Cook n Scribble

Students, faculty and some of the super star lecturers from Cook ‘n Scribble’s fall’s BlogU intensive have put together a fabulous collection of recipes and reminiscences to add to your Christmas cookie repertoire. I’ve doubled every batch, am still baking and have long since run out of tins.

So bake on, Sistahs — and send in your favorites, too — The benefits of a sugar high at this time of year are wildly underrated. — Molly O’Neill

Montana Macaroons

Stella Fong’s love affair with coconut began early and shows no sign of fading. Ms Fong lives and writes in Montana where, she says, indulging her appetite for coconut “adds a little bit of the tropics” to the snowy mountains.

“It began with the Hostess Snowball,” writes Ms. Fong,  “Soft and gooshy, hidden behind cellophane.  I always preferred the pink frosting over the white believing it tasted more delicious. My love affair with coconut continued with teh Foremost Ice Cream company’s coconut ice cream balls with a red candle.

But it was the Mounds candy bar that sealed my love for coconut.  My tastes may have become more sophisticated, but my weakness for coconut abides. Its changed form. Today I bake coconut macaroons. Yes, there is the traditional French way, sophisticated and simple with just egg whites and sugar, But this recipe, which was inspired recipe from Martha Stewart, uses sweetened condensed milk that brings bring back the sticky memories of yester-holiday. Ho Ho Ho.

Coconut Macaroons

Makes 80 cookies

2 large egg whites

Pinch of salt

1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 bags (14-ounce each) Angel Flake sweetened coconut

1.     Preheat oven to 300-degrees F.  In large bowl, whisk together egg whites and salt until soft peaks form, about 2 minutes. Stir in sweetened condensed milk and vanilla. Crumble coconut into the bowl. With a rubber spatula, fold in coconut until well combined.

2.     Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper or nonstick baking mats. Using a tablespoon and fingers, form macaroons into 2-inch rounds about 1-inch apart.

3.     Bake macaroons until golden, about 25 minutes. Transfer baking sheets to a cooling rack, let cool completely. Store in an airtight container for up to a week or keep in freezer for several months.

Students, faculty and some of the super star lecturers from Cook ‘n Scribble’s fall’s BlogU intensive have put together a fabulous collection of recipes and reminiscences to add to your Christmas cookie repertoire. I’ve doubled every batch, am still baking and have long since run out of tins.

So bake on, Sistahs — and send in your favorites, too — The benefits of a sugar high at this time of year are wildly underrated. — Molly O’Neill

Nariyal Nankhatai

A cooking teacher in Westchester County, New York, Rinku Bhattachara specializes in fusing traditional Indian cuisine with her the ingredients she finds in her local supermarket — and the American tastes of her young children. She blogs at  Cooking in Westchester and is best known for her savory food. Her neighbors, however, have become addicted to her Indian-spiced holiday coconut cookies.

She writes:

“These coconut cookies are one of my favorite quick tea cookies. I adapted this recipe from an old Martha Stewart recipe, but have added so many Indian accents that they bear little resemblance to that recipes. The addition of cardamom and “jaggery”,( a raw Indian sugar available in specialty stores) create something very close to the “Nice Biscuits,”  that were my childhood treat. Their crisp and rich texture makes them a perfect companion for tea or coffee

Traditionally, coconut and cardamom are two ingredients that say “festive” in traditional Indian cuisine. As these cookies bake, the toasty smell of coconut pairs with the sweet fragrance of cardamom and perfumes the air, reminding me of my mother’s kitchen. And now I know why she made them so often with me — the cookies are molded, shaped by hand and then rolled in coconut — its fun. This year I made my first batch of these cookies this evening with my 8-year old daughter. This reminded me of my first forays in the kitchen, shadowing my mother helping her mix and stir.

The coconut in these cookies is delicate and can burn easily. But its an easy recipe and almost foolproof once you get the hang of the timing. They are reat to have around while writing cards and make good gifts. In fact, my neighbors Paul and Marylou, who have named these cookies – Rinku’s Indian cookies.

Nariyal Nankhatai – Rinku’s Coconut Cookies

3 cups of sweetened baker’s coconut

¾ cup of grated jaggery (note, the jaggery is raw Indian sugar that comes in blocks and needs to be hand grated or shaved with a knife) if you cannot get it use a light brown muscovado sugar.

