I look forward to the Los Angeles Times holiday cookie feature each year (I have a digital subscription to the paper, but my parents in LA kindly send me their print copy of the holiday cookie food section), and this year was no exception. Until I looked at the recipes and realized that none of them had weight measurements. I'm at the point where I am loath to make recipes without weight measurements, and I quickly decided that I just couldn't deal with the hassle of imprecise volume measurements as I was trying to select recipes for my holiday cookie distribution project.
But after the holiday cookie rush was over, I decided to come back to the the LA Times cookie recipes. I was no longer under pressure to crank out massive volumes of cookies and could bake at a more leisurely pace. The first one I tried was Mei Lin's Brown Butter Espresso Cookies. Lin explains that she adds powdered milk to the butter when she's browning it to get more milk solids and enhanced nutty flavor. So you combine butter with powdered milk in a saucepan, brown the butter, and set the mixture aside to cool for a few minutes. Then you cream the browned butter with brown sugar, granulated sugar, and more room-temperature butter until light and fluffy; incorporate eggs; mix in espresso powder and vanilla bean paste; add flour, salt, and baking soda; and stir in bittersweet chocolate. You scoop out the dough, sprinkle each cookie with flaky salt, and chill the dough overnight before baking. I used a #20 scoop and got 29 cookies from a batch.
But after the holiday cookie rush was over, I decided to come back to the the LA Times cookie recipes. I was no longer under pressure to crank out massive volumes of cookies and could bake at a more leisurely pace. The first one I tried was Mei Lin's Brown Butter Espresso Cookies. Lin explains that she adds powdered milk to the butter when she's browning it to get more milk solids and enhanced nutty flavor. So you combine butter with powdered milk in a saucepan, brown the butter, and set the mixture aside to cool for a few minutes. Then you cream the browned butter with brown sugar, granulated sugar, and more room-temperature butter until light and fluffy; incorporate eggs; mix in espresso powder and vanilla bean paste; add flour, salt, and baking soda; and stir in bittersweet chocolate. You scoop out the dough, sprinkle each cookie with flaky salt, and chill the dough overnight before baking. I used a #20 scoop and got 29 cookies from a batch.
The amount of instant espresso powdered required for this recipe is seems wildly excessive (and I'm still not convinced it's not a typo): four tablespoons, or a quarter cup. That's more than four-tenths of a teaspoon of espresso powder per cookie. The espresso powder colored the dough so much that the cookies looked like they were made with chocolate dough. The finished cookies were chewy and rich, and all I could taste was espresso -- even the chocolate was overshadowed. It seemed like a waste to go to the trouble of making enhanced browned butter when the flavor was completely drowned out by the espresso.
If I were to make these cookies again, I would dial back the espresso powder substantially. I think that four teaspoons instead of four tablespoons would make a lot more sense. On other other hand, if you want to eat something that is essentially espresso in cookie form, this cookie might be for you.
Recipe: "Brown Butter Espresso Cookies" by Mei Lin, from the Los Angeles Times.
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