Recipe: Maple Sugar Cookies

Posted on 2020-12-03 by admin

2021-12-13: Updated with tweaks from my latest batch, the best yet!
I also added weight equivalents for most of the ingredients.

I also added some notes for what, if anything, to adjust when doubling the recipe, which is what I usually do for giving away cookies during the holidays.

Living in New York City most of my life, I’m not in what one would think of as “maple country”. But the northeast is rich with sugarbushes – the managed groves and forests of maple trees from which sap is harvested and boiled down to make this nectar of the gods. And nearly every NYC Greenmarket (farmers’ market) has at least one farmer that sells maple syrup and other maple prodcuts, even if it’s not their primary business.

The key ingredient to this recipe is DARK maple syrup. If you only have regular/light maple syrup, to keep the mapley flavor, you can use that and add 1/8 teaspoon of real maple flavoring, available from specialty baking suppliers.

The extra spices are optional. I found the ginger and cloves enhance the mapleness of these cookies.

Ingredients

Double, as needed. Do not attempt to halve this recipe; it calls for one egg.

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted (“sweet”) butter, softened to room temperature
1/2 cup vegetable shortening, softened to room temperature
1 cup (213 grams) dark brown sugar
1 cup (312g) DARK maple syrup
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract (I really like vanilla. Original recipe calls for 1 teaspoon)
Optional: 1/8 teaspoon real maple flavor, either to make up for lack of dark maple syrup, or to boost the flavor
Optional: ¼ teaspoon ginger
Optional: 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
Optional: ½ teaspoon salt (I nearly always omit this from my baking. These cookies don’t need it.)
1 large egg
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 cups (480g) pastry flour, or pastry blend flour, sifted to remove lumps.
Optional: maple sugar or white granulated sugar, for decoration

Preparing the Dough

Cream the butter and brown sugar together until light and fluffy.
Add the maple syrup, vanilla, and your chosen flavorings.
Scrap down the bowl, blend thoroughly, and taste to adjust, as needed.
Add the egg and mix thoroughly.
Add the baking soda and mix thoroughly.
Add the flour gradually, blending at slower speed, until all flecks of flour are gone.

Chill the Dough

This is a very soft dough. Chill the dough, covered tightly to keep out air, for at least two hours. It’s even better overnight.

Baking

Preheat the oven to 375F.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Scoop out tablespoon sized balls of dough.
If you want, roll them in the sugar.
Set them far apart on the cookie sheet. They will spread.
Bake for 11 minutes.
Let the cookies cool on the sheet until they are firm enough to remove.

Notes and Tips

You can use all butter, if you don’t have shortening, or prefer not to use it. This is already a very soft dough, so you may need to use less maple syrup to compensate for the increased moisture from the butter.
If you double the recipe, 2T = 1/8C for the vanilla.
Real/natural maple flavor can be over-powering. So taste the batter before adding the eggs, and adjust as needed. Even when doubling the recipe, 1/8 teaspoon is likely enough.
The original recipe called for 2 teaspoons of baking soda, and the cookies came out more poofey/cakey than sugary/crispy. If you prefer your cookies that way, you may want to experiment with increasing the baking soda by 1/2 teaspoon.
This comes out as such a soft dough, it can be difficult to work with when forming the cookies. I want to try substituing some of the brown sugar with maple sugar. I would probably need to also substitute some of the baking soda with baking powder to compensate for the reduced acid.
Pastry flour has a lower gluten content than others and makes for a more tender cookie.You can use all-purpose white flour, or even white whole wheat flour, instead.

Links

This recipe is adapted from “Maple Cookies” from AllRecipes.

Molasses Spice Cookies

Posted on 2019-12-06 by admin

A friend just asked me for my spice cookie recipe. I was surprised to find my current recipe wasn’t already up on the blog – the last time was in 2008! So, here it is …

King Arthur Flour provides weight equivalents for the volume measures in many of their recipes. I use a kitchen scale and weigh bulk ingredients like sugar and flour whenever possible. It’s much faster, more accurate, and leads to more consistent results. It also reduces cleanup, since fewer measuring cups are involved! This is especially convenient for liquid or sticky ingredients like the molasses in this recipe.

I used whole wheat flour instead of all-purpose, sifting it and leaving out the coarsest remaining bran to give it a finer texture. Since I had “robust” molasses, and I was using whole wheat flour, I increased the total amount of spices. I also added vanilla, allspice, and of course cardamom, none of which were in the original recipe. This created a complex taste, where none of the flavors overwhelm, but I think I would miss any I left out.

