Viewing entries tagged
cookies
Cantucci (the Tuscan name for biscotti) are typically served with vin santo for dessert. I tend to chuck in whatever nut or dried fruit we have available, and this particular combo worked out exceptionally well: the tanginess and chew from the oranges, the toasty crunch of the hazelnuts, and the plump, wine-soaked sweetness from the figs. I try not to overcook them so as to retain some of that satisfying chewiness.
These exist in that tender interior, crunchy exterior, no-man’s-land between a scone, and a biscuit. I tried something similar at a hotel in Turkey, where at daily afternoon tea they produced thick, golden and extremely savoury kashar cheese cookies. As kashar cheese is a little harder to get here in the UK, I subbed in a mix of mozzarella, pecorino and feta, and they turned out beautifully. They’re umami, and slightly salty, and the cheese caramelises on the outside in a way that’s reminiscent of a toasted cheese sandwich.
They’re extremely easy to whip up, and work perfectly as a savoury treat at afternoon tea, accompanying a bowl of soup, or with cheeses, membrillo paste and a handful of fresh baby tomatoes.
150g butter, very cold/frozen
75g fresh mozzarella
75g semi-stagionato pecorino (or parmesan, if you can’t get hold of pecorino)
60g feta
1 ½ tsp double cream (or milk if you don’t have any double cream to hand)
250g plain flour
10g nigella seeds
½ tsp salt
½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp caster sugar
large baking tray, lined with baking parchment
6cm diameter cookie cutter (feel free to use a different size if you want larger/smaller cookies, but bear in mind the baking time will reduce for smaller cookies)
1) Preheat oven to 200°C.
2) Take the mozzarella and press it between two pieces of paper towel to squeeze out as much liquid as possible.
3) Using the coarse side of a cheese grater, grate the cold/frozen butter, mozzarella, pecorino and feta into the bowl of an electric stand mixer or a large bowl if making by hand. The cheeses may crumble a little unevenly but don’t worry too much about striving for perfection, they just need to be broken down into small pieces. Add in the double cream and stir together.
4) In a separate medium sized bowl, whisk together the flour, nigella seeds, salt, baking powder and caster sugar until evenly mixed.
5) Pour the dry ingredients into the bowl containing the cheeses. If using an electric stand mixer, fit it with the paddle and mix on a low-medium speed until the mixture just comes together. If making it by hand, stir with a wooden spoon until a crumbly dough is formed. Take care not to over mix as this will stimulate the gluten in the flour, and break down the butter too much, making the cookie tougher and less tender. If the mixture is too dry (climate/room temperature can affect this), add in a tiny bit more double cream but be careful not to add too much – the dough should be slightly crumbly.
6) Lightly dust a clean surface/board with flour. Tip the cookie dough on to the surface and pat it together until it forms a disc. Roll it out to an even thickness of 1.5cm. Then use the cookie cutter to stamp out the circles. Place them on the baking tray at least 4cm apart (they won’t spread much).
7) Place in the oven and bake for 12-15 mins, until the top and base are golden and crunchy. You can serve these warm or cool. NB, they keep for up to 3 days stored in an airtight container at room temperature. Or you can freeze them for up to 6 months in an airtight container.
These are slightly different from my other cookie recipes – they’re NYC-style: enormous, and molten and tender, to the point where they very nearly collapse when lifted. They’re saturated with chocolate and have the delicious crunch of walnuts and a touch of sea salt to counteract their sweetness.
Checkerboard Cookies: This cookie is partially inspired my nostalgia for playdough, and partially by my extreme jubilation about the fact that Drag Race (both UK & US editions) has just started again (the cookies represent the Drag Race flags that Ru Paul holds, obviously). If you like either of those things, especially playdough, are feeling crafty, and/or are seeking some fun on day 323 of lockdown, then these cookies are for you.
I don’t understand why there’s a “season” for pumpkin spice themed dishes when delicious pumpkin puree is available (from a can) all year round. In honour of this recent discovery, I decided to make these cookies. I was influenced by a recipe on Bon Appetitwhich incorporated pumpkin and various spices into a cookie. However - I was very disappointed by the result: the cookies were mean and thin, with root canal problem-inducing sweetness, overly egg-y, and totally lacking in the promised pumpkin flavour.
