savory-bites » Cookies

Oatmeal dark chocolate cookies from Kodiak Cakes

Jessie — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 03:54:06 +0000

Cookies frustrate me. No no- not when I’m eating them, but when I’m baking them. With a fickle 25 year old oven that can’t quite decide what temperature it wants to stay at, I feel like I can never get it right. I can’t blame my oven though, because I’ll admit, I suck at baking cookies from scratch.

Unlike cakes, cheesecakes, cupcakes, and just about any other cake, the methodology behind the types of inputs and the process behind integrating those inputs is more complicated when it comes to a cookie. Pray tell, you ask? I was going to anyway.

Input: Cold butter v. soft butter

Butter begins to melt at exactly 68 degrees F. I don’t know about you, but that’s not a lot of leeway for me, considering my house temperature in the summer is over 75 degrees. Even worse, once butter melts, “it’s gone.” You can rechill it all you want, but the emulsion within the butter will break down. So clearly, you can screw up your input before you even input the butter.

So when do you use cold butter?

Not in cookies, that’s for sure (well I’m sure there are some one-off recipes that do but…). Cold butter holds air well. That’s why when you make puff pastry, you want the butter to be icy cold. Chunks of butter in between layers of a croissant will melt, releasing steam, causing the dough to rise (and ultimately creating those flaky layers!). So cold butter works as a leavening. When you see those domed cookies and you’re wondering, ‘My, how did those cookies get so thick and dense?!” Well, that’s the butter.

Most cookies call for creaming the butter and sugar. As you cream the two, you incorporate air. The point isn’t to actually soften the butter, it’s to beat air into it. Sugar adds more pockets of air. Now you’re probably asking yourself, “Why not just use leavener like baking soda or powder?” Well, they can’t create air pockets.

When do you use melted butter?

This is up in the air. Melted butter dissolves sugar much better and improves the consistency of the dough. At the same time, it makes for a very runny cookie, meaning it’ll spread out in the oven. So if you like those thin, spread out cookies, melting the butter may be your way to go.

For a much more comprehensive article from a much more renowned source, check out the NYTimes piece on butter!

Process:

Beyond the mixing stage, which I won’t even get into, how and when you place your cookies onto the cookie sheets makes a huge difference. Some secret recipes call for an overnight chilling over the dough, but more importantly is baking on the same cookie sheet. If you’re too impatient to wait for the cookie sheet to cool before putting on your second batch, the dough will start spreading and that dense cookie you were salivating for will just remain a dream.

Now do you see why cookies frustrate me? And this is just the butter we’re talking about (although I personally believe that butter is the most important component in a cookie). So the remedy?

Boxed cookies!

Now normally I wouldn’t subject my friends to boxed anything, but Kodiak Cakes left me a nice little package of boxed mixes some while back. And when you’re bad at baking cookies from scratch… good quality box mix starts to look appealing.

So Suki and I, en-route to Amanda’s graduation party, baked up a storm with these Oatmeal Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies. All you need is a stick of unsalted butter and an egg. No sugar, no flour, no other hassles. Of course, you still need to cream the butter, but you dramatically cut down on the time and best of all, it’s nearly always guaranteed to come out delicious!

Isn’t that oven awesome? So we followed the cardinal rule of letting the cookie sheets cool (by rinsing them in cold water) and the cookies came out perfectly! What do I love about these Kodiak cookies?

How ridiculously soft and chewy they are. They break apart delicately in your fingers but the outer edges have that slight crisp to them. Ah, heaven!
The dark chocolate chips. These aren’t your generic chocolate chips. They tasted so… real!
The taste. It’s like an explosion of chocolate and oatmeal, but not overbearing enough for it to be a bad thing.
The size. They don’t spread that far out so you can just set them 2 inches apart and you’d be fine. Once in the oven, these cookies rise, like a dome but full of dense chewiness. It’s that creamed butter I tell ya!
The time. Literally 5 minutes to throw together and under 10 to bake!

