Linzer Cookies

When it comes to classic recipes, ones that I’ve never tried before, I sometimes get caught up in checking every possible source at my disposal for versions of the recipe in question. It’s a little crazy, but I have to know what all the options are. And, so it was with Linzer Cookies. I kept seeing them here and there and really wanted to try making them this holiday season. With the sugar-dusted tops and jam filling, they make pretty holiday cookies. I had an excellent reason to bake some extra cookies too. The gang behind Austin Bakes organized another bake sale on the weekend following Thanksgiving to benefit recovery efforts after the recent flooding in south Austin. It was a great way to start the holiday baking season. So, my search for recipes started with the original The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. Ina’s Linzer Cookie is a plain, shortbread sandwich cookie with raspberry jam. They’re lovely but a little less traditional. A more traditional option would be made with ground nuts, spices, and maybe citrus zest in the dough. In The Model Bakery Cookbook, Linzer cookies are made with almonds and lemon zest but no spices. Raspberry Linzer Disks from The Modern Baker have almonds, cinnamon, and cloves but no zest. The version found in Martha Stewart’s Cookies includes ground pecans and cinnamon but no citrus zest. And, the version I finally settled on is from Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies, and it combines all the possible ingredients with cinnamon, cloves, orange zest, and lemon zest. Hazelnuts are suggested for the nuts, but I liked the idea of using pecans and made that one change. 

The cookie dough comes together quickly in the food processor. Flour, toasted pecans, granulated sugar, salt, cinnamon, and cloves were pulsed until the nuts were finely ground. Pieces of butter were added and pulsed until crumbly before almond extract and lemon and orange zests were added and pulsed into the dough. The dough was divided into two parts, each was wrapped in plastic and left in the refrigerator to chill for a few hours. I actually made it in advance and left it in the refrigerator for a couple of days. When ready to bake, each half of dough was rolled out between sheets of parchment paper. Circles were cut, and I used a piping tip to cut smaller circles in half of the cookies for sandwich tops. The dough does become soft and sticky as it’s rolled and cut. While combining and re-rolling dough scraps, I placed the dough in the refrigerator from time to time to let it chill for easier handling. The cut cookies baked for about 14 minutes. When cool, the cookies for the bottoms were topped with raspberry jam that had been strained to remove the seeds. The cookie tops were dusted with confectioners’ sugar before taking their places on top of the jam. 

I’m easily entertained by learning about different approaches to the same type of cookie, and in the end, I was thrilled with this choice of recipe. All the flavors of spices and citrus were fragrant and lovely. I think Linzer Cookies are now going to have a permanent spot on my holiday cookie baking list. 

I am a member of the Amazon Affiliate Program.

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Brownie Bow Ties

I have no idea how an entire year went by during which I watched so few current films. As of Oscar night, I had seen exactly two of the movies nominated for Best Picture. As usual, we attended an Oscar party and bet on the outcome of the awards. I was sure the Academy would pick George Clooney as Best Actor, and in my typical Oscar-betting fashion, I was wrong. At least I had these cookies to enjoy during the ceremony. They’re little squares of pastry that get folded over a filling of brownie dough and end up looking a little like bow ties. I thought bow tie cookies seemed appropriate for Oscar night. The recipe is from Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies, and I have a couple of things to tell you about making these cookies. First, Alice Medrich is always very precise with her instructions, so rolling the pastry dough and cutting it to the size she suggests works well. She then instructs you to fill each pastry square with one rounded teaspoon of brownie dough and fold two corners of the square in and seal at the top with water. Maybe I rounded my teaspoons of brownie dough too much because the first batch I placed in the oven came out looking like they sort of exploded and not much like bow ties. So, less than you think of the brownie filling per cookie is better. The other thing I wanted to mention is that Medrich suggests optionally grating some cinnamon stick or nutmeg over the cookies before serving. I suggest definitely doing so. I used both cinnamon and nutmeg. When I tasted a cookie that hadn’t been dusted with the spices, it was of course delicious, but it seemed lacking or naked compared to the ones with spices.

