cookies

Leaf shaped black sesame cookies with matcha tea icing

maki — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:34:18 +0200

[From the archives. These sesame cookies with matcha icing look and taste quite dramatic. In leaf shapes they are rather spring-like, but try simple rounds or squares for year-round appeal. Originally published in April 2007.]

Flavor wise black sesame seeds aren’t that different, if at all, from white or brown sesame seeds. But there is something about their dramatic black-to-grey color that is quite exciting. At the moment I’m quite enamored with black sesame seeds, and have been using them instead of the regular brown ones in everything from sauces to salads.

These leaf shaped cookies contain toasted and ground black sesame seeds, dark brown muscovado sugar, and whole wheat flour, and are decorated with matcha (powdered tea) royal icing. The sweetness is quite restrained, both in the cookie and in the icing. You are first hit by the tea-flavored, very slightly bitter icing, followed by the nutty darkness of the cookie. It’s an intriguing combination. They are a wonderful accompaniment to tea, black or green, hot or iced. If the ultimate cookie to you means something very sweet and gooey you may not like these. They are quite adult cookies.

I had to shoot the pictures in a hurry, because they were disappearing faster than almost any other cookie I’ve made recently.

Since I don’t have a leaf shaped cookie cutter, I just made a simple paper template and cut the leaves out with a knife. You can cut them out into any shape you’d like of course, though given the coloring leaves seem appropriate. Quite spring-like, in fact.

Black sesame cookies with matcha icing

For the cookies:

50g / 1.75 oz. raw black sesame seeds
120g / 4.25 oz. dark brown or muscovado sugar. In Japan I would use kurozatou （黒砂糖）preferably from Okinawa.
250g / 8.8 oz. whole wheat flour
100g / 3.5 oz. unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 tsp. salt
1 large egg
A few drops of pure almond extract

For the icing:

8 Tbs. powdered (icing) sugar
2 Tbs. matcha tea powder
1 Tbs. egg white or egg white substitute

Equipment needed:

kitchen parchment paper or baking paper
cookie cutter or sharp knife and a paper template
mortar and pestle or suribachi for grinding the sesame seeds
rolling pin

Toast the sesame seeds in a small frying pan until they just start to pop. Immediately remove from the pan.

In a mortar and pestle or suribachi, or with an electric grinder, grind up the sesame seeds until they have turned into a fragrant powder.

In a bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the ground up sesame and almond extract. Beat in the egg.

Add the flour a little at a time. The dough may not form a ball - it will be a bit on the dry side. Put into a plastic zip bag, and roll flat with a rolling pin. Put in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicon sheet.

Take the cookie dough out, and cut open the plastic bag with scissors. Cut out the cookies with cookie cutters or using a paper template and a sharp small knife. Place the cookies on the lined baking sheet.

Bake for 25 minutes. You may need to rotate the baking sheets once if the cookies are baking unevenly.

As the cookies area baking, make the icing. Mix together the icing (powdered) sugar and the matcha powder. Add the egg white, mixing well to a spreadable but not too thin paste.

When the cookies are baked, take them out and cool, preferably on a cooling rack. Let cool completely.

Once the cookies are cooled, spread with the icing. Let dry on the cooling rack until the icing has firmed up.

Store the cookies (if any survive that long) in a cool, dry place.

Notes

Make absolutely sure that the sesame seeds are fresh, and not rancid. Taste and sniff - if it seems even the least bit off to you, it’s Not Good and has to be thrown out. The best way to store raw sesame seeds? Well wrapped, in the freezer.

If you can’t get a hold of whole wheat cake flour, use regular white cake flour or all-purpose flour. Regular whole wheat flour might make the cookies a bit dry.

Use the best quality matcha you can afford - keeping in mind that matcha is not cheap at all.

You can also use white icing - mix powdered sugar with a little lemon juice and egg white to form a paste. Or, leave the cookies unadorned - they look quite interesting that way too.

(Want more matcha? Check out these matcha shortbread cookies by Clotilde on Chocolate and Zucchini.)

Galettes Bretonnes, golden butter cookies from Brittany

maki — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:42:10 +0100

When it comes to cookies, I like them rather plain and not overly sweet. This traditional cookie from the Bretagne (Brittany) in France is so plain and simple, that the ingredients really shine. It is made of flour, sugar, egg, and the famously delicious salted butter (beurre demi-sel) of the region. Somewhat related to shortbread or sablé cookies but not as rich, for me they are almost the perfect cookie, and very more-ish.