Suki and I had to resist eating all of them ourselves. That’s her up there. She’s quite the awesome one. Anyway, we kept on making excuses like, “Oh, that cookie looks like it’s about to break apart. We can’t bring that! Yeah, let’s just eat it!”

While I would absolutely love to buy these mixes, they’re not carried in my local grocer so I’d have to order them online and unfortunately, they don’t come cheap. But if you’re looking for a quick and healthier solution to baking cookies, this might be a brand for you to consider!

NMHKGVMKDMD3

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Chocolate dipped almond biscotti

Jessie — Tue, 11 May 2010 03:00:22 +0000

I remember the first time I had biscotti. It came in a tub, individually wrapped in thin plastic, and smelled like dried cookie crumbs. The biscotti crumbled perfectly in my mouth, melting into a soft sweetness. Each bite had a particular crunch, as if the air could crackle. The biscotti was perfect in every way- not only was it delicious, but it also came from Costco, meaning it was supercheap.

I remember the second time I had biscotti. It came in a wax paper, carefully wrapped by the barista behind the counter at one of my favorite coffee shops in New York City. It was a quarter of the size of the biscotti from Costco and cost twice as much. The biscotti actually didn’t smell like anything, and when I bit into it, I thought I chipped it tooth; it was rock solid.

What a ripoff, I thought! I paid for a cookie so stale that it wasn’t even chewable. And then, as if it was the most natural thing to do, I dipped the biscotti into my latte like a little kid would dunk an Oreo into a glass of milk. I swirled the biscotti, round and round, until foam from the steamed milk covered half of the biscotti. Then I took a bite.

Sometimes there are moments in life when a light bulb in our heads switch on and things become so clear. In that moment, I realized that the best biscotti aren’t the ones that are airy and soft or the ones that you can casually bite into. The best biscotti are the ones that can survive a good dunking in that hot coffee and only begin disintegrating when it hits the innards of your mouth. The perfect biscotti, in other words, is one that you can play around with by swirling it in your coffee while you casually glance at your newspaper, and still be intact when you decide to take that bite.

Nuts, especially almonds, go wonderfully well in biscotti. While chopped nuts provide for that contrasting crunch against the soft cookie post dunking, using almond flour gives it this intensity that’s equally distributed in each bite. Almond flour is sweet by nature and ground until delicately soft. The best thing to compare it to texture-wise would be powdered sugar, but in a pastel yellow.

The following recipe makes around 8 long biscotti or 16 small biscotti depending on the cut. It pairs well with that morning cup of coffee and is perfect for some heavy dunking. Dipping it in bittersweet chocolate, though optional, is highly recommended. After all, what doesn’t taste good dipped in chocolate?

Chocolate dipped almond biscotti

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup white sugar
1/8 cup almond flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg
1 egg white
1/2 cup chopped almonds
4 oz melted bittersweet chocolate

Recipe:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F or 175 degrees C. Prepare a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, sugar, almond flower, baking soda, and salt. Beat in the vanilla, egg and egg white, and then mix in the almonds. Now, using a rubber spatula, fold the mixture so that the flour is fully incorporated.

Knead the dough by hand until the mixture forms a smooth ball. If the dough is too wet to handle, adjust by adding a bit more flour, but only a slight pinch at a time. Roll the dough into a log about 10 inches long on a lightly floured surface and roll it out with a rolling pin until the log is 6 inches wide. Transfer the log onto the cookie sheet.

Bake for 15-20 minutes, making sure that the bottom of the biscotti does not brown. After baking, cool on a rack. With a serrated knife, cut into 1 inch slices (you can decide how big or small you want your biscotti to be). When cutting, cut on a diagonal so that the first cut looks like a triangle. Place the slices, cut side down, back onto the baking sheet and continue baking in the oven for another 15-20 minutes. Turn the biscotti over halfway through the baking.

Meanwhile, in a double broiler or in a microwave, carefully melt the chocolate. Transfer the melted chocolate to a flat plate and dip one side of the biscotti into it. Place the biscotti on wire racks, chocolate side up. Wait 10 minutes for it the chocolate to harden.

