Tag: cookies

Cranberry Brown Butter Shortbread Bars

The cranberries are in! There isn’t a whole lot of cranberry love here in Germany, so when they showed up at the green-grocers, I came home and started strategizing. The brown butter creates an extra step, but the different flavor is very worth it. I made Cliff brown the butter (because hot popping grease freaks me out) and he did a fantastic job. I found this recipe here, and have changed very little (used a little less sugar with the berries), but I broke down the instructions into a more readable format. Don’t let the lengthy instructions put you off – it’s a lot easier to execute than to explain.

1 c + 5 T (263 g) butter
1 c (210 g) sugar, divided into 3/4 and 1/4 c
3/4 t salt
2 egg yolks, lightly beaten
1/4 t almond extract (didn’t have any, so we used amaretto)
3 c + 3 T (404 g) flour
1 lb (500 g) cranberries, picked over and rinsed
3/4 c (158 g) sugar
1/3 c orange juice

  1. Prepare brown butter. In a saucepan, melt butter over medium-low heat. Once it’s completely melted, turn heat up to medium and stir constantly until milk solids separate out (it will foam, just keep stirring). Butter will smell very nutty and turn golden brown. Pour into a heatproof bowl, set aside and allow to cool, stirring occasionally.

  2. Line a 9×13 pan with foil or parchment. In a large mixing bowl, combine cooled butter, 3/4 c sugar and salt, stirring until well mixed. Add yolks and almond extract, stirring until smooth. Next, add the flour. The original recipe says to use a spoon or rubber spatula, but I incorporated it with a pastry blender. Worked for me. The dough will be quite stiff and dense, just go with it. Transfer about 2 c of the dough to the lined 9×13 and press it until it knits together. It will still be kind of bumpy, but that’s cool. Put the pan of dough into the fridge for about 40 minutes. Add the remaining 1/4 c of sugar to the rest of the dough and work it in with the pastry blender until it’s crumbly.

  3. Prepare cranberry jam. In a deep saucepan over high heat, bring cranberries, sugar and orange juice to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and stir constantly until cranberries have popped and jam achieves chunky, thick consistency. Set aside and allow to cool a little.

  4. Heat oven to 325° F/163° C. Remove dough from fridge and prick all over with fork. Bake for 15 minutes, then remove from oven and turn heat up to 350° F/175° F. Spread cranberry jam evenly over hot shortbread, then sprinkle remaining dough crumbles over the top. Return shortbread to oven and bake for at least 25 minutes or until streusel is golden brown. Remove from oven and allow to cool on trivet for at least 1 hour.

Ginger Cookies

I saw @LivWrites and @Rachel_Munich tossing ideas around about ginger cookies, including this recipe from allrecipes.com: Big Soft Ginger Cookies

I thought to myself, “Self! You have everything you need to make those!”

But I looked more closely at the recipe and decided, mostly out of laziness and efficiency, to swap in ingredients of my own choosing: some coconut oil and butter instead of margarine What follows are the ingredients I used — the steps are the same as the original.

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups (311 g) whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon salt
110 g coconut oil
50 g butter
1 cup (210 g) white sugar
1 egg
1 tablespoon water
1/4 cup (about 100 ml) molasses
2 tablespoons white sugar for rolling

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Sift together the flour, ginger, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, and salt. Set aside.

In a large bowl, cream together the margarine and 1 cup sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg, then stir in the water and molasses. Gradually stir the sifted ingredients into the molasses mixture. Shape dough into walnut sized balls*, and roll them in the remaining 2 tablespoons of sugar. Place the cookies 2 inches apart onto an ungreased cookie sheet, and flatten slightly.

Bake for 8 to 10 minutes in the preheated oven. Allow cookies to cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container.

They don’t look so great, but the flavor is very good. As usual, I tried to get too many cookies onto one sheet and I totally forgot that step about letting them cool before trying to move them. I like the subtle addition my coconut oil substitution lends.

These will be good eating as an ice cream topping. Next time, I think I’ll try oomphing up the ginger flavor another notch with either even more ground ginger or perhaps some freshly minced ginger root in the dough. Not to mention sticking closely to the sizing guide and making four or more trays worth instead of just two.

