browned butter shortbread

Some of you may remember my shortbread experiments of the past.  Recently I saw this recipe and figured I'd give it a whirl.  I do need to note that the recipe as I found it told me microwave the butter.  At the risk of making fun of my source, I need to point out that microwaving butter doesn't get you browned butter anything.  Browning butter is a process.  Not a particularly complex one, but a process nonetheless.

With that stated, I give you:

Browned Butter Shortbread
10 tbsp butter
3/4 cup sugar
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 large egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350F. Butter and flour a 9-inch baking pan.  Brown the butter (see link above).  Combine dry ingredients, add the rest.  Now, I have personally never had a shortbread dough turn in to anything but a giant pile of crumbs, but maybe I'm doing it wrong--if your mixture actually forms dough, more power to you.  If not, don't panic.  Just press it into the pan and bake about 30 minutes.

brown sugar cookies

I made these quite some time ago and completely forgot to post them.  I've seen a few dozen sugar cookie recipes floating about lately--'tis the season, after all--and I figured I'd come back with this alternative.  Recipe via Epicurious.

brown sugar cookies
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
1 1/4 cups dark brown sugar
1 large egg
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Preheat oven to 375.  Cream butter and sugar, add egg.  Combine dry ingredients separately, then add to butter.  Bake 8 to 12 minutes. Let the cookie sheet cool completely between batches.

The only note here is that they aren't kidding when they call for dark brown sugar.  I used light brown, because that's all I had on hand and I was making these on a whim, and it wasn't particularly inspiring.  However, the potential was there; it was obvious what I was missing.  I'd recommend them for a nice fall/winter cookie.

Inception Cookies

Some time ago, a friend of mine linked to a post about Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies. Which I thought was interesting. Then she referred to them as "Inception cookies" and I knew I had to make them.

The recipe is below, but I'm going to say right up front that I wasn't hugely impressed. They were awesome as an oddity, and everybody loved the idea, but they wound up being really dry.

On the other hand, they were delightful when they were still warm. So, thought one, use them for microwaving & covering with sundae stuff. Thought two, dip them in fudge shortly after they've cooled to seal in the moisture.

Of course, WE NEED TO GO DEEPER. The aforementioned friend wants to peel one cookie side off two Oreos, slap the creme/cookie remainders around a Thin Mint, then cover that in chocolate chip and dip the result in fudge. I'm having a hard time saying no, of course.

(And yes, I actually did print out that photo of Xzibit and write "Yo dawg I heard you like cookies so I put some cookie in your cookie so you can snack while you snack" on it, to put out with the cookies. Reactions were mixed.)

At any rate:

Inception Cookies

2 sticks (1 cup) softened butter
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon pure vanilla
3 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
12 oz bag mini chocolate chips
1 pkg. Double-Stuff Oreo cookies

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream butter, sugar. Add eggs and vanilla.

In a separate bowl mix the flour, salt and baking soda. Add to wet, alternating with chocolate chips, until barely combined.

Add teaspoon of dough to each side of Oreo, seal along sides. Try to keep them as small as possible. These things get HUGE if you let them get out of control. Here's a picture for perspective:

(If you were not aware, my fist is very large.)

Cookie sheet, parchment paper, you know. Bake until golden brown. These took close to 17 minutes in my oven; your results may vary wildly, because that seems excessive. Let 'em cool for a bit before putting on a wire rack.

Makes about 2 dozen.

butter crescent cookies

'Twas the night before Christmas and I decided I was just going to go ahead and make my mother's incredibly unhealthy crescent cookie recipe because life is short and butter is tasty.

There's not a lot to say about this. You really are supposed to mix these by hand. Also, for whatever reason, my mother assures me that you cannot double this recipe, because the dough simply won't mix properly. I can't vouch for the accuracy of that, because I've never tried it.

buttery crescent cookies
1/2 cup confectioner's sugar (plus extra for topping)
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cornstarch
3/4 cup butter, softened

Preheat oven to 375°.

In large bowl, combine dry ingredients, then add butter and combine, by hand. (By hand = stick your hands in there and squish the sucker.) Make roughly crescent shaped cookies from approx one slightly rounded teaspoon worth of dough.

Place on cookie sheet. Bake 12 minutes or until lightly golden. Place on wire rack to cool.

Once cookies have cooled somewhat but not completely, put them in a container with some more confectioner's sugar and agitate gently. Consume and enjoy. Then buy larger pants, because after these you'll need 'em.

chocolate chip shortbread (finally!)

I've been screwing around with shortbread recipes for some time now, and I just haven't had any luck getting the results I've been after. Recently I found this blog entry and I knew that this was the recipe for me. Which began my quest to find caster sugar. I went everywhere, which is to say all four grocery stores we have here, and I came up totally blank. Eventually I was pointed to superfine sugar, at which point I Googled it and realized "caster sugar" is just British for "superfine sugar." Blargh;alrkgj.