The salted butter is the key to this cookie’s distinctive nutty, buttery sweet-salty flavor. The best salted butter from the Bretagne and other regions along the Atlantic in France are creamy-fresh and rich, with little glistening crystals of salt still visible. If you can get a hold of really good salted butter, you can use traditional recipes and the cookies will turn out the way they should. If not, some adjustments need to be made. So, I would recommend following the variation of the recipe that meets your butter quality.

(You might see something called galettes bretonnes au sarrasin. These refer to a thin crêpe or pancake made out of buckwheat (sarrasin) flour, usually served with a savory filling. I love those too, but these article is about the cookie galettes bretonnes.)

Recipe 1: Galettes Bretonnes

Version 1: Use this version if you can get really good salted butter with a slightly cultured taste.

250g / 8.8 oz / about 2 U.S. cups all purpose or cake flour (cake flour preferred)
1/2 tsp. baking powder
120g / 4 oz / 1/2 cup minus 2 Tbs. sugar
120g / 4 oz / 1/2 cup / 1 stick salted butter, softened
1 ‘large’ egg, plus 1 egg for glazing
1-2 Tbs. milk if needed
Additional flour for your working surface and the rolling pin

Version 2: Use this version if you are using supermarket-level salted butter, but you don’t want to mess with adding salt and so on (see Version 3).

Add to Version 1:

Large pinch of good quality coarse sea salt
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Version 2: Use this version if you don’t have access to good salted butter, and want to replicate the salty/cultured taste as closely as possible.

250g / 8.8 oz / about 2 U.S. cups all purpose or cake flour (cake flour preferred), plus 2 tablespoons of flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
120g / 4 oz / 1/2 cup minus 2 Tbs. sugar
120g / 4 oz / 1/2 cup / 1 stick unsalted butter the best you can get, softened
1/2 tsp. regular salt
1/2 tsp. coarse salt
1 ‘large’ egg, plus 1 egg for glazing
1-2 Tbs. buttermilk or sour cream (sour cream is richer of course)
Additional flour for your working surface and the rolling pin

Equipment needed:

Rolling pin
Baking sheets
Parchment paper or silicon baking liner
Pastry brush

The method for all 3 versions is the same.

Sift together the flour and baking powder.

Mix together the sugar, salt (if applicable) and butter. Add the flour mixture and rub well into the butter-sugar mixture with your fingers. Add the egg and vanilla if you’re using Version 2, plus just enough milk or buttermilk so that the dough comes together cohesively. Form into a ball, flatten and wrap in plastic.

(If using a food processor or mixer, you can combine the butter, sugar and flour mixture first, then add the liquids. Don’t overmix this dough after you add the liquids or the cookies will be a bit to tough.)

Chill the dough for at least an hour, until firm. This dough is quite soft so this chilling step is very necessary.

Heat the oven to 180°C / 355°F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper or silicon liners.

Flour your work surface and a rolling pin. Roll out the dough to about 3mm / 1/8 inch or so thickness. Cut the dough out into shapes. Put the cut out dough onto the lined baking sheets.

To prevent the cookies from puffing up in the middle, press down with the tines of a fork, or prick with a fork. (Traditionally the cookies are pressed with a pretty pattern.) (Note: I actually forgot to do the pressing bit for the cookies in the photo! Tastewise they don’t change much, so you can omit the pressing part if you don’t mind the slight dome in the middle of each cookie.)

Beat up the extra egg and add a few drops of milk. Brush the surface of the cookies with this eggwash. (You can just use the yolk with a bit of milk, which would give you a deeper golden glaze. You can also add a pinch of salt for an extra bit of saltiness.)

Bake for 10 minutes, then rotate the baking sheets. Bake for another 5-7 minutes, until the cookies are a golden brown on top.

Cool completely on a rack - these are cookies that taste a lot better when cooled and crispy, rather than soft from the oven. Store in an airtight container.

