Archive for the ‘Cookies’ Category
A four leaf clover is good luck any day of the year, but a few clovers are an especially nice way of finishing off these St Patrick’s Day themed Shamrock Chocolate Peppermint Cookies. The cookies are tender, chocolate wafers that are topped with minty green shamrocks. They’re easy to make, flavorful and definitely look festive enough for any St Patrick’s Day celebration.
The cookies are tender and slightly soft, with a nice cocoa flavor. They’re slice-and-bake cookies, which means that the dough is rolled into a log and chilled, then sliced into rounds before baking. This approach is faster than using cookie cutters and gives the cookies a nice uniform size and shape. The cookies aren’t too sweet, so they do very well with that little bit of extra sweetness that the icing gives them to round out their flavor.
Peppermint can be a difficult flavor to work with because it is so strong. It goes well with chocolate, but it is easy for the mint to overwhelm the other flavors in a dessert if you’re not careful – and adding too little will leave you with something that lacks that peppermint punch. For these cookies, I left the peppermint out of the cookies entirely and concentrated it in the frosting. Those little green shamrocks are packed with mint flavor, adding a refreshing quality to the cookie as well as a little extra sweetness. It’s a good balance and definitely a nice way of introducing the peppermint here without it taking over the whole cookie.
You can pipe your shamrocks on using a small round piping tip, or just scrape your frosting into a ziploc bag and snip off the corner. I free-handed my clovers (three or four large dots and a line for the stem) and you don’t need to be a master piper to make it work. Be sure to let the icing dry for a couple of hours before storing the cookies, and store them in a single layer to ensure that the shamrocks don’t get smudged before you have a chance to eat them.
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Biscotti are one of my favorite cookies to have with a cup of coffee or tea, but these Crispy Almond Thins give my usual biscotti a run for their money when it comes to being the perfect accompaniment to a cup of coffee. These cookies are thin and crisp, with a rectangular shape that makes them perfect for dipping. They have a good flavor of brown sugar and almonds, both of which go with most any coffee or tea, and they keep extremely well when stored in an airtight container.
Crispy Almond Thins are slice and bake cookies, meaning that the dough is shaped and chilled, then sliced into uniform pieces before baking. The dough for these cookies is fairly stiff, so it is not difficult to shape it into a rectangular log before chilling it. Use a very sharp knife to slice the cookies so that you can easily get thin slices. Thinner cookies will be crisper than thicker ones (although an extra minute in the oven usually does the trick if yours come out a little thicker), and are a little bit more addictive. I aim to get my cookies just over 1/8-inch thick when I slice them so that if they end up a little thicker, I have some wiggle room.
I like these cookies as-is, with their nice balance of almonds and brown sugar, but this is an easy cookie to dress up, too. You could try dipping them in chocolate or adding a chocolate drizzle to one side of the, or you could add some extra spice to the cookies and turn them into something similar to a gingersnap, with cinnamon and cloves.
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Oreo cookies are the best selling cookies in the world for good reason: each cookie is a great combination of sweet, crispy, chocolatey and creamy flavors and textures. And they are even better when dipped in a tall, cold glass of milk. The cookies have been made more or less the same way for the past 100 years and some of the magic of the Oreo is the way that the cookies are formed and made with machines. The wafer cookies are essentially just pressed into place and aren’t held together by much, which is what makes them so deliciously tender.You just can’t get the exact same results with homemade knockoffs, but you can get something close that captures that much loved cookies n’ cream flavor and is made entirely from scratch.
My Homemade Oreo Cookies start out with a chocolate wafer cookie dough that is shaped into logs and chilled. The dough is made with a generous amount of cocoa powder to give the cookies a deep chocolate flavor and very dark color. Slicing the cookies when the dough is chilled allows you to get a uniform look and shape, keeping the cookies nice and flat during baking. The wafer cookies aren’t too sweet (so that they can handle a sweet vanilla filling) but have a strong chocolate flavor when they’re done. The dough should be sliced thinly (about 1/8-inch) so that that wafers can bake up to be nice and crispy. If you cut your dough too thick, the cookies will not get crispy all the way through and will remain slightly soft (still tasty, but not like a real Oreo!).