Anyway, the making of this recipe also involved learning a neat new trick. I had the butter out on the counter for an hour or so and it was still pretty firm because, well, Potsdam, winter, old apartment: It's cold in here. So I figured someone on the Internet must have figured something out beyond microwaving it and getting little pockets of melty bits in between chunks that are still solid. And lo: Someone has. You know, I remember life before Google and I still don't know how we ever got anything done back then.

Also, don't measure your almond extract over the mixing bowl unless you have a very steady hand or enjoy your cookies smelling like they've been soaking in Amaretto. Whoops.

A word on bake times: Use your judgement. The original recipe called for 15-17 minutes, I wound up doing more like 22. The final bake step is essential, in my opinion, as it substantially improved the quality of the end product.

One final note, that has just now occurred to me: I was doubling this recipe and I'm quite sure I forgot to double the quantity of chocolate chips. But these are pretty chip-heavy. I really wouldn't enjoy having twice as many chips. As always, your mileage may vary.

Anyway.
awesome chocolate chip shortbread cookies
2 sticks butter, softened
2/3 cup superfine sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
~1/4 tsp almond extract (optional)
2 cups flour
"3/4 cup" mini chocolate chips (see note above!)

Cream butter & sugar extensively. Add extracts. Add flour, beat on low, stop when flour has just become incorporated. Stir in chips.
Transfer dough to gallon storage bag. Roll dough inside bag until it is 1/4 inch thick. You'll want to make sure the height is as uniform as possible; it really will make a difference in cooking time. Oddly, this step is kind of fun. Maybe it's an OCD thing.
Put the entire flattened mass, still in the bag, in the fridge to chill for at least two hours.
Once it's done, preheat the oven to 325°. Cut the bag off, put the dough on a cutting board, and use a pizza cutter to chop it into squares. Put them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment or the like, bake for ~20 minutes (see note above). Rotate them halfway through (top rack to bottom, front to back) for even cooking. Note that top of cookie will stay very pale throughout baking process, and cookies will likely be slightly flexible even when actually completely cooked. You just really have to guess. Sorry.
Put the cookies on trays, let them cool thoroughly. Put them back on the cookie sheets, "top" side down, then put them back in the oven for another 3-odd minutes. Cool and enjoy.

the good lord's own cookies

Once upon a time, I went to a Methodist Sunday school in a very small town in Maryland. One of my teachers had a cookie recipe that she would bust out when we were leaning about a specific part of the Bible. The cookies are light, fluffy, whitish in color, kind of springy-textured, and sweet. These cookies, she told us, were manna cookies. That's right. The food God threw down for people to eat. God's own dessert food. For real.

So if these cookies have another name, I do not know it. I will say that they are very tasty. A friend of mine tested the first batch and said, "They're nice and sweet and then there's this aftertaste that makes me want to hug my grandmother. Your cookies make me want to hug my grandmother." To be honest, I'm not quite sure what that means. But I'm taking it as a compliment.

The only down side to these cookies, which I always forget until it's too late, is that they're going to stick to each other. If you're packing them, put something between them (wax paper would probably work just fine). Otherwise, they're easy to make and don't disappoint.

Maryland Methodist Manna Cookies
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
2 cups flour

Preheat oven to 400. Cream butter, adding sugar gradually. Add eggs and beat thoroughly. Add honey, salt, and vanilla.

In a different bowl, combine baking powder and flour; add to butter mixture. Drop by half teaspoonfuls onto buttered cookie sheet.

Bake at 400 degrees for 5-6 minutes. Watch very closely. They don't really brown, per se; you just have to wing it. Cool on wire rack. Makes 6 dozen.

checkerboard cookies

A few weeks ago I encountered a post on 17 and Baking about checkerboard cookies, and they looked like a fun and complex project, ideal for breaking in my new kitchen. On a side note, if you're not reading 17 and Baking, you should be--the author is a young writer who (as you might guess) loves to bake. Her posts are introspective and well-written, and the recipes are always quality.

You'll note from my picture that my own product isn't quite as well put together as the examples on the original post, but I'm not going to pretend to be particularly ashamed of that--these are some excellent cookies I have created, and while there is a lack of right angles, the presentation is still pretty cute (and not too shabby for a first attempt if I do say so myself).

Also, I learned something interesting in the course of making this recipe. Specifically, I learned about room temperature eggs. Seriously, I have been baking for [mumble] years, and I even took cooking classes in my youth, yet no one ever bothered to tell me about the room temperature egg thing. What's that about?

At any rate, the dough recipe is fairly basic, and will have healthy eaters cringing right away. It goes like this:

5 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 lb (2 cups or 4 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 cups granulated sugar
1 tbsp pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

Combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Recipe calls for sifting; people tell me you don't have to do that anymore but I do it anyway because it's fun. In another bowl, cream the butter and sugar thoroughly, add eggs one at a time, then vanilla. Add the flour all at once and mix lightly with the beater then continue by hand--you don't want to overmix this, but fortunately it will be really obvious when you're done if you're paying attention.