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Photo du jour: “I WILL EAT YOU!”

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Chocolate dipped orange biscotti

Jessie — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 01:43:36 +0000

Believe it or not, I haven’t touch an oven in, oh, FIVE months!! School kept me busy (not to mention my sublet wasn’t the most ideal for baking), and it wasn’t until today that I had some downtime.

So one of my favorite things about drinking coffee is dipping biscotti into it. Biscott0 (no that’s not a typo, it’s the plural form) are possibly my favorite type of cookie. Don’t get me wrong- I love a warm, gooey, and chewy chocolate chip cookie too, but… I think I like the action of dipping and drenching something into coffee so that all of the tiny pores soak up that glorious flavor. And if you haven’t figured it out yet, I LOVE coffee.

My favorite biscotti is the type that’s really dry and difficult to bite without dipping. All of the softer and “lighter” ones (aka the ones you find at Starbucks) aren’t as ideal for dipping because it’s more like a quick dunk. I like to swirl my stick of flour, egg, and sugar in the coffee for seconds on end before I take a decent bite out of it. My favorite ones are from Think Coffee next to NYU. Too bad they cost $1.25 and are 4-5 inches long.

Of course, after I made the biscotti, I needed some good coffee. If you’ve never had Illy, you’re missing out. That being said, this tiny canaster will probably set you back $15. And no, I did not pay for this. Companies just love to hand out free stuff on the streets of New York City for some reason.

These biscotti are strong in their orange flavor from the zest and hard enough to survive some lengthy dipping. You can add nuts such as almonds to give them a more complex flavor. Honestly, though, the chocolate and orange combination is good enough for me!

The following recipe makes about 10 biscotti (5 inches long) or less depending on how you choose to cut them. It was modified from this recipe.

Chocolate dipped orange biscotti

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup white sugar

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 egg

1 egg white

2 tablespoons orange zest

4 (1 ounce) squares bittersweet chocolate

Recipe:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a baking sheet.

In a large bowl, stir together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Beat in the egg first then egg white. Finally, mix in the orange zest.

Knead the dough by hand until the mixture forms a smooth ball. This should take a minute or two.

Roll the dough into a log about 10 inches long and place it on the baking sheeting. Press down until the log is about 6 inches wide. Make sure the long is at least half an inch thick.

Bake for 25 minutes in preheated oven. After baking, transfer to a cutting board. With a serrated knife, cut into 1 inch slices. Place slices, cut side down, back onto the baking sheet.

Return them to the oven for an additional 20 to 25 minutes; turning over half way through the baking.

Melt the chocolate over a double boiler or in the microwave oven.
(I didn’t have any bittersweet chocolate so I just threw in whatever I could find…)

Allow the chocolate to cool but not harden before dipping one side of the biscotti into it. If you’re using a round bowl, you can “spread” the chocolate onto the biscotti. Place cookies on wire racks, chocolate side up, until cool and dry.

Side Notes:

The orange zest should give you enough orange-y flavor, but you can always add orange extract or even orange juice (a tablespoon or so)

When melting the chocolate in a microwave oven, do so in 30 second intervals. The last thing you want is burnt chocolate!

You can reduce the sugar down to a quarter of a cup (which is what I did) if you want to cut back.

When slicing, slice on an angle.

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Whole Wheat Apricot & Nut Biscotti

Jessie — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 05:15:17 +0000

One of my favorite things to do when I’m back at home in Jersey is sit next to my fireplace on my cozy rug and sip hot coffee (hot chocolate at night) while reading a book or watching a film. Now that my parents have relocated to Pennsylvania, it’s just me in the house. So every morning, I’ve set a little tradition where I wake up, start the fire, make the coffee, and check the headlines. It’s so relaxing.

I hate hard cookies. I was never a fan of cookies in general until college started. The dining halls introduced my palate to those soft chewy cookies galore. It was as if the all you can eat was a way of making sure that I’d like the cookies by the end of the year. But hard cookies just aren’t the same. They’re crumbly and you have to chew… alot more. So how to make a hard cookie into soft?