Regular Oreos are made without any dairy products and without eggs (yes, they’re vegan!), so I kept with that standard when creating this recipe and used shortening instead of butter in both the cookie dough and the filling. You can make the cookies with butter instead of shortening and still get good results, but if you want the most authentic Oreo creme filling, opt for shortening (trans-fat free, of course). The vanilla will stand out in a filling made with shortening, while in a filling made with butter, you’ll have a more frosting-like flavor.
These cookies are at their best when dipped in milk, but they’re tasty on their own, too. They are not quite as crumbly as a “real” Oreo, though they are crispy, chocolatey and have a filling that is as creamy as the real thing. If you don’t want to make the whole batch at once, you can keep some of the cookie dough in the freezer, well-wrapped, for a few weeks and bake off a new bunch when the mood strikes.
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You can never go wrong with a good chocolate chip cookie, and as much as I enjoy making more elaborate baked goods like creme brulees and homemade cinnamon rolls, I will always come back to the classic chocolate chip cookie from time to time. Chocolate chip cookies can be crispy, chewy, cakey or somewhere in between. Regardless of what type of chocolate chip cookie you’re eating, they should always be buttery, packed full of chocolate chips and hopelessly addictive.
I like to call these Really Good Chocolate Chip Cookies because they are exactly that: really good. The cookies get a wonderful flavor from butter, brown sugar and a healthy dose of vanilla extract. A hint of extra salt in the cookie dough gives them their addictive quality (without making them seem salty) and offsets the generous amount of sugar in the cookie dough. They’re tender and chewy, and they stay chewy for several days after baking when stored in an airtight container. These are definitely some of my favorite chocolate chip cookies, and they are always a crowd pleaser.
These are fairly large chocolate chip cookies and I prefer to use fairly large chocolate chips in them for the best results. In this particular batch, I actually used See’s Candies huge Semisweet Chocolate Chips in these. Guittard’s chocolate chips tend to be on the larger side, as well. Alternatively, you can also cut up chocolate bars into coarse chunks and stir those in instead of chocolate chips. I like classic semisweet chips in my cookies, but bittersweet chocolate and even dark chocolate will also make excellent cookies.
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Macarons are one of my favorite treats to make for special occasions, and they should be one of yours, too. These little french cookies are made with thin meringue shells that have a crisp and chewy texture and they are sandwiched together with flavorful fillings. They’re small, sweet and beautiful to look at. The cookies have a reputation of being difficult to make, largely because the almond-based meringues are delicate when compared to other cookies. That being said, the cookies are not as difficult to make as they might look and with a little patience you can easily make them at home.
Chocolate macarons are one of my favorite flavors. Chocolate shells go with a wide variety of fillings, including Nutella and chocolate ganache, and they can also be paired with a simple buttercream like I’ve used here. The finished cookies have a deep chocolate color and a lovely crisp-chewy texture to them.
The macarons are completely gluten free and start with a paste made with almond flour, cocoa powder and confectioners’ sugar. I make an Italian meringue – a cooked meringue that has a hot sugar syrup poured into beaten egg whites to cook and stabilize them – and fold it into the chocolate paste. This gives the cookies a lot of stability and creates enough bubbles in the batter to make the cookies puff up nicely when they bake. The cookies should be piped onto parchment paper or a silpat in small circles and allowed to set for about 30 minutes before baking. This set-up time allows the surface of the macaron to set and form a kind of “skin” that gives the macarons their signature smooth look.
I’ve given the quantities for this recipe in volume and by weight. I really recommend weighing the ingredients out if you have a kitchen scale because you’re going to get the best results that way. If you don’t have a scale, just be sure not to pack the ingredients down tightly (just as you shouldn’t pack flour down when you measure it) when you measure them because your cookies will be a little on the dense side if you do
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