exactly a quart of filling, because I used a #50 scoop and was able to make precisely 50 centers), and dip them in melted dark chocolate (I used Ghiradelli 72% "Twilight Delight" bars).  Using a spiral dipping tool, I was able to do a relatively neat job dipping the candies and creating nice-looking buckeyes with a pretty circle of exposed peanut butter filling.  The buckeyes need some time in the refrigerator for the chocolate to set up.

There lovely little morsels are rich and absolutely delicious.  If you like peanut butter and chocolate together, there's nothing not to like about them.  The graham cracker crumbs give the centers a substantial but not heavy texture.  It's been a few months since I've tasted one, but I seem to recall that Adam's buckeyes -- which contain crushed Rice Krispies instead of graham cracker crumbs -- have a lighter texture.  The peanut butter centers were not too sweet, and I liked the bitterness of the dark chocolate I used for the coating.  Unfortunately, these treats require refrigeration, so they're not easy to tote around, and they are also difficult to handle without leaving fingerprints in the chocolate (I used vinyl food service gloves to solve this problem).  Tom tells me that he liked to eat buckeyes straight out of the freezer as a child, and I can imagine that they would also be delicious frozen. 

The "Buckeye Battle Cry" is one of Ohio State's fight songs; it's about football and winning and Ohio smashing through to victory.  But these buckeyes are so tasty that they inspire my own personal Buckeye Battle Cry along the lines of "Peanut Butter + Chocolate Rocks!," or more succinctly, "YUM!!"

Recipe: "Buckeyes" from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.

This Meringue Falls Flat: White Chocolate Brownies

One recipe that caught my eye when I flipped through Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours, was "White Chocolate Brownies."  I noticed it instantly because the large accompanying photo is striking; it shows a lovely pale bar, studded with raspberries, covered in a layer of lightly browned meringue.  Meringue?  I've never made a bar with meringue before and I was intrigued.  Plus, these bars have the same almond-white chocolate-raspberry flavor profile as one of my favorite bars of all time, the Pillsbury Bakeoff Raspberry-Filled White Chocolate Bar, so I had high expectations.

The bottom layer of this bar is made from melted white chocolate and butter, sugar, orange zest, eggs, vanilla, flour, ground almonds, and salt.  You spread the batter into a pan, and sprinkle fresh raspberries on top.  Then you spread on a layer of meringue made from egg whites, salt, and sugar.

The photo of the bar in the cookbook shows a pristine, gracefully contoured, unbroken layer of meringue on top.  My meringue became quite puffy and misshapen in the oven, and parts of it collapsed and cracked upon cooling.  Also, when I pulled the cooled bars out of the pan by grabbing onto the parchment paper I had used to line the pan, the bars flexed and the meringue cracked even more.  So the result is what you see in the photo above -- completely cracked meringue.  Also, as you can see, my meringue started weeping by the time I took the photo, which was the day after I baked the bars.  However, I don't consider this a significant problem because: 1) the weeping was minimal, and 2) even the meringue on the cookbook's picture-perfect bar is visibly weeping. 

The recipe does not direct you to test the cake for doneness, but only instructs you to bake the cake for "30 to 35 minutes, or until the meringue is browned and crackly and the brownies pull away from the sides of pan."  When I cut my bars, I discovered that the bottom layer was quite wet and definitely could have used some more time in the oven.  If you try this recipe, I would recommend that you actually test the cake for doneness with a toothpick instead of just eyeballing the color of the meringue.

I don't think that I will be making this recipe again.  Although the layer of meringue on top is certainly interesting and different, the meringue doesn't really add much taste-wise, and the bars themselves don't have much flavor, either.  I could hardly taste the almonds, and the main flavors of the bar were white chocolate and orange.  Plus, the meringue makes these bars fragile and they don't keep well.  This bar seems like a fabulous idea, but at least for me, the execution just fell flat.

Recipe: "White Chocolate Brownies" from Baking: From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan.

There's an App for That: Chewy Almond-Raspberry Sandwich Cookies

A few weeks ago, Tom handed me his iPad to show me that his epicurious app was open and displaying a recipe for Chewy Almond-Raspberry Sandwich Cookies.  Tom claims that he just opened the app and it went right to that recipe; neither of us can figure out why it would have done that, but perhaps the baking gods just work in mysterious ways.  The recipe included a photo and it looked like it was right up my alley, being the almondphile that I am.  Unfortunately, I didn't have any almond paste in the house, so I had to wait until I could go out and buy some before I could try the recipe.

