Soft Honey Butter Cookies and Baklava Cookies

Is this picture blurry, or do I need to clean my glasses?

If you like crispy cookies, stop reading this right now. These are soft and chewy buttery-sweet cookies. If you want to bite into a cookie and get crumbs in your lap (or in your cleavage) this in not the recipe for you. 

Preheat your oven to 350 convection, or 375 degrees regular oven.

Ingredients:

1 stick salted butter, room temperature
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup white sugar
1/3 cup of the best quality honey you can get
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
1 egg
1 and 2/3 cup all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt

Almonds for topping, or to mix in (optional) 
Walnuts, sugar, cinnamon and honey for baklava topping (optional)

The method is pretty standard, if you've made Nestle Toll House cookies, you can make these. Mix the butter and sugars together first, then add the egg and honey and beat for another minute. (The vegetable oil is for you to rub the inside of the 1/3 cup measuring cup with before you measure out the honey, so the honey won't stick to the cup.) 
Add the dry ingredients next and beat well until combined. 

Drop your dough onto a cookie sheet (I use some parchment paper lining because I hate cleaning pans) by rounded tablespoons. I like to use my hands to ever-so-gently roll each ball of dough and then squash it into cookie shape, so the cookies come out nice and round- you don't have to do that. (But you should, don't be lazy!)

Before you put them in the oven, you can sprinkle the tops with sugar, or if you like nuts you can sprinkle the tops with sliced almonds or add some sliced almonds to the batter. 

If you're feeling really adventurous, you could mix 1/3 cup finely chopped walnuts with a teaspoon of sugar and 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon, and sprinkle that mixture on top of them to give you kind of a 'baklava' cookie, and when they come out of the oven, you would drizzle just a wee bit of extra honey on top.
Bake them for 8-10 minutes. I like to pull them out the second they are just barely cooked, when the dough is not shiny-raw looking on top, but not yet really brown on the edges. The more undercooked they are, the more you'll get the flavor of the honey; nine minutes is probably ideal, if you do ten minutes they'll be less on the soft side and more on the chewy side. Set a timer, or don't leave the kitchen! Burnt cookies are the worst.

Let them sit for one minute on the pan before you GENTLY remove the cookies with a thin spatula to cool on a rack (or paper towels of you don't have a rack). They will seem very soft while they are still hot, resist the urge to put them back in the oven, unless they are truly raw and wet in the middle.

Christmas Day Gingerbread Cookies

These cookies are thin and chewy, so if you like that kind of cookie, you'll really love these.  They are good for making vanilla ice cream cookie sandwiches, or you can frost them with buttercream. They have an interesting soft sugary crystalline texture because the sugar doesn't get creamed with the butter. If you can't have dairy, the butter can be replaced with margarine or Crisco and the recipe will still work, and then you could use 7-minute frosting to ice them.

Ingredients:

3 cups all purpose flour
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 rounded teaspoon ginger
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 sticks of soft butter 
1/3 cup mild molasses 
1 egg

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix the flour, sugars, spices and baking soda in you mixer first, then add the butter, molasses and egg. If you butter the measuring cup with one of the wrappers, the molasses will come out of the it easier. Mix the ingredients for a few minutes on medium speed until it looks combined. The dough will look and feel a little bit like wet sand.

Using a heaping teaspoon of dough at a time, roll each lump of  dough into a ball, then squash it flat into a round cookie shape. Place them on the cookie pan, spaced about an inch apart since they will spread out a little. Bake for ten minutes, then let the cookies rest on the pan for another two-four minutes or so, until they stiffen up enough to remove them with a spatula without messing them up. Because they are thin, they don't tell long to cool, so you can frost them after they sit on a cooling rack for about 15 minutes.

Soft Pretzel Dinner Rolls

Costco has great pretzel rolls, but they come in this huge bag which you are guaranteed to eat in two days and get all fat. Instead, just make eight of them and mitigate the weight gain. I don't know what their recipe is, but mine is kind of awesome.


Ingredients:

For the dough:
1 packet Rapid Rise yeast
1 cup warm milk
1/4 cup melted lard (just do it)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
2 2/3 cups flour (if you're flour isn't as dry as mine was, you might need almost 3 cups, you just want the dough to come away from the sides of the bowl easily and not be too crazy sticky.)

For the tops of the rolls:
1 beaten egg, to brush on, plus a little kosher salt for sprinkling.

For "bath" water:
 5 cups water
1/3 cup baking soda

In a bowl, mix up the yeast, warm milk and sugar, then add the rest of the ingredients making sure that the baking powder is distributed evenly in the flour first. Knead the dough for a bit, you don't need to do it for a long time. Separate the dough into 8 even rolls. Let them rise uncovered on your cutting board for 30 minutes. Meanwhile bring to a boil the water and baking soda in a medium saucepan and preheat the oven to 425 degrees. 

When the  rolls have risen, use a slotted spatula to carefully lower each roll into the boiling baking soda water, one at a time, face down. Let each one go for about 30 seconds, then flip it over and let it boil on the underside for about ten seconds, then move it to a small oiled cookie sheet, putting them all fairly close together. If you don't have non-stick pans, you might want to line the pan with oiled parchment paper. Brush each roll with egg wash and sprinkle lightly with kosher salt.

Bake the rolls for 11 minutes, until they're dark brown like a pretzel.