Salted Lavender Cookies

Salted Lavender Cookies, originally uploaded by michele wynne.

I love that feeling when I wake up early on a rainy morning and realize that I don't have to go to work...even better when there is nothing on the To Do list that involves me having to get out of my jammies and leave the apartment. Yesterday was such a day. I popped season 2 of Downton Abbey into the DVD player and noodled away the day in the kitchen. I started with waffles. I still can't get those Black Bear Diner Sweet Cream Pancakes out of my head. I've been making & tweaking various recipes  amping up the sugar in a variety of ways: subbing in vanilla sugar, infusing warm cream with vanilla sugar, adding more vanilla, adding more sugar,  a couple of squirts of agave nectar...and on and on...the little test kitchen is hard at work as is my sad little waffle iron. Coincidentally, there's a giveaway going on over at The Pioneer Woman Cooks. Fingers crossed.

This morning the sun has been teasing in and out whilst I chill at Simple Pleasures enjoying a pint of java and these Salted Lavender Cookies I made yesterday. Unlike the waffles, this recipe seems to have found it's balance. They've been a work-in-progress since my first crack at them back around Thanksgiving. Now, thanks to my Christmas Kitchen Aid, there's an added churn power that gives the dough a fluffy lift and slightly more tender texture.

Dorie Greenspan's recipe for Sables has been a little kitchen go-to for years without fail (using a $10 hand mixer). It's the basis of my salt & lavender ratio tweaks over the course of several test runs. The last tweak is to the method, inspired by Christina Tosi's book Momofuku Milkbar, the insider revelations behind Milkbar, Momofuku's bakery in NYC.

Salted Lavender Cookies

adapted from Dorie Greenspan's Sables

1 cup butter - 2 sticks - room temperature

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup powdered sugar - sifted

1 teaspoon fine sea salt

2 large egg yolks - room temperature

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon finely crushed, dried, lavender buds*

Maldon sea salt for finishing

In the bowl of an electric mixer, paddle the butter at medium speed until smooth and creamy -    about 3 minutes. Add both sugars and salt. Beat until well blended - 3 more minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, waiting for each egg to incorporate before adding the next. Add the vanilla. Paddle on high for 7 minutes, occasionally scraping down the side of the bowl.
Stir the lavender into the flour. Add the flour mixture into the butter and mix it in using a the lowest speed just until the flour has been incorporated. The dough will be soft and slightly sticky. Scrape the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and form into a roughly rectangular mass. Divide it in half lengthwise so you have two logs. Place one log onto a piece of plastic wrap rolling the dough into a compact, uniform roll about 9 inches long, by twisting and tightening the ends of the plastic wrap. Repeat with the second log.

Refrigerate for a minimum of 2 hours or overnight. The dough can be frozen at this point as well. Put the wrapped logs into a freezer bag and press out as much air as you can.

Arrange a rack in the center of the oven and pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and slice the logs into 1/2 inch rounds, slicing uniform pieces from each end first, then slice the remaining log into 1/2 thick rounds. Lay each round an inch apart. Sprinkle each round with a light pinch of Maldon sea salt and press the flakes lightly into the dough.

Bake one sheet at a time for 16 minutes, rotating the baking sheet at the 8 minute mark. Remove when the edges turn golden brown. The top of the cookie should still be pale.

Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for 1-2 minutes and then transfer them onto a wire rack to continue cooling.

*I forage lavender from my neighborhood and let it dry out on my window sill. Scrape the buds off the stem and onto a cutting board and chop, chop, chop and chop some more or use a mortar and pestle crushing & pounding until you have a variation of powder and bigger bits.

Cashew Butter Balls

 

 

It's a week into the New Year and I've only just come up with my resolution. I have only one: To learn some thing new. Every day. It will probably be kitchen related most likely, but I'm keeping my eyes and ears wide open. Really, we all learn new things everyday. We just don't always remember them, or think them relevent enough to our lives to take particular note of.

This one's pretty simple, general and as good of a place to start as any:
You CAN teach an old dog new tricks.
So, I start this year with a new take on an old favorite. Back to back posts on what is essentially the same cookie. The subtle differences that make one damn good and the other one sheer bliss.

These Cashew Butter Balls are a gigantic leap forward for what I thought was the crowning stand-out of my holiday baking-the Mexican Wedding Cakes, or what I started calling Sugar Bombs. They are always the first to disappear from every cookie tray or tin I've turned out for the last 10 years. I thought that they were perfect just they way they were. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. So many recipes, so little time...and all that jazz.
Yet, when a post as timely and gorgeous as Smitten Kitchen's pops up on my radar, I get all twitchy with anticipation. I attempt to wrangle my kitchen OCD for the greater good and go all ATK on these bad boys.  So much so, that I was compelled, for the first time ever, to bake AFTER Christmas. That's saying something.
These were brilliant. I love them so much that I have started my new tradition of The New Year Cookie. I gifted these to friends I met up with between Christmas and New Year's Day. I made up two gift boxes, saving about 6 for myself. I was actually going to bring them to the cafe and share them with Sheena, but they never made it. Once I ate the first one and it was so delightful, I had to have another, just to make sure I wasn't over-reacting. Once I ate the third, it was all over. These buttery, sweet, melt-in-your-mouth bites of nutty heaven are addicting. I dub thee Crack Cookies.