This recipe only requires six ingredients: sliced almonds, almond paste, sugar, cinnamon, egg whites, and raspberry jam (I skipped the step of sprinkling powdered sugar over the cookies at the end, or it would require seven).  All you have to do to make the batter is grind the almond paste with the sugar and cinnamon in the food processor and add the egg whites.  While the recipe instructs you to put the batter in a pastry bag and pipe out strips, I didn't want to deal with variability of piped cookies, because I wanted all my cookies to be of uniform shape and size to make neat-looking sandwiches.  So I used a #50 scoop to form cookies that were perfectly round and consistently sized (ending up with 20 cookies that were 2.5 inches in diameter after baking).  I dropped the scoops of dough onto a layer of sliced almonds and then coated the top of the cookies with almonds as well, before transferring the cookies to a parchment-lined sheet for baking.  In the oven, the cookies puffed up quite a bit, but after cooling, they flattened out to become nice and even.

These cookies were quite delicious -- full of rich almond flavor and covered with crisp almonds all around. The middles of the cookies were wonderfully chewy.  I thought that the cookies bordered on being too sweet by themselves and were better when sandwiched around some raspberry jam, which provided a bit of tartness to offset the sweetness.  However, the cookies were so good plain that I am still craving one now just thinking about them.

Recipe: "Chewy Almond-Raspberry Sandwich Cookies" from epicurious.com.

Baked Sunday Mornings: Tomato Soup Cupcakes with Mascarpone Frosting

I'm so glad that Tomato Soup Cupcakes with Marscapone Frosting were the assignment this week for Baked Sunday Mornings -- I have been thinking about trying this recipe since I saw it featured on Daily Candy last fall before Baked Explorations was even released.

This cupcake is not difficult to make.  You cream together butter with sugar and brown sugar, add in eggs, and then alternately incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, salt, and baking powder) and condensed tomato soup that has been mixed with baking soda.  The resulting batter is strongly orange colored, like pumpkin cake. 

While the recipe says it yields 24 cupcakes, I made mine small (using a #20 scoop) so that they wouldn't overflow my scalloped cupcake papers, and I got more than three dozen.  The cupcakes are frosted with a mixture of butter, mascarpone cheese, powdered sugar, and vanilla.  The frosting is rich and thick, with a full and luscious mouthfeel. 

I had no idea what these were going to taste like, so when the cupcakes were cooled and frosted, I eagerly took a bite.  I was astonished that the cupcake tasted exactly like pumpkin and spice.  The mascarpone frosting is outstanding and goes wonderfully with the spice flavors in the cake.  Unsure if the perceived pumpkin flavor was just the subliminal effect of the orange color, mix of spices, and mascarpone frosting playing tricks on my taste buds, I asked other people to try the cupcakes without revealing what was in them.  Not surprisingly, no one divined that tomato soup was the secret ingredient, but guesses ranged from pumpkin to carrot to apple to sweet potato to citrus.  I'm still marveling at how this chameleon of a cake can keep people guessing!

Recipe: "Tomato Soup Cupcakes with Mascarpone Frosting" from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

Ipso Fatto Instant Photos: Cecelia's Baby Shower

I love baking for parties, no matter what the occasion -- but is there anything more fun than baking pink things for a girl's baby shower?  I went to Little Bitts in Wheaton, MD, and picked up a nice assortment of pink sugar decorations -- pacifiers, teddy bears, baby carriages, baby faces, bibs, booties, and safety pins.  I made cupcakes using the recipe for Restaurant Eve's Cake, and tinted the frosting pink. 

I can't believe I never figured this out until now, but I just discovered that if you frost cupcakes in a swirl pattern using a closed star tip (I used a Wilton 2D drop flower tip), you end up with something that looks a lot like a rose.  This technique requires virtually no effort and is perfect for someone like me who couldn't make a frosting rose if my life depended on it. 

 

Congratulations Will and Cecelia!  

Recipe: "Restaurant Eve's Cake" from the April 23, 2006 Washington Post. 

Previous Posts:

• "Think Pink!," November 15, 2008.
• "When You Care Enough to Send the Very Best," March 22, 2009.

