A is for Almond, B is for Butter...

I have an excess of almond extract (I couldn't help myself when an 8oz bottle of the good stuff appeared on sale), so expect it to be included in many recipes in future.  Also almond is delicious.  So is brown(ed) butter, which brings me to Brown Butter and Almond Cookies.

I adapted a simple sugar cookie recipe, adding the brown butter and almond and also turning them into a slice-and-bake variety because I wanted the edges of the cookies to be rolled in ground almond.  I consulted this slice-and-bake recipe for the thickness of the sliced cookies and the temperature, although it might also have behooved me to use icing sugar as it suggests instead of caster sugar.  It's an excuse for another go anyway!

The recipe is in the Recipe Box.  Start by browning the butter over medium heat, stirring continuously once melted to keep it from burning.  Keep stirring the butter over heat until it is brown and emitting a nutty aroma.  I took the butter off the heat when it smelled right to me, but once it was out of the pan I thought I should have left it longer, the butter could have been browner.

I stuck it in the freezer instead of in the refrigerator because I was in a hurry (no time to wait when cookies are at stake!), but I left it a little too long - the butter froze.

I let it thaw, but the butter was still quite cold when I creamed it with the sugar.  It's probably better to wait for the butter to be at room temperature before creaming it, but as you might have noticed, I have issues with patience...  While waiting for the brown butter to set - or waiting for it to defrost as the case may be - mix the dry ingredients and set them aside.  When the butter is set, cream it with the sugar, beat in the egg and extracts, and stir in the dry ingredients.  Roll the dough into logs, and then firm them up by rolling them tightly in parchment paper or wax paper.

Once all the dough is rolled, refrigerate it for a couple hours, or freeze it for 20-40 or so minutes (don't freeze it solid, unless you want to save it for use another day).  When the logs are ready, take them out and roll them through ground almonds.

After the logs have been coated in ground almonds, slice off cookies about 1/3" thick.

Bake at 350F (180C) for about 8 minutes.  I baked my first batch for longer, until they were a golden brown, and they came out very crunchy; not a bad crunchy, a bit like a biscotti, but still, you'd not want to bite into them if you had dentures...

If at first you don't succeed, bake some more!

Perfectibaking 2: Lessons in Lard

One of the beautiful things about a chocolate chip cookie is that it needs no occasion.*  I didn't have one the last time I baked a batch, but it just so happens that I had one this time.  Well, maybe not an occasion, but a reason: I wanted to try baking with lard.

This is not a desire that I'm accustomed to.  In fact, I have never before had any desire to use lard for anything; I'd go as far as to say I'd probably avoid it.  In reality though, lard is just shortening: the original shortening and trans fat free!  Even so, I'm still scrunching up my face right now thinking about it.  Old habits die hard.

The idea with using lard in cookies, as I was recently told by the owner of a wonderful little bakery, is that it makes them lighter and gives a more tender crumb than using butter alone (and from my brief experience I think crispier, though I've read it does the opposite).  Butter contains water where lard and other shortenings do not, which is why lard or shortening is often called for in pie dough to produce a light flaky crust.  Now I'm also wondering if this is why shortening is the fat of choice in the Waldorf-Astoria recipe for red velvet cake, to offset the liquid from all that food colouring...

The recipe is in the Recipe Box.  I used half lard and half butter, as directed by the bakery owner, to retain the creamy butter flavour.  Lard is (fortunately) flavourless.

I combined the dry ingredients to start, then cubed the butter and lard to cream them.

Mmm, creamed lard...

Then I combined the sugars.

I creamed the sugars into the fats before adding the dry ingredients.  In fact, I think I creamed the sugars and fats a little too vigorously, creating air pockets suitable for a cake.  Cakey cookies are good, don't get me wrong, but I'd wondered with the last batch why the cookies poofed up so high, and I think my creaming method may be the answer.  For the next go I'll use a spoon instead of the hand mixer.

I did use a spoon for adding the egg and vanilla, and then for combining with the dry ingredients.  Lastly, the chocolate!

Spoon out the dough and roll it up into balls, you know the drill.

They baked to a nice light brown, and the first round (I only have one baking sheet) puffed up like my last batch.  The second had more spread but I think that was because a.) the dough was softer from sitting out and b.) the sheet was still warm from the first round when I arranged the second on it.

The second round was thinner with more spread.

I let them cool a bit, and then stuffed my face.  As expected they were light and crumbly and I recommend serving with ice cream.

* I feel like I've begun posts like this before...  It may just be my excuse for baking whatever whenever...  Oh well.

Perfectibaking

Maybe it was the man who invented a machine to find the perfect chocolate chip cookie.  Maybe it was learning about the chemistry behind these sweet treats.  Maybe it was just high time to forget the science and take a big bite through the crispy caramelized edge of an oven-fresh chocolate chip cookie and straight into its gooey melting centre.