You begin by making a cream cheese rugelach dough which needs to be refrigerated for at least a couple of hours before being rolled out. Next, you make the brownie dough by melting butter and chocolate in a double-boiler. Some sugar is added to the butter and chocolate followed by vanilla, salt, and eggs. A little flour is whisked in, and then this chocolate dough is also refrigerated for at least an hour or overnight. I made both doughs a day in advance of rolling, cutting, and filling. Working with one quarter of the rugelach dough at a time, it is rolled out and trimmed into a nine inch by eleven inch rectangle which is then cut into twelve squares. A barely rounded teaspoon of the chilled brownie dough should be placed in the center of each pastry square. Then, two opposite corners are pulled up and over the brownie dough, and the pastry corners are pinched with water to secure. Just before going into the oven, the cookies are brushed with milk and sprinkled with sugar, and they are baked for about 20 minutes. After cooling, I highly recommend grating cinnamon and nutmeg over the cookies.

These aren’t the quickest cookies to bake, but all of the steps involved are simple enough. The cream cheese pastry is delightfully flaky, rich, and tender for a cookie, and it makes a very nice wrapper for a bite of dark chocolate brownie. They’re dressy, little cookies suited for a black tie kind of night.

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Pebbly Beach Fruit Squares

A first flip through a cookbook always ends with those several pages that get marked because of great-looking things that I intend to make right away. Then, reality happens, and I might not get back to those marked pages for weeks or maybe months. These cookies were on one of those marked pages in Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies by Alice Medrich. I’ve baked a few other things from the book, but I only recently made my way back to this page. I was looking for a birthday cookie for my sister, and I remembered these fruit-filled squares. This is the first cookie of the Chewy category, but they’re a little bit crispy too. It’s an interesting cookie technique and one I hadn’t tried before. Basically, they’re made from two layers of pastry with dried fruit in the middle and a coarse sugar topping. As they bake, the top layer of pastry settles around the bits of fruit and makes a pebbly-looking surface. Once cool, they’re crisp and firm enough to pack and ship without fear of them crumbling. Another great thing about these cookies is the possibility of infinite flavor variations. I went with lemon zest in the dough and a filling of dried cranberries, but other suggestions include cinnamon or anise in the dough and dried fruit like golden or dark raisins, apricots, dates, cherries, candied ginger, or any combination of those.

Starting the dough is the standard cookie procedure of creaming butter and sugar and adding an egg and vanilla. Next, you add the flavor component of choice which was lemon zest for me, but it’s noted in the recipe that anise smells lovely in the dough as it bakes. Then, the dry ingredients of flour, baking powder, and salt were added and mixed to combine. The dough was divided in half, each half was pressed into a round, and the rounds were wrapped in plastic and chilled for a few hours. Once chilled, one piece of dough at a time was rolled in between sheets of parchment paper into a big rectangle. The dough does become a little sticky as it comes up in temperature, so the parchment makes it much easier to roll without excess flour. To fill, the top piece of parchment was removed, dried cranberries were strewn about on the bottom half of the rectangle of dough, and the top half of dough was folded over the bottom. The top was then sprinkled with turbinado sugar, the edges were trimmed, and squares were cut. The process was repeated with the second piece of dough, and the squares baked for about 15 minutes.

For a brief moment, it seemed like rolling the dough and folding and cutting was going to be complicated, but it was actually pretty simple. The squares were cut and ready to bake in no time. I’m already thinking about flavors to try next time. It might be cinnamon in the dough and dried apricots and candied ginger for the filling. With crunchy pastry layers and a chewy fruit filling, these are worth trying in every flavor combination you can imagine.