Sometimes Bigger is Better: Orange Butter Cookies

When trying to decide what I could bake to bring to an open house yesterday afternoon, I looked for a recipe that would be quick and easy -- because I was headed to New York City later in the day on a business trip, I didn't have a lot of time to put something together.  I decided to try the recipe for Orange Butter Cookies from The Sweeter Side of Amy's Bread because the recipe was quick (you can make the batter and bake immediately, no chilling needed) and I had all of the required ingredients on hand. 

As I have mentioned before, one thing I love about this cookbook is that it provides three sets of measurements for dry ingredients: volume, metric weight, and avoirdupois weight.  Weighing out flour and sugar is more precise than measuring by volume, and it also saves you the time and hassle of having to wash a bunch of measuring cups.  The dough for these cookies is made from butter, sugar, orange, zest, an egg and two egg yolks, all-purpose flour, cake flour, baking soda, and salt.  The dough is fairly stiff and easy to handle.  The recipe says it will yield a dozen cookies if you scoop our scant 1/2 cup balls of dough that weigh 85g.  I used a #24 scoop to form 45g balls of dough, because I didn't want the cookies to be huge.  As instructed, I flattened the balls of dough with my hand (leaving parallel impressions from my fingers) and sprinkled the cookies with sugar before baking.  I ended up with 22 three-inch diameter cookies.

The baked cookies were a little puffy and in my opinion, did not look particularly appetizing.  However, they tasted good.  Basically, as you might surmise from the recipe name, these are just sugar cookies with a nice burst of orange flavor.  I thought the cookie was just a little on the cakey side, which is something I disfavor.

Yesterday evening when I arrived in New York City, I realized that my hotel in Times Square was fortuitously located just a few blocks away from the original location of Amy's Bread in Hell's Kitchen.  I stopped by the bakery this morning and bought an orange sugar cookie so that I could bring it home and compare it to my version.  As you can see from the picture below, my three-inch cookie (on the left) is much smaller than the real thing (on the right).

While I thought that the Amy's Bread version of the cookie may have had a slightly more buttery (and better) texture, the flavor of the cookies was identical.  Tom commented that if he closed his eyes and alternately ate bites of my cookie and the real one from the bakery, he would not be able to tell which was which.  I certainly think that the Amy's Bread version is more attractive, and that the larger size has something to do with it.  Although my cookies were the same height as the Amy's Bread version, they looked puffy and out of proportion since they were smaller in diameter.  Mine also literally paled in comparison to the golden color of the real thing -- perhaps they needed a little more time in the oven.

This it the first time that I've had the opportunity to make a side-by-side comparison of the real thing from a bakery and my homemade version from the bakery's cookbook.  I may have to start planning my baking schedule around my travel schedule so that I can do this more often!

Recipe: "Orange Butter Cookies" from The Sweeter Side of Amy's Bread: Cakes, Cookies, Bars, Pastries and More from New York City's Favorite Bakery by Amy Amy Scherber and Toy Dupree.  The recipe is available here on the New York Times website (as compared to this online version, the recipe in the cookbook calls for an additional 1/2 teaspoon of orange zest, instructs you to bake the cookies from 17 minutes, and does not provide a recipe for icing).

Previous Post: "The Sweeter Side is Sometimes Salty: Nutty Peanut Butter Cookies," March 16, 2011.

Shortbread That Goes the Distance: Rosemary Shortbread

Lately I've been baking so much from Baked Explorations that I thought I should give some more attention to other cookbooks that have been sitting idle.  I have been eager to try more recipes from Joanne Chang's Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston's Flour Bakery + Cafe, and since I had some fresh rosemary on hand, I decide to make Change's recipe for Rosemary Shortbread.

The recipe is nice and simple -- you cream room temperature butter, then add in light brown sugar, an egg yolk, chopped fresh rosemary, flour, cornstarch, salt and baking powder.  You form the dough into a disk, chill it briefly, and then roll it out and cut it.  I cut my shortbread into rectangular fluted biscuit shapes. 

This shortbread exceeded all of my expectations.  It is buttery and tender, with a delicate melt-in-your mouth quality.  The rosemary flavor is bright and lovely, without being overpowering.  These little cookies might not look like much, but they are simply delectable.

Recipe: "Rosemary Shortbread," from Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston's Flour Bakery + Cafe by Joanne Chang.