So, I made my own to tick the 3 commandments of cookies:
- Chewy
- Molten
- Thick
I radically amped up the amount of pumpkin, and reduced the sugar. I also added both white and milk chocolate, so that, upon baking, they caramelized, creating a sophisticated toffee flavour. The added crunch and maple-flavour of the pecans add some complexity, too.
NB If you would like a more savoury cookie, you could switch the milk and white chocolate for dark chocolate. And if you’d like to have a supply of cookies for emergencies, you can freeze the scoops of uncooked cookie dough and bake them when desired.
150 unsalted butter, softened
80g light brown sugar
70g caster sugar
1 egg
40g pumpkin puree
1 ½ tsp vanilla extract
½ tsp cinnamon
1 ½ tsp ground ginger
¼ tsp ground nutmeg
1/8 tsp mixed spice
220g plain flour
heaped ½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
100g white chocolate + 30 g white chocolate for topping (I use buttons but you can chop up a bar or use chips instead)
50g milk chocolate, roughly chopped
50g chopped pecans, + 20g for topping
2 large baking trays, lined with baking parchment
1) Put the unsalted butter, light brown sugar and caster sugar into the bowl of an electric mixer, fitted with the paddle, and beat until light and fluffy (about 5 minutes). If doing by hand, beat ingredients together with a spoon. Add the egg, pumpkin puree and vanilla extract, and beat until full combined.
2) Add the spices (cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, mixed spice), flour, baking powder and salt to the wet ingredients, and very gently fold together until almost combined, leaving some flour still visible. Add the chopped milk chocolate, white chocolate and pecans, and very gently fold them into the cookie dough until combined.
3) Cover the bowl and refrigerate for minimum 1 hour and up to 24 hours (until you’re ready to bake the cookies).
4) Preheat the oven to 180°C. Then. either using an ice cream scoop, or a tablespoon, scoop the cookie dough into 40g dollops. I weigh each one to make sure they cook evenly, but if you can’t be bothered just estimate. Roll each into a sphere between your palms to ensure that they bake into near-perfect rounds. Place on the tray leaving about 4cm between each so that they have room to spread when they bake. Then, into each sphere, press a piece of white chocolate and a piece of pecan.
5) Place in oven to bake for 7-10 minutes, or until they are golden at the edges but still soft to the touch. Once they are removed from the oven, they will continue to cook on the baking tray so leave them to sit for a couple of minutes. Serve warm if you can’t wait, or keep them for up to 4 days in an airtight container. You can also freeze them in an airtight container for up to 3 months.
These chocolate brownie and peanut butter cookies are not hard to make, but they’re so good I wouldn’t recommend wasting them on frenemies.
I am reluctant to call them custard creams as they are everything traditional ones are not. Instead of being brittle and flavourless, the biscuit is light, vanilla-scented, and so tender it almost dissolves on your tongue. And the filling is smooth, and generous, with a subtle lemon tang to add astringent relief.
These cookies are thick; they’re chewy; and they have a a molten Nutella centre with oozy chocolate and crunchy toasted hazelnuts. I’m not even going to feign modesty: these cookies are the apotheoses of cookies. Make sure you have at least two reserved per person because eating one is never going to be enough – be warned.
In my dictionary definition of cookie, I’m going to be demanding. It needs to be thic(ccc)k so that each mouthful contains some of the promised flavours, be they chocolate, nut, or candy. I want it crisp on the outside so that when broken, it gives way to a chewy cookie-dough goo. If there’s chocolate or caramel, they need to be molten. They also need to have enough salt to balance the sweetness and add depth of flavour.
And, after years of trials, the quest to create the perfect cookie becoming increasingly Sisyphean, I’ve done it. And you need to make them ASAP.
Maybe they think that all the gluttony and swollen stomachs affect our ability to digest information, that all the turkey/mince/fruit/chocolate/stuffing becomes blinding and we are no longer able to read paragraphs of text. Instead, we have to have things numbered so as to reassure us that whatever we are reading won’t detract too long from the Christmas stasis.
Every newspaper or magazine clearly has some greedy journalist on its team who takes it upon him or herself to rate every mince pie out there to save us all the hard work. Then the subjective lists are compiled and played back to us year after year, despite the foods remaining the same, in the identical, consumable, numbered format.
In response to this, and inspired by an affront to my eyes when opening the newspaper magazine this weekend, I thought I would do a light review of the food adverts themselves:
Apparently, it’s for fruit lovers: congealed, glistening and with blood/jam trickling through its rivulets. But what is it? Depends how you like your desserts, but I’ll pass.