¼ cup white sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

¾ teaspoon freshly powdered cardamom

1/2 cup salted butter

1 egg

1 and ½ cups white flour

Extra butter or baking spray to grease the cookie sheet

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place the coconut in a food processor and process until finely chopped, this takes a few good pulses. Remove about ¼ cup and set aside. Add in the jaggery or brown sugar, white sugar, baking powder and cardamom to the coconut and process until finely mixed.
2. Add in the butter and process until mixed and then add in the egg and pulse and finally, add the flour and process until the mixture is a crumbly soft consistency. This will take about 1 minute.
3. Grease a cookie sheet. Remove about a walnut sized ball, the dough will be soft, relatively dry and pliable.Shape into a ball, flatten to 1/3 inch thickness and roll in the reserved coconut to lightly cover the surface of the cookie. Press lightly to let the flakes bind.
4. These cookies do not spread much, so you can place them relatively close. Bake for 25-30 minutes. Check them when you can smell the cardamom in the air, they are rather delicate and can burn easily. They should be pale brown and lightly puffed when done.
5. Remove from the oven and let it cool for a few minutes, then place in a serving basket. If you are planning to store them, cool them thoroughly before placing them in an airtight tiin.

makes 1 1/2 dozen cookies

Cookie Image Source: Chai Pakora

Students, faculty and some of the super star lecturers from Cook ‘n Scribble’s fall’s BlogU intensive have put together a fabulous collection of recipes and reminiscences to add to your Christmas cookie repertoire. I’ve doubled every batch, am still baking and have long since run out of tins.

So bake on, Sistahs — and send in your favorites, too — The benefits of a sugar high at this time of year are wildly underrated. — Molly O’Neill

Time to Bake The Cookies

My mother started baking Christmas cookies the day after Thanksgiving. Now eighty four years old, she begins saying that she is not going to bake Christmas cookies.

“Its too much,” she says.

“I’ve baked enough,”  she says.

And then, by the first week of December, she starts baking, almost apologetically.

“I thought you weren’t going to bake this year,” I say.

“I am not BAKING,” she says, “I am just making a few cookies.”

Virginia O'Neill is Not Baking Photograph by Rebecca Busselle for OneBigTable.com

Here isa link to the first cookie she bakes every year, a crisp, honey-scented almond cookie that keeps for up to a month if stored in a tin between layers of wax paper and kept in a cool place.

I’m constitutionally incapable of following a recipe without improvising and so have never been the baker that my mother is. I make a few cookies. Mostly I make her cookies. I also try to add a recipe or two each year to the repertoire. Along with the rest of the country, I’ve gone a little savory.

It began on Labor Day weekend when Hurricane Irene had devastated upstate New York. We  were without power and were cooking (by gas) against melting freezers. I’d laid in a significant store of small-batch butter from a Vermont farm, butter that wouldn’t last for more than a day after thawing. There were shrubs of rosemary that hadn’t been flooded. Et Viola. Rosemary Shortbread.

Image by Stephanie A. Meyer www.freshtart.net

Shortbread is the basis of most winter holiday cookies. If you add ground nuts they become Swedish nut balls, Russian teacakes, Mexican wedding cookies. If you add chocolate they become chocolate shortbread. If you add a whole lot more butter and sugar they become “scottish,” shortbread, crisp, brown, addictive. call 911.

The only secret to great shortbread is using great butter and using less flour than seems right. I generally reserve a 1/4 of a cup of the flour in a shortbread recipe and use it to flour the rolling surface and the rolling pin. If the first tray of cookies turn into amorphous blobs, I add more flour. Judiciously.

These are great. And here’s a link to a short how-to video from The Joy of Baking, a woman who really bakes — and who has a lot of information on how to vary the master recipe successfully, a result that a mere cookie maker cannot always guarantee.

Irene’s Rosemary Shortbread

2 cups flour

1/4 teaspoon sea salt, plus extra for sprinkling on top if you want to live dangerously and prefer your cookies more savory than sweet

1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature

1/2 cup powdered sugar

1 teaspoon high quality vanilla extract

11/2 Tablespoon minced fresh rosemary

1 teaspoon minced lemon zest

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper.