I haven't made chocolate chip cookies in a surprisingly long time, and have had a wide range of success with my past batches.  One of my earliest baking memories, in fact, was making chocolate chip cookies.  It was a joint effort with my sister when we were being babysat, and our abilities were questionable at best.  Let's just say that our oven use was supervised, but our measuring wasn't... and salt does look a lot like sugar; Rochelle from Sport Relief Bake Off knows.  More recently I used a recipe from a Mrs. Fields' cookie cookbook, and loved them!  That's why this time I tried to find the same recipe online, leading me to Mrs. Fields' blog and her Blue Ribbon Chocolate Chip Cookies.

The recipe called for more chocolate than I had on hand (one bar) and for dark brown sugar when all I had was light.  So I adapted; I cut the recipe in half to offset the lack of chocolate (my waistline may also have thanked me) and, in an attempt to return some of the deeper caramel flavour, substituted one tablespoon of molasses for one tablespoon of the light brown sugar.  My adapted recipe is in the Recipe Box.

The recipe is very straightforward: whisk the dry ingredients in one bowl, cream the butter and sugar in another before adding the egg, molasses and vanilla, and then combine everything.  As with most recipes, over-mixing should be avoided.

After mixing, scoop out tablespoon-sized balls of dough, roll them up, and arrange them on the baking sheet.

I expected quite a bit of spread from the cookies - to be honest I thought they might have been one giant cookie when I took them out - but I took a chance and they were fine.  They spread at the start of the bake...

And then they puffed up.

They surprised me again when they didn't fall back down after I took them out of the oven... These were not the same cookies I'd made from the cookbook.  I don't know if that was because the base recipes were different, I checked the cookbook and the recipes are the same (thank you Mrs. Fields!), so it seems that either my method (ignoring the directions in the recipe or not ignoring them) changed, or the addition of molasses really made quite a difference.  I remember those initial cookies as being relatively flat, crispy on the outside and soft in the middle; the kind you could bend a bit without breaking.  This batch also bends without breaking, to a point, but are far thicker.  They aren't cakey or dry, but a bit crumbly in a good way.  The edges and surface have that carmelized sweetness, and the overall flavour is very nice.  I simply don't know what happened to give them their height; maybe it's my memory that's faulty.

I checked out this handy guide from Handle the Heat, but it didn't shed much light on my particular batch, as the only thick cookies she baked were the product of adding more flour to the recipe, which I didn't do.  She also reports that they were undercooked and gooey in the middle, which mine were not.  (That is, however, in line with what cookie machine guy suggested - see link above).  It seems like I'll just have to make them again - or a few more times - to experiment.  Darn.

Speaking of experiment, I made a discovery with this micro-batch of cookies: an ex-Balvenie canister holds one dozen of them, perfectly.

They aren't whisky, but they'll certainly do.

A Candy Cane Christmas

A stock compliment for food, at least in tv commercials, is 'It's just like grandma used to make!'.  It's not that grandma's cooking should necessarily be held up as the gold standard against which all other food should be judged (let's be honest, the course of history has surely produced grandmas who couldn't bake), it's the idea that grandma represents warmth, love and comfort [food] that the compliment seeks to evoke.  Unfortunately for me I grew up on the opposite coast from my grandma, and while we visited every couple of years as kids, there aren't really many things that I can remember her making, except - importantly - cookies.

My favourite cookies of grammy's were candy cane cookies.  She probably didn't make up the recipe herself; it appears in Christmas Cookies (1986).  But I didn't know that as a kid, and she was making them long before the publication of that book: my mom remembers her making them when she was little.  Nowadays if mom makes them she uses a handwritten recipe copied from grandma's - the best kind of recipe I think.

Not only do handwritten recipes show that the ingredients and methods are tested, but it puts you in touch with the writer and brings the recipe to life.  They might have additions and emendations, and, if you're lucky, they even have food stains to show their time in action (also a sign of a good cookbook).  They preserve history, but aren't stuck in it.  My mom's candy cane cookies are not just like grandma's, and mine are not just like hers.  It doesn't matter though, because they are yummy in every iteration, and a candy cane cookie will always mean Christmas.

The recipe for candy cane cookies can be found in the Recipe Box.  These cookies begin with one batch of basic cookie dough, similar to sugar cookie dough but with the addition of shortening.  To this grandma would add both vanilla and almond extract.  Mom adds vanilla, almond, and peppermint extract.  I add just the vanilla, then split the dough into two batches (which will be the two stripes of the candy canes) before adding almond to one and peppermint to the other.  The peppermint batch also gets red dye.

