As I mentioned in my last post, my family often had a blue tin of Danish butter cookies in the house when I was growing up. I loved all of the varieties, but my favorites were any shape cookie topped with fat granules of sparkling coarse sugar. Samantha Seneviratne has a recipe for "Danish Sugar Cookies with Currants and Lemon" in The Joys of Baking that is a hybrid of the piped rings and the currant cookies I remember from the blue tin: her cookies are piped rings with currants.
The recipe seemed straightforward enough. You just beat room temperature butter with sugar; add an egg, lemon zest, and vanilla; and incorporate flour, dried currants, baking soda, and salt. You're supposed to put the dough in a piping bag fitted with a 1/2-inch star tip and pipe it into small rings. I tried several large star tips and each time, the currants got caught in the tip. (I used currants from nuts.com that are larger than some other varieties I've used, so I wasn't entirely surprised that the fruit was getting caught in the piping tip.) Then I tried a plain tip, but the dough was so stiff that it was still difficult to pipe, and the rings I was making looked terrible. So I set the piping bag aside and decided to turn these into drop cookies instead.
I used a #40 scoop to portion out the dough (I got 20 cookies from a batch) into hemispheres that I flattened slightly before sticking them in the freezer for a bit. After the cookies were firm, I dipped the tops in coarse sugar and baked them until the edges were golden.
My finished cookies looked nothing like what you might find in the blue tin. They were slightly puffy looking and I was pretty bummed that I hadn't been able to make the cookies in the fluted ring shape that is so distinctive to Danish butter cookies. The cookies were quite lemony (there was a tablespoon of zest in the batter) and I liked the currants and the crunch of coarse sugar on top. But overall, I though this cookie was just okay. It was not firm like a real Danish cookie, and it the flavor and texture were not what I was expecting. I would prefer a cookie out of the blue tin to one of these.
Recipe: "Danish Sugar Cookies with Currants and Lemon" from The Joys of Baking by Samantha Seneviratne.
The recipe seemed straightforward enough. You just beat room temperature butter with sugar; add an egg, lemon zest, and vanilla; and incorporate flour, dried currants, baking soda, and salt. You're supposed to put the dough in a piping bag fitted with a 1/2-inch star tip and pipe it into small rings. I tried several large star tips and each time, the currants got caught in the tip. (I used currants from nuts.com that are larger than some other varieties I've used, so I wasn't entirely surprised that the fruit was getting caught in the piping tip.) Then I tried a plain tip, but the dough was so stiff that it was still difficult to pipe, and the rings I was making looked terrible. So I set the piping bag aside and decided to turn these into drop cookies instead.
I used a #40 scoop to portion out the dough (I got 20 cookies from a batch) into hemispheres that I flattened slightly before sticking them in the freezer for a bit. After the cookies were firm, I dipped the tops in coarse sugar and baked them until the edges were golden.
Recipe: "Danish Sugar Cookies with Currants and Lemon" from The Joys of Baking by Samantha Seneviratne.
Comments