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Combine the flour and salt and set aside. Cut the butter into chunks and sprinkle with the powdered sugar, the vanilla the rosemary, lemon zest and pepper. Use a hand mixer to completely combine, but don’t whip it too much. The goal is total combination, not airy butter mixture.

2. Sprinkle 1/4 of the flour mixture over the butter mixture and work it together as if you were making a pie dough. Continue to add until all but 1/4 cup of flour has been used. Divide the dough into two hunks. sprinkle some of the reminaing flour on a sheet of wax paper and roll out to 1/4 inch thickness. Use a 1 1/2 inch cookie cutter and press out cookies. Gently lift to a lightly greased cookie tray.

3. Cool in refrigerator for 30 minutes and then bake for 10 15- minutes until the cookies smell great and are lightly golden around the edges. cool on the tray then lift onto a rack. Cool compeltely before storing between layers of waxed paper in an airtight container. Alternatively, cool them until the risk of burning tongue and finger is minimal and eat them at once.

makes about 36 cookies.

The following, nutted variation on the shortbread theme comes from From “One Big Table: A portrait of American Cooking”

Dolly’s Butterballs

Birmingham, Alabama

Everyone in Birmingham knows Melanie Fay for her fabulous parties—and she has her mom, Lurene Hall, to thank for that. Known affectionately as Dolly, Mrs. Hall was a local fashion model and avid home cook. You need to create your own signature on your baked goods, Mrs. Hall would always instruct her daughter—hers was two tiny rows of marks, made with the tines of a fork, on top of her biscuits. As for these butterballs—they’re actually what the rest of the country calls Russian Tea Cakes—first published in the “Woman’s Home Companion Cookbook” in 1943. But when Ms. Fay chose to serve them every Christmas with a special “ambrosia” fruit salad (made with oranges, grapefruit, and coconut), she made that recipe her own.

1 cup butter, softened

4 tablespoons powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups sifted flour

1 cup chopped nuts (Dolly almost always used pecans, but sometimes used black walnuts)

Extra powdered sugar for rolling

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Cream butter.  Add sugar and continue to beat until light and fluffy.

3. Add vanilla.  Add sifted flour and mix well.  Fold in the nuts.

4. Shape into small balls, about the size of walnuts.  Place on ungreased baking sheet.

5. Bake for 15 – 18 minutes.  Roll in confectioner’s sugar while still hot.

6. Cool on brown paper sacks or wire cooling racks.

Makes about 3 dozen.

Students, faculty and some of the super star lecturers from Cook ‘n Scribble’s fall’s BlogU intensive have put together a fabulous collection of recipes and reminiscences to add to your Christmas cookie repertoire. I’ve doubled every batch, am still baking and have long since run out of tins.

So bake on, Sistahs — and send in your favorites, too — The benefits of a sugar high at this time of year are wildly underrated. — Molly O’Neill

Back to Betty

This is the season of nostalgia and ho-ho-how about those retro yearnings? Carol Carlson, a private chef and food blogger, specializes in health-conscious family cooking. But as the snow began to fall in Colorado, she was pulled back to her childhood, her mother’s Betty Crocker Cookbook and the era when flour was white and sugar was abundant.

She upped the healthfulness of her mother’s date-nut bar recipe — but she went back to the “source.” She writes:

“What a happy day it was when my mother made Date and Nut Squares. Betty Crocker’s 3-ring cookbook lay open on the counter and I was allowed to operate the nut chopper. It was a simple mill screwed on top of a plastic jar, but to my ten year old imagination it was high-tech. I turned the small crank and was fascinated to watch the nut become pieces and fall into the reservoir.

Next to me my slender, hard-working mother (there were five of us children) stood at the counter, cutting hard, dried dates with the red-handled kitchen scissors. She frothed the eggs, checked the recipe, measured each ingredient and checked the recipe again. And then out came the Sunbeam stand mixer and soon, the metal beaters tap-tapping each other began to swirl a batter.