1/5
I know Christmas is supposedly about family and coming together, but the picture of “grandma” with a prawn coming out of her head doesn’t conjure up any feelings of warmth for me
1/5
I’ve caught members of my family spooning Boursin directly into their mouths. I was cynical at first about their Christmas rebrand with the addition of the “merry” epithet. But somehow, heady with garlicky creaminess, it has caught on in my household – we are now asking each other whether we’d like some “Merry Boursin” on our toast.
4/5
Lidl has gone down the particularly salivating route in showing us the turkeys pre-slaughter. They are relaxing free range by a bale of hay with the sun shining to stained glass effect through the translucent wattles. Delicious.
0/5
Anyway, with all this Christmas “magic” abounding (and as a remedy for all this gaudiness), we might as well move on to an actual “magic” cake. Making a cake is magical enough, but there is a childlike joy when you put a homogeneous mix into the oven and it emerges, burnished, in perfectly ordered layers. This particular magic cake is like a perfectly formed French entremet, but without the effort. All it requires is eggs to be separated and whisked and somehow it all falls into place. When making the speculoos topping, I would advise making a bit extra to allow some innocent “sampling” during the process (it’s ambrosial).
Ingredients
Speculoos layer
300g Speculoos cookies + 100g for decoration
220ml unsweetened condensed milk
¼ tsp salt
Cake
3 eggs, separated
75g caster sugar
90g unsalted butter
50g plain flour
¼ tsp salt
300ml milk
4 small pears, peeled, cored and diced into 1cm cubes
21cm square cake tin (or round tin with similar area) fully lined with baking parchment. It doesn’t matter if the tin is marginally larger or smaller
Method
1) Preheat the oven to 150°C
2) Put all the ingredients for the speculoos layer into a blender and blitz until smooth, and set aside.
3) Melt the butter and set aside to cool. In a bowl (if doing by hand) or electric mixer beat the sugar with the egg yolks until thick and pale. Pour in the butter and 150g of the Speculoos layer and gently combine. Then sieve in the flour and salt and fold to combine. Pour in the milk and combine.
4) In the bone-dry bowl of an electric mixer or by hand, whisk the egg whites vigorously until they thicken and hold their shape in stiff peaks. Very gently fold them into the batter, taking care to preserve the aeration.
5) Scatter the diced pear evenly on the bottom of the cake tin, then gently pour the batter on top. Smooth the surface with a knife and place in the oven to cake for 35 minutes. The cake will still be soft when you remove it from the oven but this is how it is meant to be. Put it onto a rack to cool to room temperature, then place in the fridge for an hour to set.
6) To serve, lift the cake out of the tin on the serving plate using the baking parchment and remove baking parchment. I choose to slice off the cake edges in order to better expose the layers. Spread the remaining speculoos layer on top and over it crumble the decorative speculoos cookies.
Recipe adapted from "Magic Cakes" by Christelle Huet-Gomez
Candlelit dinner in a restaurant suddenly eye-wateringly expensive, a single rose rattling in its cellophane wrapper, chocolates filled with chemical cherry liqueur, and greetings cards covered with hearts and teddy bears and hearts and pictures of champagne and hearts: these are contemporary references to St Valentine’s Day.
How much more seductive would it be to celebrate Lupercalia as the Ancients did?
On the 15th February, naked youths of noble birth, anointed with the blood of sacrificed goats, and carrying strips of the animals’ hide, would run through Rome in a spirit of hilarity and lash waiting females in order to promote fertility and assist with pregnancy.
If this sounds too overtly carnal, how about taking the advice of Ovid in his Ars Amatoria on how to secure a woman or man, how to seduce him or her, and how to keep him or her from being stolen by another? His tips include knowing where to look to find the beloved as he or she will not just fall from heaven.
According to Ovid, the theatre is a particularly good place to meet beautiful women. He warns men to wear well cut and spotless togas, and to avoid having dirty, long fingernails and visible nasal hairs.
Beware, too, the persuasive effects of low lighting and alcohol which can mask a woman’s true looks, he says.
Women, however, he advises, should use to their advantage all the tricks that cosmetics can offer, while not letting any man observe their application: hide the work in progress, he suggests. Wear simple, unostentatious clothes, revealing a slightly exposed shoulder or upper arm. Sing, play an instrument and learn to play board games, he tells women, and beware of fops.
But if all this sounds too much like hard work, I heartily recommend that you make these cookies. Simple to make, they are rich and decadent and infinitely seductive.
Ingredients (Makes 24)
300g good quality dark chocolate (70% cocoa)
160g Nutella
45g unsalted butter
225g plain flour
35g unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
4 large eggs
300g caster sugar
finely grated zest of 2 medium-sized oranges
1 tbsp fresh orange juice
80g icing sugar
2 baking sheets, lined with non-stick baking parchment
Method
Every year the bile-inducing pink and fluffy over-commercialised day of dictated love comes about. And unsurprisingly, due to their arguable aphrodisiac qualities, sales of oysters peak. Well as you or your date slurp these down on your Valentine’s date, think of this: oysters are related to slugs. Why not grab a few from your garden, douse them with some Tabasco with buttered bread on the side and gulp these instead – cheaper and more plentiful (this is not actually a recipe).
Something a little more acceptable as an anti-Valentine’s day recipe might be this: soft & chewy hot spiced double ginger nut cookies. They’re not red, not cloying-sweet and they’re not heart shaped. They even have a little rebellious kick to them if you choose to add the cayenne pepper, which as a spice addict, I love. But if you prefer something a little milder, leave it out. If you want to shake off a stalker add more (roughly 5x stated quantity) and deliver gift wrapped.
Makes about 35 cookies
Ingredients
200g unsalted butter, softened
440g self-raising flour
125g caster sugar
3 tbsp ground ginger
1 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (optional)
1/4 tsp salt
100g stem ginger (;preserved in syrup), finely chopped
2 tbsp ginger syrup (from the preserved ginger)
180g golden syrup
30g treacle
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 baking tray lined with baking parchment
Method
1.)Preheat oven to 160°C.
2.)Place butter, flour, sugar, ground ginger, bicarbonate of soda, cayenne pepper (if using) and salt in a blender and blitz until thoroughly mixed and is like damp sand.
3.) Warm chopped ginger, ginger syrup, golden syrup, treacle and vanilla extract in a pan over a low heat for a couple of minutes until the mixture becomes less viscose. Pour this into the dry ingredients and pulse until combined into a dough.
4.) Roll the dough into 3cm wide spheres and space them out on the baking trays as they will spread whilst baking.
5.) Place in preheated oven and bake for 7-10 minutes until golden and slightly crisp on outside and very soft on the inside. They should seem slightly under-baked as they will continue to cook as they cool and this will make them deliciously soft and chewy.
I blame salted-caramel for my short-sightedness. At the end of morning assembly, when I was five years’ old, the headmistress would read a prayer. Every one of us would dutifully lower her head and shut her eyes. I pressed mine tightly closed with my hands until, like some computer generated visualiser, semi-hallucinogenic patterns appeared. Well, mainly one pattern: a recurrent drop of molten gold slipping seductively into its glistening pool, creating ripples that seemed to extend to the corners of dark space behind my eyelids. I found the effect narcotic, and would do this without fail every morning.
I now realise that the real-life equivalent to that voluptuous liquefied gold is salted caramel: fudgy, creamy slick, viscous and dangerously addictive, I’m obsessed.
Too often it drenches and drowns all other culinary thoughts and ideas I have, but to resist its ambrosial pull is futile. So, instead, I have decided to partner it with its already well-established acquaintance - chocolate. That’s not to say that these cookies are in any way ordinary.
Most shop bought packets of chocolate cookies are filled with empty promises, often dry, floury, over sodium bicarbonated, and rock solid.
I have a friend who has developed and perfected the “cookie-pinch”. Her forefinger and thumb clamp down on unsuspecting biscuits in their paper wrapping. The motion is swift and discreet, but in that split second the pads of her well-attuned digits estimate the freshness of the cookie to the nearest hour.
These chocolate biscuits, however, are crisp, rich, chewy and soft, and cushioned by their silky smooth salted caramel filling, rendering my friend’s admirable skill totally redundant.
Ingredients
Cookie
200g dark chocolate, chopped
40g unsalted butter
2 eggs
150g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
35g plain flour, sifted
¼ tsp baking powder, sifted
¼ tsp salt
Salted caramel frosting
165g white caster sugar
60ml water
125ml single cream
150g unsalted butter, chopped
250g icing sugar, sieved
1 tsp vanilla extract
½ tsp salt
2 baking trays, lined with baking parchment
Cookies
Salted caramel icing
(adapted from Donna Hay)