Take a small ball of each colour (less than a tablespoon), and roll them into strips.  Before doing this, you can optionally crush up about three candy canes to roll the red strips through, or you can crush them later to mix with sugar and sprinkle over the cookies just after they come out of the oven.  In my experience the sugar-candy cane sprinkles don't stick very well, so just to be safe I do both.

Roll the strips of each colour out to about the width of your pinky finger, then twist them together.  It is possible to make larger candy canes than this, but they may be more liable to breakage, especially if they will be travelling.

Then shape into a candy cane.  I do this before transferring to a lightly greased baking sheet, but if it is easier for you you could transfer the twist to the sheet and shape there.

These cookies do expand a bit when baking, so make sure there is a little bit of space between each cane.

If baking with candy cane pieces, remove from the baking sheet while still slightly warm, as the melted candy will stick to the sheet.

Finally, all you need to do is decide if you're leaving any for Santa...

An Array of Cakes, an Array of Hedgehogs

If finding cobwebs on your whisk isn't a sure sign of a neglected procrastibaking habit, I don't know what is.  I don't know how I let the situation get to such a point; could it be that I've actually been getting real work done?  Or maybe Charlotte was just trying to whip something up...

While I did have a bit of a break from baking recently, I didn't have a break from cake.  Some friends of mine came to visit and we had a bit of a cake tour in London, hitting the Cake and Bake Show, back for its second year, and the popular chocolaterie Choccywoccydoodah.  I'd been to Choccywoccydoodah, a bright shop whose wares are not for the faint of stomach (I love chocolate, but even I struggled to finish my hot cocoa) before, but this was my first visit to the Cake and Bake Show.  Sprawled across the venue in Earl's Court was an array of food stalls, some run by larger bakeries, others by small businesses, and virtually all of them tempting.

If you wanted to try it all, you would have to have prep snacked for weeks.

There were also plenty of cake decorating tools on offer, and inspiration all around!  There were silicone lace molds that allow you to do things like this:

I think I may need to make an investment.

There were adorable hedgehogs*, to which I will return shortly...:

And there was creativity in ample quantities, some of it with touch of humour/creepiness:

There were also free samples (yay free!), and charity goody bags with cake mix and sprinkles.  Because everyone knows that edible souvenirs are the best souvenirs.

Getting back to inspiration and hedgehogs, I wanted needed to make those hedgehog cookies.  So I did!  After de-webbing my baking equipment...

I wasn't sure what type of cookie they were made out of, but I thought pfeffernusse would be close enough.  Plus I really like pfeffernusse, but haven't actually made it before.  I used yet another of Martha's recipes.

The cookies were not difficult at all to make; the biggest problem I had came when I realized that the allspice in my cabinet was really mixed spice.  Oops.  So I substituted equal parts cinnamon and cloves and a pinch of nutmeg.

After mixing the dry ingredients together, I played with molasses.  Can't say that I ever have before; that's some slow sticky stuff.  Contrary to the idiom, however, I think it would have been faster (and less messy) to pour it directly into the measuring cup, rather than spooning it.

After beating the butter, sugar and molasses, and then mixing in everything else (eggs, vanilla, dry ingredients), you just spoon out dough, roll them into balls (or in my case, egg-shaped hedgehogs-to-be), and put them on parchment-covered trays.

And bake.  The recipe says 15 minutes in the oven until golden and firm to the touch.  I didn't read carefully enough to touch the first batch, and consequently I think that I left them in a bit too long waiting for golden brown; that was about a 15 minute bake time.  The second batch went for about 13 minutes and they were firm to the touch when I took them out.

Halfway to hedgehogs!

When the cookies had cooled, I melted some dark chocolate (two bars, which may have been excessive) and dipped the cookies.

At first I dipped the cookies about halfway up with chocolate, but after testing putting faces on them they looked a bit too much like disembodied heads for my liking.  The hedgehogs needed less of a receding hairline, so I dipped them deeper into the chocolate (ah, such hardships).  When dipping, the wider end of the cookie goes into the chocolate, the thinner end is the head.  Shake the excess chocolate off, and then dip the top part of the cookie into chocolate sprinkles.

If the chocolate is very hot the sprinkles might fall off the cookie in chunks when you pull in out of the dish, so you could let the chocolate cool a bit after dipping to prevent this.  Otherwise try to pull the chocolate sprinkle chunks out of the dish so you don't get lumpy hedgehogs.  After they've been sprinkled, lay them out on parchment to set; I reused the parchment I baked on.  Finally, rather than messing with a piping bag to add the faces, I just dipped a toothpick into the chocolate and dripped tiny blobs onto the front of the cookies for eyes and nose.

It is both a blessing and a curse that the cute factor makes them more difficult to eat... but not that much more difficult.

*A side note: who knew that the collective noun for hedgehogs is an array?