White mixer, red-handled scissors, nut chopper, and my mother in her ruffled half apron – promises that something sweet and delicious was in the near future. I wanted to create “her” recipe. Fortunately, my mother said: “I still have the Betty Crocker cookbook. I was able to salvage it from Hurricane Charlie (2004) because it was only water damaged. Let me see if that page is still there. Yes, here is the recipe. Ready?” I copied it down, and here it is.

I used a knife instead of a nut-chopper orange-handled scissors instead of red ones, whole wheat flour and a less-processed sugar. The result was soft, chewy sweetness — but not quite the heaven of my mom’s.”

Almost Betty Crocker’s Date and Nut Squares

Ingredients
2 eggs
½ c sugar [I used Succanat]
½ tsp. vanilla
½ c sifted Gold Medal Flour [I used organic whole wheat]
½ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
1 c cut-up walnuts
2 c finely cut up dates
Confectioners sugar for dusting

Beat until foamy 2 eggs;
Beat in ½ c sugar and ½ tsp. vanilla
Sift together and stir in :
½ c sifted Gold Medal Flour
½ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt

Mix in
1 c cut up walnuts
2 c finely cut up dates

Spread in a well-greased 8-inch square pan
Bake until top has dull (not shiny) crust

Cut into squares, cool and remove from pan

Temperature: 325 degrees, low moderate oven
25-30 minutes
Makes 16 2 “ squares

To sugar them, dip in confectioners sugar and shake excess off.

Students, faculty and some of the super star lecturers from Cook ‘n Scribble’s fall’s BlogU intensive have put together a fabulous collection of recipes and reminiscences to add to your Christmas cookie repertoire. I’ve doubled every batch, am still baking and have long since run out of tins.

So bake on, Sistahs — and send in your favorites, too — The benefits of a sugar high at this time of year are wildly underrated. — Molly O’Neill

Bake On, Ye Slovaks of Upstate New York

Annette Neilsen lives and writes in the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York. Her mother’s Slovakian relatives, she said, recreated home when settling in their small town their small upstate town by keeping the home country traditions alive — Sokol gymnastics and theatrical performances, huge Sunday dinners after church and extensive holiday bake-a-thons.

Annette recently posted a piece about strudel-making on her blog, The Kitchen Cabinet. Her mother made cherry strudel, miniature cranberry nut cakes and bite-size kolacki with poppyseed, apricot or prune filling as well as these birds nest cookies for the holidays and her father still delivers plates of these tasties to neighbors for the winter holidays.

Annette adapted her mother’s traditional birdnest cookie in the recipe below, using hazelnuts — yum! — in place of the traditional almonds. She writes: “Our bungalow’s woodstove continued to smolder through Christmas Eve, so Santa’s cookies were traditionally left on the kitchen table with a glass of milk. My mother continued to bake for our big Christams Day meal. The dollop of local jam at the center of these rich Raspberry Hazelnut Cookies, looks a bit like St. Nick’s red nose.”

Raspberry Hazelnut Cookies

You can substitute chopped walnuts or pecans for the hazelnuts, and most any jam will work here, as long as you can strain out large pieces of fruit.

¾ cup unsalted butter (1 ½ sticks), plus 1 tablespoon
½ cup sugar
2 egg yolks
1 egg, lightly beaten
2 hard-cooked egg yolks, pressed through a fine mesh
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 teaspoon grated lemon peel
2 ½ cups flour
½ cup finely chopped hazelnuts
1/3 cup raspberry jam
1/8 cup confectioner’s sugar

Yield: 24 cookies

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Lightly grease sheet pan with additional butter and set aside.

In a large bowl, blend room temperature butter with sugar, egg and egg yolks, vanilla and lemon peel. Add flour and mix thoroughly, lightly working into a smooth dough.

Pinch off pieces of dough and roll into 1 ½-inch balls; roll in bowl of chopped hazelnuts, making certain to lightly press nut pieces into the dough. Place each on baking sheet.

Gently, make an indentation in the center of each piece of dough with your thumb or end of a wooden spoon handle. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes, or until lightly golden brown.

Allow cookies to cool on baking sheet for five minutes and fill with approximately a teaspoon of jam. Place filled cookies on platter and use a flour sifter or small sieve to sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar.