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.

Jeannie's Crunchy Custard Lulu's

I promised I wouldn't post another summer squash recipe, so then, of course, I had nothing else to write about. Thank God my sister came to town and dragged me out of my squash rut. We made many non-squashy dishes which I will soon share. 

This first dessert she made for me was so good I ate a whole plate of them- yes, all the ones in the picture. Don't judge me. They're crunchy and creamy and glazed with wildflower honey. What would you have done? We called them lu-lu's because the Greek word for donuts similar to these are called loukoumathes...which is kinda hard to say. And to spell.

Jeannie's Recipe:

Pastry:

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup water
1 T. dry yeast
1 tsp. salt
1 T. sugar
Oil for frying (vegetable, corn, sunflower, etc.)
Honey for drizzling

Whisk dry ingredients, add water and whisk until smooth.  Cover and let rise in a cool/dry place for about 45 minutes.  Heat vegetable or corn oil in a sauce pot or fryer to 350 degrees.  Drop by the spoonful in the hot oil and flip after about a minute - should be deep golden color, but not too dark (dark will mean bitter to your tongue).  Drain on paper towels and drizzle honey over the pastries before they cool.

Custard:

It's a great idea to make the custard first, let it cool to room temperature and then refrigerate it while you are making the pastry.

1 cup whole milk
2 T. corn starch
Pinch of salt
1/3 cup sugar
1 T. real butter
2 eggs
1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

Whisk all ingredients in a sauce pan.  Turn on heat to medium or medium high and continue whisking until smooth and thickened.  Remove from heat and keep whisking.  Transfer to another bowl and whisk again.  The more you whisk, the smooth and fluffier your custard will be.  Cool to room temperature and refrigerate.

Assembly:

Pipe the cold custard over the cooled pastry and serve.

Macaroons with Buttercream Filling

First off, I'd like to say that "February Carb Month" (as I declared it) has to end early or it will be the end of my waistline. One cool thing about these cookies though, as sugary and calorie-rich as they are, they are totally gluten-free for all of my "glutarded" friends out there.

The inspiration for these macaroons was a trip to the well-appointed Ginger Elizabeth here in Sacramento. This teeny weeny boutique has delicious hot chocolate and other goodies including lovely little French Macarons. They are deliciously crispy and chewy little sandwich cookies that could become quite a habit, but at $1.75 per tiny cookie, it's an addiction I can't afford all of the time. After looking at a few recipes on the internet, I decided that, even with the high cost of almond flour I could enjoy these for much less.

For the macaroons:

1 16 oz. bag of Bob's Red Mill Almond Meal/Flour
2 tablespoons regular granulated sugar
3 cups powdered sugar, sifted if the bag has been opened
5 large egg whites (save three of the egg yolks for the filling)
1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Beat the egg whites. When they are frothy-looking, add the cream of tartar, and then whip them on high until you get stiff peaks, adding the 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar slowly as you whip. If you haven't done this in a while, stiff peaks means that when you turn the beater upside down, the peak of white fluff doesn't fall over.

Next, with a big spatula, gently fold in the almond flour and powdered sugar one cup at a time, alternating them, and anytime in there put the 2 teaspoons of vanilla in as well. 

Now here's where it gets tricky. You need two cookie sheets and they must be non-stick OR you need to use parchment paper, but you must ALSO grease them well. Don't miss a spot. These cookies will stick to a pan like nobody's business. To dispense your goopy dough, you either need a pastry bag with a wide-mouth tip, OR you can be a like me and shove it all in a gallon Zip-loc freezer bag and cut one of the corners off with your scissors to make your own pastry bag. 

Dispense dough in 2 inch blobs, more or less, into even rows. I believe I fit about 20-24 cookies per large cookie sheet. Afterwards, wet your hands in cold water and use them to pat each blob until they are smooth on top and evenly round. Now the deal is, you are supposed to let the cookies sit for quite a while, an hour or even two, before baking. The reason for this is that you want a dry crust to form on the top which will give your cookies and even look and more importantly, an even crispy outer crust. If you pop them in the oven straight away, they taste just as nice, but they will have cracks on top and have uneven texture. IS that a big deal? Not really. If you don't care, then who else will? They're your cookies, you can do what you want.