Ingredients

• 2 sticks (1 cup, 8 ounces) unsalted butter
• 7 ounces (1 cup) sugar
• 6-1/4 ounces (a little more than 1/2 cup) molasses, robust flavor. (6 ounces would have been 1/2 cup.; the extra 1/4 ounce was a mistake on my part, but I recorded it as what I did.)
• 2-1/4 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon cloves
• 1 teaspoon ginger
• 1 teaspoon allspice
• 1 teaspoon cardamom
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 extra large eggs (original called for large)
• 14 ounces whole wheat flour (not sure of the volume equivalent)
• sugar, for coating (This gives the outside of the cookies some crunch. The recipe calls for coarse or even pearl sugar, for more crunch. I’d use them instead if I had them.)

Preparation

1. Let the butter come to room temperature, if possible, for easier creaming.
2. Preheat the oven to 350F. (Be sure you have an accurate oven thermometer! I had a devil of a time baking in our horrible kitchen until I bought a thermometer and discovered that the oven dial was off by 100F!)
3. Prepare a small bowl with some of the sugar for coating the cookies.

Mixing

1. Cream together the butter and sugar until they’re light and fluffy.
2. Beat in the molasses, salt, and spices. (Here’s where you can taste-test to adjust if needed. I added the spices at 1/4 or 1/2 teaspoon at a time to make sure I didn’t over do it. I ended up with 1 teaspoon of each, as listed above.)
3. Beat in the baking soda.
4. Add the eggs one at a time, beating until they’re mixed well into the batter. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and the beaters and mix well.
5. Slowly stir in the flour. (Stirring the flour in at low speeds keeps the cookies tender. Beating the flour in at higher speeds makes the cookies tougher.) Scrape down the sides of the bowl and the beaters and mix well.
6. This is a fairly soft, wet dough. Refrigerate the dough for a few hours, or even overnight, to set up before baking.

Baking

The recipe calls for greasing baking sheets or lining them with parchment.

1. Using a tablespoon cookie/ice-cream scoop, create a small ball of the dough. (A scoop is the fastest, easiest way to get a consistently sized, professional looking, batch of cookies. You could also just use two tablespoons.)
2. Drop the dough ball onto the coating sugar. Coat thoroughly.
3. Place the coated dough ball on the baking pan. Space them evenly, and leave plenty of space for them to spread. (The recipe says leave 2-1/2″ between them, which sounds about right.)
4. Bake for at least 10, at most 11, minutes at 350F. (With experience, your nose and eyes are the best guides here. When they smell like they’re just starting to burn, and the edges are visibly just darker than the center, they’re done.)
5. Remove the pan and let it cool for 5-10 minutes.
6. Move the cookies to a wire rack to cool completely. (But try at least one with a glass of cold milk while it’s still warm!)

Grief and Baking: Rolled Holiday Butter Cookies

Posted on 2018-12-02 by admin

Today is World AIDS Day. By coincidence, the 41st president also just died, reminding me – and the cohort of survivors from his dark reign – how many more of us died on his watch from inaction, and more active hatred.

It’s also my dad’s mortiversary, the 10th anniversary of his death.

As I did ten years ago, I turned to baking. In anticipation of our upcoming tree-trimming party, and a hoped-for cookie-decorating side activity, I chose a rolling cookie recipe from King Arthur Flour. Since I’m unfamiliar with this type of cookie, I stayed as close as I could to the original recipe.

I consider these a qualified success. There are some improvements I can make, mostly about technique. I’m happy with the basic recipe.

Ingredients

Confectioners’ sugar, 1-1/4 cups / 5-1/2 ounces (Their recipe gives 5 oz as the weight equivalent, but this is what my scale came up with)
Unsalted (“sweet”) butter, 18 tablespoons = 1 cup + 2 tablespoons, room temperature (I neglected to let mine come to room temperature, but with an electric mixer, it whipped up just fine, anyway)
Yolk of 1 large egg (reserve the white to brush the cookies and add decorative sugar before baking)
Salt, 1/2 teaspoon (I usually omit salt from my baking, but this was my first time with this recipe. The “Tips” section of their recipe suggests using 1 teaspoon when using unsalted butter. It wasn’t necessary.)
Flavoring:

Vanilla extract, 2-1/2 teaspoons
Lemon oil, 1/4 teaspoon
(I started with 2 teaspoons of vanilla. a taste test indicated it needed more assertive flavor, and a little something more than vanilla.)
(The original recipe calls for 1/4 teaspoon of Fiori di Sicilia. I’ve never used that; I’ve only ever seen it in their recipes.)

White whole wheat flour, 2-3/4 cups / 11-1/2 ounces (The original recipe calls for unbleached all-purpose flour)

Directions

Whip the butter until it’s smooth and starts peaking. (If your butter is still cold, as mine was, slice it into small ~1/2T pats first.)
Gradually stir in the confectioner’s sugar. Once combined, whip some more at high speed. (If you add all the sugar at once, you’ll get a cloud of sugar. I used a pouring shield to add it while the mixer was on slow speed and keep dust down.)
Separate one large egg. Add only the egg yolk to the batter. Beat it in until the batter is smooth. Keep the white refrigerated for the cookie-making.
Mix in your flavorings of choice.
Add the flour, mixing at slow-medium speeds until just smooth. If the dough is sticky to the touch, add a small amount of flour to adjust the texture. (Their recipe notes: “The mixture will seem dry at first, but will suddenly come together. If it doesn’t, dribble in a tablespoon of water.” This wasn’t a problem for my first time.)
Remove the dough from the bowl. Wrap and chill the dough for at least 2 hours, or overnight.

Preparation and Baking

Our kitchen is tiny, with no counter space. (Seriously: attentive readers may notice that the “counters” in the photos are the side-drain of our sink and the space between the burners on our stove.) Since I was doing this as a tech rehearsal for a party activity, I used our dining room table as the surface for setup and rolling. I rolled the dough out directly onto parchment paper for cutting and pre-decorating, then lifted the parchment directly onto the baking sheet.

“When you’re ready to bake, remove the dough from the refrigerator, and let it soften for about 20 to 30 minutes, until it feels soft enough to roll. It should still feel cold, but shouldn’t feel rock-hard.”
“Sprinkle your rolling surface with flour, and flour your rolling pin. Working with one piece of dough at a time, roll it 1/8″ to 3/16″ thick.”

Notes: I found rolling the dough evenly to be difficult. This resulted in uneven baking, both among the cookies, and even across the surface of larger cookies.

The thicker cookies baked more evenly, and had a nicer “tooth” to them. The thinner cookies ended up more like crackers. I want to invest in some rolling pin rings to eliminate this variation, and get more professional looking cookies. With rolling pin rings, I can do some more precise experimentation with different thicknesses. I think 1/4″ cookies will end up being my favorite.
Use a cookie cutter to cut shapes. Collect the trimmed dough for re-rolling. They won’t spread much in the oven, but leave 1/2″ between them so they don’t butt up against, or into, each other. (Most of the cookies I cut out in these photos were too close together. Lesson learned!
Optional Pre-bake Decoration: Mix 1 teaspoon of water into the egg white you reserved earlier. Brush cookies lightly with with the white-water mixture. Cover the cookies with coarse or colored sugars, edible glitter, etc. (I tried some peppermint crumble, but it wasn’t designed for baking; it all melted.)
Bake the cookies in a preheated 350°F oven for 12 to 14 minutes, until they’re set and barely browned around the edges.
Remove the cookies from the oven, and cool right on the pan. If you’ve used parchment, you can lift cookies and parchment off the pan, so you can continue to use the pan as the cookies cool.
Repeat with the remaining piece of dough, rolling, cutting, and baking cookies.

Links

Original recipe: King Arthur Flour

Recipe: Crisp and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Posted on 2016-02-21 by admin

These cookies have been taste-tested recently at a going-away party and after-church coffee hour. Adults rave about this cookie. You will have no leftovers, even from a double batch.

I’ve been working on this recipe for a while, and I think I’ve finally got it to where I want it.

I started with “The Essential Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie” from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion cookbook. I doubled the recipe, and made a few substitutions and additions, noted below.

I was getting the taste I wanted, but not the texture: they kept coming out too high and dry. They would rise in the oven, but they wouldn’t fall.

I finally realized I just needed to reduce the flour called for in the original recipe to balance my other changes. This made them come out perfect, just the way I wanted them: slightly browned and crisp at the edges, soft and chewy in the centers.

I also like to amp up the chocolate chips, both by increasing the amount, and using different kinds, mixing milk and semi-sweet chocolates. My favorite are the chocolate drops from NYC’s own Lilac Chocolates. They make them in at least three different varieties: milk, dark, and 72% extra-dark.

Pre-heat

Pre-heat your oven to 375F. You can also line some heavy-duty cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Ingredients

3 sticks (1-1/2 cups, 12 oz) butter, warmed to room temperature
Optional: 1/2 C smooth peanut butter (husband John loves peanut butter in everything)

Whip up the butter until light and fluffy. Then cream the sugars into them and whip them up even more. The batter should be light brown in color.

1-1/3 C (10-1/2 oz) dark brown sugar
1-1/3 C (9-1/2 oz) granulated sugar
3/8 C (6T, 3-3/4 oz) maple syrup, as dark as you can get (this is a substitution for the corn syrup called for in the original recipe, and a 50% increase over the original amount)

Beat in the rest of the flavorings. If you’re using cider vinegar, it does double duty: first as the chemical reagent for the baking soda, second with the slight cidery taste.

2T (1/8C) cider vinegar (you can use white vinegar if you don’t have cider)
1/4 C (4T) vanilla extract (this is double the original recipe. I love vanilla!)
1 teaspoon espresso powder OR 1 Starbucks Via packet (I like Via because it has a longer shelf life than the usual plastic container of espresso powder, which ossifies into useless slag, and because they have a decaf italian/dark roast.)
Optional: 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt (omit to reduce sodium)

At this point I’ll do a taste test, before beating in the eggs one at a time.

4 large eggs

You want to blend the baking soda and powder into the wet batter so they can dissolve, disperse, and begin their chemical reactions to give lift to the dough in the oven. I’ve made the mistake of sifting them with the flour, treating them as just other “dry” ingredients, and they don’t get incorporated as well.

1 teaspoon baking soda (this will react with the vinegar and brown sugar)
1 teaspoon baking powder

Sift and gradually/slowly stir in the flour, until no dry flecks or lumps remain. Again, I’ve made the mistake of treating the flour like the rest of the batter, trying to beat it in. That makes for tough, not tender, cookies.

4 C (16 oz) whole wheat flour flour, sifted (The whole wheat makes a big difference in the flavor and texture. The original recipe calls for all-purpose/white flour. This is a reduction by about 1/8 from the original amount.)

The dough will be wet. You should be able to scoop some out with a tablespoon, and have it stick to the spoon. If it’s too loose, add some more flour to get the texture you want.

Finally, stir in, by hand, the chocolate chips and chunks of your choice.

6 cups (36 oz) chocolate chips and/or chunks

Cover the dough tightly, so it doesn’t dry out – some plastic food wrap pushed down onto the surface of the dough works well. – and chill in the refrigerator for a few hours, or overnight.

You can also start baking immediately. At this point, I’ll bake at least one sheet of cookies, both to test the dough, and for (nearly) instant gratification.

Baking

Pre-heat the oven to 375F. (But you did that already.)
Cover a heavy-duty cookie sheet with parchment paper.
Scoop out heaping tablespoons of dough onto the paper. Stagger them so they have room to spread without touching. On a standard-“half-sheet”, I can get 5 rows from one end to the other with 3 heaps at each end and the center, and 2 heaps in between those rows. 3, 2, 3, 2, and 3: a baker’s dozen!
In the first few minutes after putting the tray in the oven, the dough should spread with the heat, and rise with the leaveners.
Bake for 10-12 minutes. Your eyes and nose are the best judge of “done” here. Sniff for the slight smell of burnt sugar, and look for the edges to be set and just starting to darken. The centers should still look wet. Ideally, they will have started to collapse, but don’t wait for that – you don’t want them to set while risen.
Remove the sheet and set aside. Let the cookies cool on the sheet until they slide easily without squishing, bending, or breaking up.
Remove the individual cookies to a rack to cool completely. (Or eat while still warm and gooey).

Lemon Cardamon Sugar Cookies

Posted on 2013-12-13 by admin

Recipe updated (improved?) 2016-12-03.

A few weeks ago, I had a craving to do some baking with cardamon (cardamom). A few Google searches later, I found a recipe for lemon cardamon sugar cookies.n

Other than doubling the recipe, and substituting all butter instead of the blend of butter and shortening, I stuck pretty closely, at first, to the original recipe. The batter, however, was overpoweringly lemony; not bad! but the cardamon was lost. So I doubled the cardamon in the original. Still way more lemon than I wanted, so I added a touch of ground cloves.

Even after adding the flour, the dough was very wet and soft. I baked one batch directly after mixing. They spread a lot in baking. I chilled the rest of the dough, which made it easier to manage. They still spread a lot.

Those were the most lemony cookies I ever had. Delicious, but still a waste of good cardamon. I adjusted the recipe further:

I reduced the amount of lemon to balance the spices.
Reducing the lemon juice also reduces the liquid, for a firmer dough.
I added some ground ginger.
To save time and reduce waste, I zested a frozen lemon instead of separately zesting and juicing fresh lemons.

The trick of using a frozen lemon and zesting the whole thing is something I picked up from my husband. He came across it, as he says, “on the computer.”

This recipe is good enough for all you beta testers out there, but it’s not “finished.” Although the flavors balance beautifully, my adaptation is now a little dry for my taste. I’ve made notes in this revision of things I would do differently next time. If you try this recipe – the original, my adaptation, or your own variant – let me know what you did and how it turned out in the comments!

Adapted from: Lemon Cardamom Sugar Cookies, Full Measure of Happiness

Yield: 60 (5 dozen) cookies

Ingredients

1 ¼ cups (2 ½ sticks) butter, softened to room temperature
½ frozen lemon, zested
3 cups (12 ¾ oz) all-purpose flour, sifted, whole wheat or white to taste
NEXT TIME: Reduce by ¼ or ½ cup
3 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups white sugar
2 teaspoons lemon extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons ground cardamom
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon salt (optional)

Directions

Let the butter soften to room temperature.
Zest the frozen lemon (pick out seeds, as needed) into a small bowl and set aside to thaw.
Preheat the oven to 350F.
Sift the flour, baking powder, and baking soda together and set aside.
NEXT TIME: Try adding baking powder and soda LAST to the batter, instead of sifting it with the flour.
Cream the butter until smooth.
Cream the butter and sugar together at high speed until light and fluffy.
Add the zested lemon, extracts, and spices. Add salt to taste, if desired.
Add the sifted dry ingredients and mix until just blended together and no flecks remain.
Chill the dough in the refrigerator for at least an hour.
Prepare baking sheets with parchment paper.
Scoop tablespoons of the chilled dough, roll lightly in sugar, and place on the parchment. Flatten them gently with the back of a flat spoon. Leave space between them; they will roughly double in diameter.
Bake for 10 minutes until just brown on the edges. Your sense of smell is the best guide; remove them when you can just smell the sugar caramelizing.
Remove and cool for a few minutes, then transfer the cookies to a cooling rack.

Links

Lemon Cardamom Sugar Cookies, Full Measure of Happiness

Recipe: Soft Molasses-Spice Cookies with Cardamom

Posted on 2008-12-23 by admin

No photos (yet) for this recipe. My motivation for this experiment was making use of a spice that was new to me: cardamom.

Cardamom

A couple of weeks back, on the recommendation of a friend of ours who’s a professional chef, I picked up some ground cardamom (alt: cardamon) for baking. I’m unfamiliar with this spice and had never used it before this recipe.

It’s intensely fragrant; even closed, the small baggie of loose cardamom I bought at the Flatbush Food Co-op has been perfuming our kitchen and dining room. It smells like Christmas gingerbread. The scent has strong citrus tones, and at first I thought it might be in the Rutaceae, the Citrus family. But it comes from the Zingiberaceae, the Ginger family, which also makes sense.

The plant is Elettaria cardamomum, a mono-specific genus native to a wide range in southeast Asia. (Some authorities separate the Sri Lankan population as its own species.) The fruit is a pod, a capsule containing multiple seeds. The spice is made from the ground seeds.

Credit: JoJan (Wikimedia Commons)

Elettaria cardamomum under cultivation. Credit: Rhaessner (Wikimedia Commons)

Searching for recipes on the Web, I found that cardamom is a common ingredient in many recipes from Nordic countries. I’m not familiar with Nordic cuisine, so I wouldn’t be able to judge so well the success of my baking endeavor. Cardamom also shows up in many gingerbread recipes, so I fell back on something more familiar to me to try out: molasses spice cookies. Once again, King Arthur Flour provided the basic recipe which I tweaked to make use of my available ingredients.