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Breakfast Biscotti

Last week, I mentioned that I was baking for the Austin Bakes for Japan bake sale which was held on Saturday. As I wrote about that, I hoped there would be a good turnout, I hoped we’d have a lot to offer at each sale location, and I really hoped the fundraising would be a success. All of those things happened and exceeded our highest hopes. There were beautiful baked goods overflowing the tables at all five locations of the sale, and people kept coming to visit the sales, choose treats to take home with them, and leave behind donations. The positive response and generosity of the community were stunning. Kathryn was our leader of the efforts to organize this event, and all of her hard work resulted in the bake sale going perfectly. The other team leaders who helped with planning as well as overseeing bake sale locations were Carly, Rachelle, Shelley, and Stephanie. As of the end of Saturday, the fund raising total was over $11,400, and because the online giving page is still active, the total is now over $11,700. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this event and for all the wonderful generosity.

So, this being a bake sale, I had a perfect excuse to pull out some recipes and bake several things in a couple of days. Timing was an issue since I couldn’t bake everything at the very last minute, and that’s how I decided on biscotti for one item. They’re cookies that last well, so I baked them two days before the sale. I remembered there were several good biscotti versions in Chewy, Gooey, Crispy, Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies, and that’s where I found this recipe. As with all the recipes in this book, this one included an upgrade option for tweaking the main ingredients. It’s a kind of healthy type of biscotti with whole wheat pastry flour, oats, walnuts, and dried fruit, and the upgrade was the addition of sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, hemp seeds, and flaxseed meal. There were also additionl tips and an overview of biscotti making. For instance, in the US we have adopted biscotti and made it our own. So while the traditional Italian biscotti or cantucci are very dry and crunchy and usually flavored with anise, our American biscotti are slightly cakey in comparison with lots of additional flavors.

This breakfast biscotti recipe is of the American style, and this was an easy cookie dough to prepare since everything was just whisked and then stirred together. All purpose flour was combined with whole wheat pastry flour, baking powder, and salt. In a separate bowl, brown sugar and oats were mixed. Then, milk and butter were heated until the butter melted, and that was added to the oat mixture and left to stand for a few minutes. Eggs and vanilla were added followed by the flour mixture, and then I added toasted chopped walnuts, dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, hemp seeds, and flaxseed meal. The dough was transferred to a silpat-lined baking sheet, and using wet hands, I formed it into a long, rectangular shape, not too wide. By using wet hands to shape the dough, it will become shiny as it bakes. I needed the biscotti to fit into the cellophane bags I had already bought, so I made the shape about four inches wide. The first baking was at 325 degrees F for about 35 minutes. The pan was removed from the oven and left to cool, and the oven was turned down to 300 degrees F. Once cool enough to handle, the baked dough was transferred to a cutting board and cut into half inch or so slices. The slices were set on a baking sheet, on their edges, and the second baking was for 25 minutes. I always worry biscotti might not be completely crunchy, so I moved the cookies around on the sheet and gave them five more minutes in the oven just to be sure.

My biscotti anxiety exists because I’ve tried a few recipes in the past that just didn’t work quite right, but there was no need to worry here since this came from Alice Medrich. Her tips such as using wet hands to shape the dough and standing the cookies on their edges for the second baking as well as the timing and ingredients all worked very well. The biscotti were deliciously crunchy and the nuts and seeds added to that effect. Since I packed them all up for the bake sale, I’m going to have to make another batch just to enjoy at home.

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Chocolate Mint Sandwich Cookies

I had two cookie recipes in mind, and I was trying to decide which one to bake for a party. I called in Kurt to make the final choice. Without even asking for details, he instantly pointed straight at these chocolate mint sandwiches and said: make those. Well, that settled that, not that there was anything wrong with the other option. I knew he’d like the mint, and they do look fetching on the back cover of Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies. They’re thin and crisp chocolate wafer cookies sandwiched with a layer of mint-flavored white chocolate, and this was just one of four ways these cookies were presented in the book. With several of the cookie recipes, Alice Medrich included “upgrades” or variations on the theme. In this case, the base recipe was plain chocolate wafers. The possible upgrades for these were spicy wafers with cinnamon, cayenne, and ground black pepper added to the dough, extra-bittersweet wafers with added ground unsweetened chocolate, and the version I made with white chocolate and mint sandwiched between two wafers.