Makes 48 small, 36 medium or 24 large cookies

Cookies on your Christmas tree? A cautionary tale

A few years ago, way before this blog was even a glimmer in my eye, I decided that I was going to decorate our Christmas tree with iced spice cookies. I was inspired by the gorgeous photos of large trees covered with big iced cookies shaped like Christmas ornaments and penguins and such that appeared in - yes, you might have guessed, Martha Stewart Living.

Once I committed to this, I had to see it through. Our tree wasn’t huge, about 6ft / 180cm or something tall, but it took ages to make enough big cookies to adequately cover it, even though we also decorated the tree with several glass ornaments, not to mention the fairly lights. I was baking cookies and icing the beasts for a solid week. I made about 200 cookies in total in the end: about 150 of them ended up on the tree, 20 or so fell and crashed while I was trying to hang them, and the remaining ones ended up as gifts, wrapped in cellophane.

When the tree was finally decorated with all those cookies, it really looked spectacular. (The photos were taken on a pre-digital camera…and the photos are packed away in boxes, awaiting our soon-I-hope move.) Besides looking great, it smelled wonderful too.

My plan for those cookie-ornaments was to serve them with coffee after a Christmas party. I imagined the scene…friends gathered around the tree, picking their favorites…the village church bells ringing in the background…as I lovingly touched one of the hanging cookies.

What greeted my fingers was…soggy sponge. The icing side was ok, but the exposed cookie side was almost wet. Dismayed, I inpected the other cookies. They were all the same - heavy with moisture. I took one off and bit into it. Ugh! It had absorbed Essence of Pine from the live tree. I spat it out.

I don’t remember what I did serve at that party, but it certainly wasn’t Soggy Pine Cookies. Thankfully, the cookies did manage to hang on the tree until we put it all away a week or so later.

So…if you do plan to have cookies or other edibles on your tree, use an artificial tree, wrap your goodies tightly in cellophane or something, or - well, just have some airtightly-packed reserved. (Besides the moisture, there’s also critters to consider…)

This is my last post on Just Hungry until after-Christmas. Happy Holidays to you all!

Cheesy-peppery savory cookies or scones or biscuits

maki — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 17:00:53 +0200

Now that the weather is getting cooler, at least in these parts, there's nothing as appealing the smell of fresh baking filling the house. I don't think I have posted a simple baking recipe in a long time, so here's one that has become a favorite because it's so delicious and versatile. Here you see them in their cookie incarnation. (I used vegetable-shaped cookie cutters.)

Up close, for scale:

And here is the big scone incarnation:

The recipe is based on one for English scones, but it's savory rather than sweet. Inspiration also came in part from Hungarian cheesy scones called pogasca, which I first had on a short trip to Budapest some years ago, and can't forget since. Depending on how big you make them, they can be fluffy-in-the-middle scones, or crispy yet soft little cookies, or biscuits for Brits. (Confusing the matter even further is of course that scones are very much like American biscuits.) In any case they are really easy to make, especially if you have a food processor.

These savory scones/biscuits/cookies are made with olive oil, which imparts the unique fruity-peppery taste of the oil, and also makes them theoretically a tiny bit healthier than using vegetable shortening or butter. You can use butter of course if you prefer that taste. (I hardly ever use vegetable shortening in my cooking, so I can't speak for it. I use lard sometimes, but that's another story.)

I have used three cheeses for this - Gruyère, feta and Parmigiano Reggiano (Parmesan) (plus cottage cheese), but you can use any bits of leftover hard or semi-soft cheese as long as it all adds up to about 1 cup in total.

If you make the scones very small and bake them until they are quite crunchy on the outside, they make perfect nibbles for a wine tasting. Make them larger and they are great fluffy biscuits/scones to have with a hearty soup or stew. You can also turn the large versions into very rich small sandwiches with a little roast ham or something in the middle.

These freeze beautifully and can be heated up in the oven, wrapped in foil, at 300°F/150°C for about 5 minutes for the little ones, 10-15 minutes for the big ones. The little ones can also be kept in an airtight cookie tin for about a week, so they are great to make ahead for a party.

