During my junior year of college I lived in a dorm that wanted to throw a party with a farm theme. (For the life of me, I can't remember why.) I was tasked with procuring bales of straw and a goat. It turns out that no responsible farmer is foolish enough to rent a goat to a bunch of college students. We did get our straw (and even recouped some of the cost by reselling it to a fraternity on campus after we were done with it), but it was a running joke that we were never able to get a goat. Hence, the dorm t-shirts that year featured a drawing of a goat swinging on a rope with the caption, "No Goat, No Party!"
I had a flashback to my college "No Goat" days recently when I was relying on Google Translate to read some Danish recipes from the Odense website. I was trying to find a way to use up some of the Odense nougat I had purchased when we were in Copenhagen in August. It is German nougat, which is gianduja, or chocolate-hazelnut praline in malleable block form.
I was using Google Chrome to visit the website because Google will automatically translate entire webpages. I found a promising recipe for cookies with marzipan, nougat, and cinnamon -- a bonus because I also had brought back some marzipan from our trip. But the automatic Google translation provided a hilarious list of ingredients: "150 g butter, 125 g goat, 100 g of sugar..." Wait, 125 grams of goat? I manually translated the word in question ("farin") and got the much more sensible result of "brown sugar" instead. Satisfied that I could make the cookies work with brown sugar instead of goat, I dove right in.
I followed the directions as I understood them via Google Translate, augmented with my baking instincts. I creamed softened butter with sugar and brown sugar; added eggs; mixed in flour and baking soda; and folded in marzipan and very cold nougat (I stuck it in the freezer for a bit) that I had cut into pieces and tossed with flour. I immediately scooped out the dough and sprinkled on cinnamon-sugar and slivered almonds. Because the dough was quite soft, I didn't bother flattening the cookies at all before baking.
The cookies spread nicely during baking. They were essentially snickerdoodles with almonds and nougat. I had cut the marzipan and nougat pieces quite small and I wish I had left them larger, especially the marzipan. I think that marzipan is absolutely heavenly and I was hoping to find big clumps of it in every bite. While these cookies definitely had almond flavor, they didn't have the pockets of concentrated sweet almond oomph that I was hoping the marzipan would deliver. There were only a few chunks of nougat in each cookie, but the gianduja flavor came through clearly if you happened to get one in a bite.
These were good cookies with a beautifully crisp exterior and soft, chewy interior. But I found the flavor combination odd, which was disappointing given how much I love cinnamon, marzipan, and gianduja individually. At least there was no goat in the mix!
Recipe: "Cookies med marcipan, nougat & kanel" from www.odense-marcipan.dk.
I had a flashback to my college "No Goat" days recently when I was relying on Google Translate to read some Danish recipes from the Odense website. I was trying to find a way to use up some of the Odense nougat I had purchased when we were in Copenhagen in August. It is German nougat, which is gianduja, or chocolate-hazelnut praline in malleable block form.
I was using Google Chrome to visit the website because Google will automatically translate entire webpages. I found a promising recipe for cookies with marzipan, nougat, and cinnamon -- a bonus because I also had brought back some marzipan from our trip. But the automatic Google translation provided a hilarious list of ingredients: "150 g butter, 125 g goat, 100 g of sugar..." Wait, 125 grams of goat? I manually translated the word in question ("farin") and got the much more sensible result of "brown sugar" instead. Satisfied that I could make the cookies work with brown sugar instead of goat, I dove right in.
I followed the directions as I understood them via Google Translate, augmented with my baking instincts. I creamed softened butter with sugar and brown sugar; added eggs; mixed in flour and baking soda; and folded in marzipan and very cold nougat (I stuck it in the freezer for a bit) that I had cut into pieces and tossed with flour. I immediately scooped out the dough and sprinkled on cinnamon-sugar and slivered almonds. Because the dough was quite soft, I didn't bother flattening the cookies at all before baking.
These were good cookies with a beautifully crisp exterior and soft, chewy interior. But I found the flavor combination odd, which was disappointing given how much I love cinnamon, marzipan, and gianduja individually. At least there was no goat in the mix!
Recipe: "Cookies med marcipan, nougat & kanel" from www.odense-marcipan.dk.
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