The dough requires some time in the refrigerator before being cut into cookies which means it can be made well in advance. It was entirely mixed in a food processor. First, flour, cocoa, sugar, salt, and baking powder were pulsed, and then chopped, softened butter was mixed in by pulsing. Last, milk and vanilla were added through the feed tube while the machine was running. The dough was formed into a log, wrapped in parchment, and chilled for at least an hour. Possibly the most difficult part of this recipe was cutting the dough into thin rounds. The log was marked at one inch lengths, and each inch of dough was cut into six skinny, little, fragile cookies. The rounds were baked, and as soon as they came out of the oven, small circles were cut in half of them. I used the big end of a piping tip to cut the circles. When the cookies were cool, white chocolate was melted and mixed with mint extract for the filling. Scant half teaspoons of white chocolate filling were spread on half of the cookies which were topped with the ones with holes.

Naturally, I thought the half teaspoon of filling was not nearly enough. I would have preferred to slather on a thick, generous layer of mint white chocolate, but I was wrong. It was just enough to add sweetness and richness and let the chocolate of the cookies shine through. Kurt made a great choice with this one.

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Peanut Butter Clouds

You might not think there would be much to learn at a cooking class about cookies, but that really depends on who’s teaching the class. I signed up for a cookie class at Central Market Cooking School last December that was taught by Alice Medrich, and I walked away with a few pages of notes. She was demonstrating cookies from her new book Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies which combines some of her all-time, favorite recipes with updates for what everyone likes to cook today. I shared some photos from the class on my Facebook page as well. Throughout the class, little, eye-opening details, the kinds of things that don’t always get mentioned, were pointed out and explained. She talked about how a home cook needs to decode a recipe. When a cookie recipe states to whip or cream something “just until,” it’s important to pay close attention and not overdo it. There are times when the butter and sugar should not be creamed to a point where it’s too light and fluffy as that can add too much air to the dough. She continued to talk as she worked, and turned a square baking pan upside down, cut a piece of foil, and wrapped it over the bottom of the pan. Then, she flipped the pan over and placed the foil inside it. I’d never thought of doing that to get the foil to the right size and shape to line the inside of a pan for brownies. Then, she spoke of flavors and adding different spices to brownies or chocolate cookies. Rather than mixing the spice into the batter or dough, it can be sprinkled on top after baking. That way, you have a different flavor experience. You smell the spice as soon as you lift the item toward your mouth, and it’s more pronounced. Also, then you can flavor one batch several different ways. So, the evening progressed with several different cookie recipes being prepped and then tasted. Every cookie we were served was fantastic, but the one I couldn’t stop thinking about over a month later was the peanut butter cloud.

This is in Medrich’s new book, and it’s a simple meringue cookie with a swirl of peanut butter running through it. Ordinarily, a meringue serves as a vehicle for other flavors, but here, the added peanut butter was mixed into the sweet, crisp, light as air cookie and chopped salted peanuts were sprinkled on for added crunch. Egg whites were whisked in a mixer with cream of tartar and eventually, sugar was added. During the class, Medrich pointed out that if you add the sugar too early while whisking the egg whites, you’ll get a glossy but limp meringue. For firmer meringue, add the sugar, after the whites have become opaque, very slowly over a two minute period. Then, dot the top of the meringue with well-stirred, natural peanut butter, and just barely fold it into the egg whites. The peanut butter should be streaked throughout the meringue. I piped the meringue into small cookie-cloud shapes onto baking sheets and topped them with the chopped nuts. The cookies baked at 200 degrees F for one and a half hours, and then they remained in the oven after it was turned off until they were cool.

The crackly texture and the sweetness of the meringue mixed with peanut butter and salted chopped peanuts just worked so well together. Thankfully, my home-baked versions stood up to my memory of them from the class. And, now I need to finish reading through the book to get several new ideas for what to bake next.

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