Cheesy-peppery biscuits or scones or cookies

Makes about 12 large biscuits/scones or 60 small biscuits/cookies

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1 Tbs. baking powder
1 Tbs. sugar
Several grinds of coarsely ground black pepper (about 1/2 tsp or so)
1/3 cup olive oil, or softened butter
3/4 cup cottage cheese
1/4 cup milk (approximately - see recipe)
1 cup of grated or crumbled cheese, a combination of Gruyère, feta and Parmesano Reggiano, or whatever you have around
Egg for glaze, optional
Extra grated cheese for topping, optional

Special equipment suggested:

a food processor, or a mixing bowl and wooden spoon
1-2 ungreased baking sheets
a cookie cutter either 2 inches / 5cm in diameter for the big ones, or 1 inch/2.5cm in diameter (or thereabouts) for the little ones

Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F.

Grate or crumble the hard cheeses so they add up to about 1 cup.

If you are making this with a food processor, follow this procedure: put the steel cutting blade in, and put the dry ingredients into the bowl. Pulse to mix. Add the oil or butter and pulse again to mix into a crumbly mixture. Add the cottage cheese and the other cheeses, and pulse several times until it's starting to form a ball. Add the milk a little at a time while pulsing until the dough has formed a rough shaggy ball around the blade. Try not to overmix.

If you are mixing by hand, mix together all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Add the oil or butter, and mix until the texture is crumbly. Squish up the cottage cheese curds with your hands to make them a bit smaller if you have large curds, and add to the bowl with the cheeses. Add enough milk to form a shaggy moist ball of dough, mixing vigorously with your wooden spoon.

In either case the amount of milk depends on how moist your cottage cheese is.

Once you have a ball of dough, turn it out onto floured surface. Roll or pat it out to about 1/4 inch / .75cm thickness for the large scones, or half that thickness for the small ones.

With a floured cookie cutter, cut our your shapes. For large fluffy scones, place them on the baking sheet right next to each other. For the smaller crispier scones/cookies, place them a bit apart. Optionally brush them with a mixture of egg and water, and/or sprinkle the tops with extra grated cheese. You can leave them as-is too for a more rustic finish.

Bake the small ones for about 15 minutes until they are lightly browned all over. Bake the large scones for about 25 minutes, until golden brown on top.

Variations

Add a lot more ground black pepper to make them very peppery.
Add about a teaspoonful of dried herbs, such as Herbs de Provence mix, dried oregano, dried dill, thyme, etc. to the batter.
Add some celery seed to make them very celery.
Sprinkle the tops (after brushing with egg-water or milk) with sesame seeds or poppy seeds.

Chocolate chip and almond cookies

maki — Mon, 12 Apr 2004 11:24:00 +0200

The usual image of homebaked chocolate chip cookies, at least in the U.S., is that of large, thick cookies with a soft, rather gooey center. The soft and gooey texture is so desired by many people that commercial cookie manufacturers even manage to maintain that in cookies that have been on the shelf for months. This to me seems very wrong. And, I don't think that gooey-soft necessarily indicates a good quality chocolate chip cookie either.

Sure, when you take the cookies out of the oven and eat them right away, they are sort of gooey and soft. But once they cool down, I prefer them to be rather crispy, even lacy, and delicate. For this reason I add a bit more butter than is normal in the traditional Toll House type of chocolate chip cookie. This makes the dough spread out more during baking, making the cookies thinner. Using slivered almonds instead of chunky nuts also makes them lighter and crispier.

If you prefer the gooey type of cookie though, use more flour or less butter.

I also use raw (light brown) granulated sugar instead of the fluffy dense brown sugar used in the traditional recipe. This is mainly because we can't get that "packed" sort of soft brown sugar here. Also, the dark brown sugar has a very pronounced molasses-like taste to me, which I don't think really fits for this cookie.

These are very adult chocolate chip cookies, because of the almonds and the dark chocolate chips. Of course kids love them also. I made these with the lemon bars in the preceeding recipe and meringue kisses for Easter, and boy were they popular.

Chocolate chip and almond cookies

2 cups of all-purpose or cake flour
250g or 1 cup plus 2 Tbs of unsalted butter
3/4 cup white granulated sugar
3/4 cup raw (light brown) granulated sugar
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1 cup slivered almonds
3 100g / 3.5 oz bars darkest chocolate

Preheat the oven to 170°C /375° F.

Chop up the chocolate into chunks. Note I do not use ready-made chocolate chips, because I really want the darkest possible chocolate here, and they don't make really dark chocolate chips.