From here, it gets complicated. First, you want to split the dough in half. As per the recommendation, I weighed my dough. If I had been smart, I would have checked the weight of the bowl it was in so I could just remove the appropriate amount of the final product, but instead I had to do a complicated back and forth sort of thing. Once you're done, knead the cocoa into one half. Split each half into halves again, then shape them in a roughly rectangular fashion, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate for two hours.

At this point, you take one of each flavor out and let them warm up. It took a while for mine to be workable; I don't know if that's a feature of my fridge or if the original 15 minute estimate was just really optimistic. At any rate, you want to roll it out into a rectangle that's about 12 by 5 inches, then cut nine half-inch strips.

Now, I do want to take one moment here, because something about that math tripped me up. It should be pretty obvious: 9 x 1/2 = 4 1/2, not 5. This worked out for me because my dough was a little uneven, so the trimming from one side fleshed out the other side. But if you're neurotic and have a ruler (ok, I had a ruler, it was just a sloppy result), you'll wind up with a full extra half inch strip. This is even funnier if you look at my source's source, who went to the trouble of making a diagram showing nine half inch strips turning into a five inch sheet. So ... yeah.

Anyway. Once you have your strips, you make two checkerboard patterns, which you can probably figure out by looking at the cookies above. Carefully squish it together, do your best to define the corners, then wrap those up and put them back in the fridge for another two hours. Then you take the other, not-yet-molested chunks of dough, warm them, roll them out nice and thin, and wrap them around the checkerboard patterns, using the opposite color to the four corners of the one you're wrapping. This is where it starts to get really sloppy. If you're going for a professional presentation, you might consider some sort of weight setup to flatten the sides. Personally I didn't care this time out.

Refrigerate overnight, then slice with a sharp knife and cook at 350° for 12 minutes. I have a nice stove, which temps quite accurately, and 12 minutes is exactly what I needed for each batch, but of course your mileage will vary. Make sure you refrigerate the dough in between batches, because (1) it will get harder to cut when it's warm and (2) screw up your cooking time.

The end result is delightfully tasty, and fairly impressive to look at. Obviously the presentation is the whole point here, so I would recommend just slopping it together, but unless you're actively trying to impress a tough crowd, even lopsided ones look pretty nice for a randomly-thrown-together sort of cookie project.

bigass cookies

I stumbled across a new (to me) recipe for chocolate chip cookies last night, and since there was talk of making cookies anyway, I decided to go for it. According to Cooking on the Side, this recipe originally came from a Land O Lakes butter box, so the butter content below should not surprise anyone.

I made this as it is here, and it was pretty good. The dough got really crumbly by the end; I had to squish it pretty hard to get it in to proper blobs for cooking, but the cookies came out well. Very bready, which is a good thing once you get used to it. I am probably going to cut it down to 4 cups of flour next time and see how it works, but for posterity, here is the original:

4 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups salted butter
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups firmly packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 (12-ounce) package (2 cups) semi-sweet chocolate chunks or chocolate chips

Heat oven to 375°F.

Combine flour, baking powder and baking soda in a medium bowl. Set aside.

Combine butter, sugar and brown sugar in a large bowl. Beat at medium speed, scraping the bowl often, until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla. Continue beating, scraping bowl often, until well mixed. Reduce speed to low. Beat, gradually adding flour mixture, until well mixed. Stir in chocolate chunks.

Drop dough by 1/4 cupfuls, 2 inches apart, onto ungreased cookie sheets (tip: line the sheets with parchment, if you have some). Bake for 10 to 14 minutes or until light golden brown. (Do not overbake.) Let stand 1 to 2 minutes. Remove from cookie sheets.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

When I make chocolate chip cookies, I usually aim for the crispier side of things, but these are nice and fluffy and still extremely enjoyable. The pumpkin is present more in the texture than in the flavor - I was able to guess the "secret ingredient" after eating one cookie, but they certainly aren't 'pumpkin-flavored' in any way.

This is the recipe as I received it from my co-worker, and I can vouch for the results, but I intent to fiddle with it some in the coming months - I'm not a huge fan of shortening, and I've recently learned that you can use coffee in the place of vanilla extract if you do it properly, so I may post some notes on variations later.

1 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 egg
1 cup pumpkin (I used canned, but whatever floats your boat)
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 pkg chocolate chips
1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Preheat to 350, cream shortening and sugar. Beat in egg, beat in pumpkin, beat in vanilla. Gradually mix in flour, then spices and powders, adding chips & nuts last. Bake 10-15 minutes - I went for 15 but it probably varies with your stove. It's really obvious when they're done, as they start to brown up around the edges.

Edited 11/13/2010: Somehow I forgot to put in the "add pumpkin" step the first time I posted this and it screws me up every time. So I fixed it.