*Really, tend toward smaller if you can help it. Walnut-sized must mean “half the edible nut part inside of a walnut shell,” and not the greeny fleshy ball thing containing the shell containing the edible nut parts that falls from the tree. Too literal, I know.

Chocolate Nutter

We got inspired to try these while quarantined sick yesterday at home and surfing around looking for recipes involving an excuse to turn on the oven and no need to leave the apartment for supplies. GuiltyKitchen.com to the rescue!

  • 1/2 cup butter (105g), room temperature
  • 1/2 cup natural peanut butter, chunky (how many grams is that? Not sure. Had to measure the messy way. And we didn’t have natural or chunky peanut butter, so we subbed in whatever we had.)
  • 3/4 cup packed yellow sugar (157g — not entirely sure what “yellow sugar” was, we used a light-brown large-granule sugar normally reserved for our coffee — to great textural effect)
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 2 tsp vanilla
  • 1 egg
  • 1/2 cup cocoa (also had to measure that one the old messy way)
  • 1/4 cup whole wheat flour (35g of generic whatever flour)
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1 cup almond meal (another messy measure)
  • 1/2 cup peanut butter chips (note to us: need more of these)
  1. Preheat oven to 325°F. Cream butter, peanut butter, sugar and salt. Beat in egg and vanilla.
  2. Sift cocoa, flour, baking powder and soda into wet ingredients, mix well. Stir in almond meal.
  3. Add PB chips and stir to combine.
  4. Roll dough into 1 1/2″ balls, then flatten before placing 1″ apart on baking paper lined cookie sheet.
  5. Bake for 12 minutes (we did 15 total, 12 was obviously not enough in our oven). Cool completely before enjoying!

These practically scream for a cup of coffee to enjoy them with. The flavor is dark and rich and the consistency is nice. I just wish they were a bit firmer or crispier — though Sarah prefers them as soft as they are. The recipe’s source is still working on firming them up, too. She suggests more butter, flour and sugar, but I really don’t want to detract from the richness of the chocolate flavor and am worried that more sugar and flour would do that. I’m wondering if simply LESS butter is the way to go to remove extra moisture from the equation.

Banana Cookies

We’ve been on a bit of a banana kick lately, I guess. This recipe was inspired by this one, but we changed it up by using half brown sugar and half white sugar. That concept came from our pal Andrea, whose chocolate chip cookies were the perfect mix between soft and squishy and dense and crunchy.

Anyhoo, here we go:

  • 1/2 cup of unsalted butter, room temperature
  • 1/2 cup of sugar
  • 1/2 cup of brown sugar
  • 1 egg, room temperature
  • 1 cup of mashed bananas (about 3 large bananas)
  • 1 teaspoon of baking soda
  • 2 cups of flour
  • pinch of salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon of ground mace or nutmeg
  • 1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves
  • 1 cup of pecans (walnuts and chocolate chips are fine alternatives)

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Cream the butter and sugar and brown together until light and fluffy. Add the egg and continue to beat until the mixture is light and fluffy.

  2. In a bowl, mix the mashed bananas and baking soda. Let sit for 2 minutes. The baking soda will react with the acid in the bananas which in turn will give the cookies their lift and rise.

  3. Mix the banana mixture into the butter mixture. Mix together the flour, salt, and spices and sift into the butter and banana mixture and mix until just combined.

  4. Fold into the batter the pecans or chocolate chips if using. Drop in dollops onto parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Bake for 11-13 minutes or until nicely golden brown. Let cool on wire racks.

Makes about 30 cookies.

Actually for us, it made exactly 3 dozen. Not sure how that happened; our recipes generally yield fewer cookies/muffins/whatevers than promised. But these are good — really good. I think I like them even better than banana bread or banana muffins due to the ease of distribution (I’m taking a few to work tomorrow and publicizing this here and now ensures that they’ll survive the night) and greatly reduced risk of loss due to crumbs from slicing or peeling (i.e., muffin liners).