Ingredients

KAF provides weight equivalents for the volume measures in many of their recipes. I use a kitchen scale and weigh bulk ingredients like sugar and flour whenever possible. It’s much faster, more accurate, and leads to more consistent results. It also reduces cleanup, since fewer measuring cups are involved! This is especially convenient for liquid or sticky ingredients like the molasses in this recipe.

Yield: About four dozen (48) cookies

2 sticks (1 cup, 8 ounces) unsalted butter
7 ounces (1 cup) sugar
6-1/4 ounces (a little more than 1/2 cup) molasses, robust flavor. (6 ounces would have been 1/2 cup.; the extra 1/4 ounce was a mistake on my part, but I recorded it as what I did.)
2-1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon cardamom
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 extra large eggs (original called for large)
14 ounces whole wheat flour (not sure of the volume equivalent)
sugar, for coating (This gives the outside of the cookies some crunch. The recipe calls for coarse or even pearl sugar, for more crunch. I’d use them instead if I had them.)

Preparation

Let the butter come to room temperature, if possible, for easier creaming.
Preheat the oven to 350F. (Be sure you have an accurate oven thermometer! I had a devil of a time baking in our horrible kitchen until I bought a thermometer and discovered that the oven dial was off by 100F!)
Prepare a small bowl with some of the sugar for coating the cookies.
(The recipe calls for greasing baking sheets or lining them with parchment. Since I have some well-seasoned, non-stick baking sheets, I didn’t bother and it wasn’t necessary.)

Mixing

Cream together the butter and sugar until they’re light and fluffy.
Beat in the the molasses, salt, and spices. (Here’s where you can taste-test to adjust if needed. I added the spices at 1/4 or 1/2 teaspoon at a time to make sure I didn’t over do it. I ended up with 1 teaspoon of each, as listed above.)
Beat in the baking soda.
Add the eggs one at a time, beating until they’re mixed well into the batter. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and the beaters and mix well.
Slowly stir in the flour. (This is something I’ve learned recently. Stirring the flour in at low speeds keeps the cookies tender. Beating the flour in at higher speeds makes the cookies tougher.) Scrape down the sides of the bowl and the beaters and mix well.

This is a fairly soft, wet dough. Although I didn’t try it this time, I bet you could refrigerate the dough for a few hours, or even overnight, to set up before baking.

Baking

Using a tablespoon cookie/ice-cream scoop, create a small ball of the dough. (A scoop is the fastest, easiest way to get a consistently sized, professional looking, batch of cookies. You could also just use two tablespoons.)
Drop the dough ball onto the coating sugar. Coat thoroughly.
Place the coated dough ball on the baking pan. Space them evenly, and leave plenty of space for them to spread. (The recipe says leave 2-1/2″ between them, which sounds about right.)
Bake for at least 10, at most 11, minutes at 350F. (With experience, your nose and eyes are the best guides here. When they smell like they’re just starting to burn, and the edges are visibly just darker than the center, they’re done.)
Remove the pan and let it cool for 5-10 minutes.
Move the cookies to a wire rack to cool completely. (But try at least one with a glass of cold milk while it’s still warm!)

Other recipes on this blog

Links

Soft Ginger-Molasses Cookies and Ginger Syrup, Recipes, King Arthur Flour

Grief and Baking: Peppermint Swirl Meringue Cookies

Posted on 2008-12-17 by admin

Updates 2014-12-13: Simplified the baking temperature and time, and added notes about portion sizing.

Yesterday it was hard for me to do anything. Although the weather was perfect – 60s and partly sunny – for planting the bulbs I have yet to get into the ground, I could not bring myself to go outside. It’s only been two weeks since my father died, and I was feeling his absence deeply and sharply yesterday. When I wrote that “there’s so much of him in me,” I didn’t appreciate how much I would feel a loss of my own self, a void left standing where “the library burned down.” It reminds me of the hole in the sky where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood. The absence is palpable.

By the end of the day, I was feeling a little better, and I thought that surrendering to my winter baking mode would help. I was prepared to make some basic chocolate chip cookies, but Blog Widow came home with a box of soft, store-bought ones. I experimented with something new, and here’s what I came up with:

I call these Peppermint Swirl Meringue Cookies, an elaboration of a basic meringue recipe from King Arthur Flour. KAF is my favorite source for all things baking. I was happy to find that the Flatbush Food Co-Op carries several varieties of King Arthur Flours in the well-stocked baking section of their new location.