Bake them, one pan at a time, on the  middle rack in a 325 degree oven for twenty minutes each. Transfer to wire racks to cool, or just lay them on wax paper or lint-free towels or a board or something if you don't have racks. Even with my greased non-stick pan I had to use  my super thin metal spatula to get them up easily, that's how sticky these babies are!

Let them cool completely before you make the little sandwiches, but they cool in half the time you might expect.

For the buttercream:

3 egg yolks
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup corn syrup
a pinch of salt
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract (or other flavoring you like, lemon zest is great)
2 sticks of room temperature butter (not too warm though)

Beat the heck out of the egg yolks. I'm talking at least four or five minutes. Add a pinch of salt. Then melt the sugar and corn syrup over medium heat in a small pot, and stir around until the sugar looks like it's dissolved into the corn syrup well. This takes, oh, about three to five minutes. Now you grab the pot handle in one hand and the egg beater with the other hand, and slowly stream the syrup into the egg yolks, beating (on high) the syrup into the yolks as you go. 

God help you if you are using a stand mixer. The problem with a stand mixer is that the syrup is supposed to not hit the side of the bowl or the metal egg beaters. If it does, it gets hard like candy and won't mix into the eggs! SO, if all you have is a stand mixer, I recommend you just use that arm muscle and go with a whisk for this part.

 Once you have the syrup all incorporated in, keep beating the heck out of it for another five minutes (go back to the mixer if you did the syrup part by hand!). The egg yolks will turn very pale in color and the mixture will start to cool. Add the butter at this point, one chunk at a time and beat for another five minutes until it looks creamy and pretty. This is a good time to beat in the vanilla, or other flavoring, and food coloring if you want a color.

If you frost these cookies, you pretty much have to serve them over the next day or two. Otherwise you will want to refrigerate everything. I would refrigerate the cookies and frosting separately, if for example you are making them on Wednesday to serve on Saturday. You can also assemble them and freeze, then pull them out an hour before serving.

Bread-and-Milk Pie

Bread pudding by any other name tastes just as freakin' fantastic.

I had five nice big leftover Hot Cross Buns from Tuesday, but they were a bit dry for eating, so of course I thought of making a bread pudding. The best bread pudding I've ever had was in a restaurant in New Orleans where it was served with a ridiculously good whiskey caramel sauce. Ever since then, I always order bread pudding when I see it on a menu (which isn't often), although I haven't found one that's as good as the one I had in The Big Easy. 

I wanted to give today's dessert a different texture and flavor, so I decided to combine the basic bread pudding idea with a Greek dish called galopita, or "milk pie." Galopita is a traditional dessert made with milk, eggs, sugar, butter and semolina flour. In case you aren't familiar with it, semolina is the coarsely ground durham wheat that is used in pasta making, and it has a beautiful golden color and the texture of fine sand. 

If you like bread pudding, or french toast or anything like that, you are going to like this recipe.

Ingredients:
5 large dried out hot cross buns (or brioche, or challah, but if you use those, add a dash of cinnamon to this recipe)
1/4 cup semolina
3 1/2 cups milk
4 large eggs
1 small can sweetened condensed milk
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 pinch salt
1 tablespoon butter

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Find a large baking dish, I used my white oval lasagna/casserole pan I got from Ikea. Rub the inside of the pan with the tablespoon of butter. Slice the buns or bread into big chunks. With the buns I cut them in half, then each half into fourths. Squish the pieces into the pan so you have a nice even tight fitting layer of bread. Sprinkle the 1/4 cup semolina flour over the top.

In a large bowl, mix the other ingredients with a whisk until the eggs are beaten in well. Pour this over the top  of the bread, then let the whole thing soak for at least ten minutes before you pop the pan in the oven. Bake for 45 minutes, you should have a nice light golden brown color on the highest bits. 

I really recommend serving this straight out of the oven. I don't think it needs a sauce or anything, but if you do a sauce I say do a toffee sauce or caramel sauce, or serve this for a Sunday breakfast with good maple syrup.