Toast the slivered almonds in the oven or in a dry frying pan until light brown. Let cool.

Cream together the softened unsalted butter and the sugars until the sugar is totally incorporated. Add the baking soda, salt and flour, and mix. Add the eggs and the vanilla. Mix well but don't overknead.

Stir in the chocolate chunks and the almonds.

Drop onto ungreased baking sheets with a spoon, or make balls with your hands and place these. Space them out well because they will spread quite a bit. Bake for about 20 minutes - you may have to rotate the pans, unless you have a convection oven. You want the cookies to a medium brown, as in the picture.

Cool the cookies on racks, after sampling one or two of course.

Lemon squares revisited

maki — Mon, 12 Apr 2004 10:49:00 +0200

A while back I posted a recipe for lemon squares, a sort of cross between a cookie and a tart with a lemon-curd topping. Some people tried it out, and found it a bit too tart. I went back and fiddled around with the proportions of sweet to sour (lemon juice), and here is the result. There is more curd, which I think makes it even better. The curd is quite a bit sweeter with 1 cup of sugar, and the extra egg makes it creamier also.

I made this as part of my Easter cookie making orgy, together with chocolate chip and almond cookies and meringues. The lemon yellow curd is beautiful as you can see, and makes a nice visual as well as taste contrast with the chocolate chip cookies.

Even better lemon squares

1/2 cup (4 oz, or 120 g) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 1/2 cups flour - cake flour, or all-purpose, not bread flour
1/4 cup icing (powdered) sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 tsp. baking powder
3 eggs
2 Tbs. flour
1/2 cups fresh squeezed lemon or lime juice
1 Tbs. grated lemon or lime rind

Preheat the oven to 350°F / 180°C. Put the butter, 1 1/2 cups of flour, and icing sugar into the food processor. Process until mixed and crumbly. Alternatively, mix the ingredients together with your hands until crumbly. Turn out into a 9" x 9" / 20cm x 20cm square baking pan. Press the mixture around the bottom and sides. Bake for about 15 minutes until lightly browned.

In the meantime, make the filling. Add the remaining ingredients to the food processor and process until blended (or mix by hand). Pour the filling into the crust, and bake for an additional 15 to 20 minutes. Cool and cut into squares.

Makes 16 squares.

Oranges and lemons, with lemon squares

maki — Wed, 07 Jan 2004 03:59:02 +0100

[Update:] A few people found this recipe to be not sweet enough. If you like your lemon bars to be a bit sweeter, try this recipe instead.

It's winter now and not much is in season fruit-wise. Of course we can get any kind of fruit and vegetables year-round now, but a winter strawberry is pretty tasteless. Fortunately, we have citrus fruits, shipped from warmer climates.

Alberto mentions the lemons of Capri on his blog Il Forno (with a delicioius looking recipe for a chocolate almond cake with lemon custard sauce), which brought back a flood of nice memories for me. When I was about 9, my parents took us on vacation to Italy. We stayed in Sorrento, and took daytrips. One of the daytrips was to Capri. All I remember of that day was being sick after going into the famous Blue Grotto, and the delicious lemonade my mother coaxed me into drinking afterwards. It more than revived me, and to this day that memory is what defines great lemonade for me. If I remember correctly, they made it by squeezing three or four whole lemons, dumping that into a glass of ice, with lots of sugar.

Another memory I have is of the big bowl of satsuma oranges (otherwise called tangerines or clemantines), that always sat on the kotatsu at my grandmother's house. A kotatsu is a table covered with a padded duvet of sorts, with a heating element underneath. Since the house was not heated, it was a really comfortable to snuggle up with our legs tucked under the kotatsu, eating orange after orange, until our fingers turned yellow.

Lemon squares are a very easy to make simple dessert or snack, especially if you have a food processor. They are great to have for tea, and are very lemony. You can also make them with limes, which makes pretty pale yellow-green squares instead of pale yellow squares.

Lemon or lime squares

1/2 cup (4 oz, or 120 g) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 1/2 cups flour - cake flour, or all-purpose, not bread flour
1/2 cup icing (powdered) sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 tsp. baking powder
2 eggs
1 Tbs. flour
1/2 cups fresh squeezed lemon or lime juice
1 Tbs. grated lemon or lime rind

Makes 16 squares.