The answer was obviously invented long before I was born. You dip it into something hot- duh! And I guess that’s why I love biscotti; it’s a cookie that’s meant to be dipped. The hard and dry textures turn delicately soft and chewy on contact with coffee. It just melts beautifully into the mouth.

The other great thing about biscotti is that it can easily be made without butter. “Biscotti” actually means twice baked so you bake it once, let it cool completely, and then pop it into the oven again. It’s also a great way to incorporate your dried fruits and nuts along with some whole wheat flour. The following recipe does all that. I saw it one day on Everday Food and adapted it.

I can’t wait to wake up tomorrow, make my cupa joe and dip my biscotti next to the fireplace!

Whole Wheat Fruit & Nut Biscotti

Ingredients:

vegetable oil, for baking sheet
3/4 cup whole-wheat flour
1/2 cup all-purpose flour, plus more for work surface
1/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup walnut halves
1/4 cup pecan halves
1/4 dried apricots, diced
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Recipe:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Brush a baking sheet with oil.
In a medium bowl, whisk together flours, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Chop the nuts and fruit; mix in.
In a small bowl, whisk together eggs and vanilla. Add to flour mixture; stir just until combined.
On a lightly floured surface, with floured hands, pat dough into a loaf about 1 inch thick, 2 1/2 inches wide (and about 7 inches long); transfer to baking sheet. Bake until risen and firm, 20 to 25 minutes; cool completely on sheet. Reduce oven temperature to 300 degrees.
Place loaf on a cutting board, and using a serrated knife, cut diagonally into 1/4 -inch-thick slices; place slices in a single layer on sheet.
Bake, turning once, until dried and slightly golden, 25 to 30 minutes; cool completely.
Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to a month

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Chocolate Truffle Cookies

Jessie — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:02:36 +0000

The word truffle holds some empowering force over me and my mind immediately jump to decadent chocolate. I always associated truffles with heavy cream, sugar, butter, and well, things that expand the waistline. Having taking a hiatus from baking (and having left Australia), I wanted to start the holidays off with something blissfully bad to the bone.

I was flipping through my “The Cookie and Biscuit Bible” when I came upon their Chocolate Truffle Cookies recipe. I almost skipped it, since I have less than half a stick of butter in my fridge but I realized that this recipe has minimal butter! In fact, it’s not so bad, that is, if you make really mini bites and share. I guess it’s the sugar that really gets you here.

So what exactly is a truffle? Most people think about Lindt Truffles and if you’re high class, you’re probably thinking about the fungus truffle. Well, the chocolate truffle was actually named after the fungus truffle due to their similar looks. But beyond that, chocolate truffles have a chocolate ganache center coated with even more chocolate. Don’t tell me that doesn’t make your knees quake.

The following recipe, thought not exactly a chocolate truffle per se, is a lovely reminder of what confectionaries crank out in their factories but in the comfort of your home. There’s also something comforting about a recipe that is converted into a cookie form. So as you bake, take a deep breath of all that chocolately goodness that comes wafting out of the oven. The best part is- it’s only a 10 minute bake.

Chocolate Truffle Cookies (18 pieces)

Ingredients:

1/2 cup plain all-purpose flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 tbsp butter, diced
1 egg, beaten
1 tsp cherry brandy or fresh orange juice
1/2 cup icing (confectioners’) sugar

Recipe:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F and prepare your cookie sheets with parchment paper.
Sift flour, cocoa, baking powder and sugar into a bowl.
Rub in the butter with your fingers under the mixture resembles breadcrumbs
Add in the beaten egg and cherry brandy or fresh orange juice. Stir into the dry mixture.
Cover with plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes
After 30 minutes, form the dough into small circles (1 inch in diameter) using your hand. Roll to cover the surface in the icing sugar.
Bake for 10 minutes and cool!

Side Notes:

I didn’t have cherry brandy or fresh orange juice so I used plum wine. Since it’s only 1 tsp, unless if you have a strong and eager palate, you can’t quite taste it. I’m sure that any type of juice or liquor would work (that being said, with good judgement).

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