I’ve made meringues many times before, but Blog Widow has never cared for them. He likens their texture to styrofoam, and I can’t disagree. The best way to eat them is not to bite into them. Instead, let them dissolve on the tongue, releasing a burst of the flavoring baked into them.

Part of last night’s experiment was to see if I could achieve a texture that would satisfy Blog Widow: crisp and crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside. The KAF recipe suggested that I could accomplish this simply by baking them for an hour less than usual. This worked beautifully. Here’s a single, intact meringue cookie, the same one in the center foreground of the photo above:

And here’s the same cookie broken open (shattered, really!) to show the chewy, slightly gooey, interior:

Perfect. And baking these did help lighten my spirit.

Meringues are more confection than cookie. The basic ingredients are just egg whites and sweeteners: no fat and no cholesterol. Since there’s no flour, they’re also fine for folks avoiding gluten.

I use dried, powdered egg whites in recipes calling for them. It saves the hassle of separating them, and I don’t have to figure out what to do with the yolks. However, dried egg whites can have an off, eggy taste. You want to make sure that the flavoring is assertive enough, without being too aggressive, to balance the recipe.

The classic flavoring is vanilla, but anything can be used. I thought I would make some red and green meringues with different flavorings for each color, such as cinnamon for red, lime for green. But a tip in the KAF recipe suggested coloring just half the mixture and swirling them together. White plus red stripes just screams candy cane, so peppermint was the flavor I went with. (If I had spearmint flavoring, I would also try green and white stripes.)

Here’s how I made the cookies in these photos, presenting the basic KAF recipe with the slight adaptations I had to make along the way. The basic KAF recipe presents lots of possible variations, even adding nuts to the meringue, so check that out for other creative options.

Ingredients

Egg whites of 6 large eggs (7/8 cup, or 7-8 ounces), or 1/4 cup dried egg whites dissolved in 3/4 cups water, at room temperature (separate eggs when cold, but whip them at room temperature to get the best volume.)

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar (a mild acid which helps stabilize the whites when beaten)
1/4 teaspoon salt (for flavor only. You can omit this if you need to minimize sodium, although the egg whites naturally contain sodium of their own.)
1 1/4 cups extra-fine sugar (also known as sanding or castor sugar. I used regular white, refined sugar and they came out fine. A finer grain of sugar dissolves easier in the whites for a smooth, non-gritty texture.)
1 1/2 cups (6 1/4 ounces) confectioner’s sugar (powdered sugar)
1/2 teaspoon peppermint extract
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract (The vanilla mellows and warms the peppermint, which remains the dominant flavor.)
red food coloring (I used a gel type.)

Preparation

Preheat the oven to 250F. (Be sure you have an accurate oven thermometer! Temperature is lower than usual for baking – too high, and you’ll burn, rather than bake, your meringues – and gets reduced further part-way into the baking time. I had a devil of a time baking in our horrible kitchen until I bought a thermometer and discovered that the oven dial was off by 100F!)

Prepare the egg whites and set them aside to let them come to room temperature.
Use the largest baking pans you have, line them with parchment paper, and set them aside. (I could only use two pans in my oven, and had to discard part of my batch because I had no more room for them.)
Sift the sugars together and set them aside.

Mixing

I used a hand whisk for the slow whisking steps, and a mixer with a whisking attachment for the rest.

Add the cream of tartar to the room-temperature egg whites, Whisk until the cream of tartar has completely dissolved and the whites are foamy.

If using salt, add it now and whisk to dissolve that as well.

Increase the whisking speed until the egg whites have doubled in volume.

Add half the sugar and whisk until the whites are glossy and start to get stiff.

Add the remaining sugar and whisk until the whites hold stiff peaks. (Since I didn’t have extra-fine sugar, I chickened out here a little and added the sugar a little early so it would dissolve completely. I also didn’t whisk completely to the hard peak stage. Just the tips of the peaks folded over, which you can see in the finished cookies.)

Add the flavorings.

Remove about 1/3 of the meringue into a separate bowl. Add the coloring and whisk it until it the desired color is evenly distributed.

Add the colored meringue back into the other bowl on top of the white meringue. Using a spatula, gently fold the two meringues together until they are just striped. It only takes a few folds for this.

Baking

Drop the striped meringue by the spoonful onto the parchment paper on your baking pans. The meringues will not spread while baking, so they can be placed as close as possible without touching each other.
Use a tablespoon to get 3 dozen big cookies; at this size, though, I usually run out of baking sheet before I run out of batter. Use two teaspoons for more, smaller, cookies; the smaller size can be placed more closely together on the sheet, and uses up all of the batter. The smaller ones are bite-sized and easier to handle.

You can also use a pastry bag, if you have one, for fancier cookies.
Bake at 250F for 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes, reduce the heat to 225F and bake for one more hour for chewy cookies, or 2 more hours for crisp-all-the-way-through cookies.
Turn off the heat, crack open the oven door, and let them cool for 30 minutes.
Remove them to a wire rack to cool completely.

Simplified baking option for chewy cookies: Instead of the two-stage, two-temperature method, bake at 250F for an hour.

Here’s another, close-up view of the finished product.

And oh yeah: Blog Widow labels this a successful experiment!

[http://bit.ly/5R9IxO]

Other recipes on this blog
The quotes in the opening paragraph come from the eulogy I wrote and read for my father’s memorial service on Thursday, December 4, 2008.

Links

Meringues, Recipes, King Arthur Flour

Recipe: Spice Cookies

Posted on 2006-10-15 by admin

I don’t cook much, but I love to bake. Over the fall and winter I’ll make cookies, cakes, rolls, bread, and so on, from scratch. It appeals to the mad scientist in me. I also like making pancakes and French toast (not really baking) for breakfast.

I made these spice cookies today. They are light and soft yet firm, not chewy, not too sweet, and very tasty. I know adults like them. I haven’t tried them out on kids yet.

This is a large batch; it makes 60-70 2″ wide cookies. You could cut this recipe in half.

Dry Ingredients:

2 & 1/2 Cups cake flour
2 teaspoons ground spices
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Wet (Batter) Ingredients:

1 & 1/2 Cups (3 sticks) sweet (unsalted) butter, at room temperature
1 Cup brown sugar
1/4 Cup sugar
4 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 F.
Sift the dry ingredients together to remove any lumps and mix them thoroughly and set aside.
In a mixer, cream the butter until it’s fluffy and has a light color.
Gradually add the brown and regular (refined) sugar. Cream the sugars and butter together until uniform in color.
Add the eggs one at a time, mixing thoroughly after each one.
Add the vanilla extract.
Scrape down the bowl and blades and mix thoroughly. The batter should be light and fluffy.
Add the dry ingredients gradually, mixing thoroughly.
The result should be a light, fluffy, wet, soft dough which holds soft peaks. If the dough is too wet to hold a peak, add more flour, no more than 1/4 Cup at a time. If the dough is too dry and stiff, add a little liquid (water or milk). Mix thoroughly after each addition, until the dough has the desired consistency.
Place teaspoons of dough on a cookie sheet. (A releasing ice cream scoop is the best tool for this.) Leave enough room for the cookies to spread. (Try setting them up 4×3 for the first sheet, so you can see how they spread.)
Bake the cookies for no more than ten minutes.
Keep an eye on them. The cookies will spread (because of the butter and sugar) and rise slightly (because of the baking powder and the air you whipped into them). When the texture of the tops of the cookies changes from glossy and shiny to matte and dull, or If the edges start to brown, they’re done.

If the bottoms of the cookies brown, or even burn, before the tops have set, turn the oven down -25 F.
When the cookies are done, remove the tray to cool for a few minutes, until the cookies firm up, then remove them to a separate cooling rack. If you leave the cookies on the sheets, the bottoms will get soggy.

Possible substitutions:

You could use whole wheat flour for part or all of the cake flour. If so, be sure to sift several times.
The spices can be anything you like: allspice, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg (a little goes a long way!), cloves. Today, I used the same commercial mulling spice blend, finely ground, which I used in the squash and pear soup last weekend.
You could omit the vanilla extract, or use a different extract, such as lemon, orange, or almond.
You can omit or reduce the salt.

Ingredients

Preparing the Dough

Chill the Dough

Baking

Notes and Tips

Related Content

Links

Ingredients

Preparation

Mixing

Baking

Ingredients

Directions

Preparation and Baking

Related Content

Links

Pre-heat

Ingredients

Baking

Related Content

Links

Ingredients

Directions

Related Content

Links

Cardamom

Ingredients

Preparation

Mixing

Baking

Related Posts

Links

Ingredients

Preparation

Mixing

Baking

Related Posts

Links