I suspect, if I never make another cookie but this, for the rest of my life, I shall make all of my friends and family very happy as they curse the crap outta me.

The Holiday Cookiepalooza continues

Mexican Wedding Cakes, originally uploaded by riptideredsf.

My Mexican Wedding Cake/Sugar Bombs got a little make-over this year with a little help from smitten kitchen. Butter, sugar, vanilla, flour. All on hand, sitting on my kitchen table, ready to go. As is my usual start of the day off, I'm down at my local java joint, noodling away on the internet when up pops this gorgeous recipe: Cashew Butter Balls. I like to think that great minds think alike...but the reality is, everyone who has ever baked a cookie, makes some version of this because they are easy and delicious...even when they're over baked. The timing on this one was freakin' freaky though, as I was only moments away from churning out my old version (I ended up following Deb's recipe using almonds since I already had so many on hand).

This excited me on two fronts: Cashews (lovelovelove 'em) and an all food processor prep. The recipe I'd been using for years (from a 10 year old Good Housekeeping Holiday edition) was the beat-with-a-wooden-spoon method and oddly enough, instructed to add the vanilla to the dry mixture?!? I never thought to question this before. I wondered what those darkish, little, crunchy clumps were in a recipe sans nuts.

Now I know better.  

Christmas Cookiepalooza

Christmas Cookiepalooza, originally uploaded by riptideredsf

Two years ago, whilst noodling around in cyberspace, I came across this post over at The Amateur Gourmet that transformed a lifetime of Christmas cookie baking. I, like pretty much everybody who has their go-to Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe, figured my recipe (well, Good Housekeeping's actually) was The Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. I baked that recipe, which included peanut butter, oatmeal and Rice Krispies, every Christmas for 10 years as part of my Menage et Trois. Three go-to recipes that became legendary and much anticipated amongst family, friends and co-workers. I'd spend the week before Christmas up to my ears in baking every night after work so as to deliver the freshest cookie trays and gift bags as close to Christmas as possible. It wore me out.

When I came across Adam's post, a Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe from Top Chef Just Desserts contestant Eric Wolitzky, I was intrigued by the same things he was: melted butter and measurement by weight...but the game changer was the note about freezing the cookie dough. How did I not know this!?! Only then did it occur to me that was how my mom was able to produce the insane assortment of cookies we'd bake every year. I'd been torturing myself needlessly.

Form and freeze the unbaked cookies on the baking sheet until solid, then transfer them to a freezer bag. I lay the bag flat on the table to distribute the frozen cookies into an even layer then I suck all the air out of the bag, to make all subsequent bags stackable.

This is the recipe that propelled me into buying a kitchen scale. The ingredients are simple so the dough comes together quickly. I've made a few tweaks to this since last year. I use a combination of chocolate. Bitter and semi-sweet chips as well as a dark chocolate bar that I chop up. I read the tip about using different chocolate from Alton Brown who recommends including milk chocolate as well, but I just don't like milk chocolate. The combination of flavors and textures makes every bite different.

I loved, loved, loved the idea of melting the butter because then I could take it a step further and brown it! I make these cookies all the time now.

The other cookies in this trio are Kim Severson's Bacon Fat Gingersnaps from CookFight and Dorie Greenspan's Beurre & Sel Jammers.

I can't tell you how thrilled and delighted I was when I found Dorie's recipe in this month's Bon Appetit. I started making her recipe for Sables about a year ago when I discovered her recipe for World Peace Cookies (which I currently have in my freezer). She creates Jammers, baked in custom designed cookie rings, for her new cookie store, Beurre & Sel in Manhattan. The uniform shape is recreated in the home kitchen using muffin tins! They're a bit labor intensive, but worth it.

The gingersnaps were the not-all-that bookend,  of an otherwise deliciously prepared meal,  at the book event dinner for CookFight. The cookie I ate that night, though tasty, had been over-baked (like the Gougeres). So, of course, since I vindicated Julia's Gougeres I had to do the same with the Gingersnaps, seeing as I just happened to have a jar of bacon fat just waiting for  my next attempt at skillet cornbread. The bacon fat replaces butter...brilliant! Moisture achieved and Kim's recipe is deemed a keeper!

 

Game Day Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate Chip Cookies, originally uploaded by riptideredsf.

I've been baking chocolate chip cookies for-EVER. Even longer than I've been a 49er Faithful and that's been a loooonnnnng time. It's a big day here in San Francisco for us Niners fans. The NFC Championship game is this afternoon and I'm going to watch it at a friends house. My first offering was to make my 7-layer mexican dip, but she's planning a chili bar, so the dip seemed a little redundant.

On to plan B, which I'm learning (I'm always still learning) should just be plan A and be done with it. The Chocolate Chip Cookie. One can NEVER go wrong with Chocolate Chip Cookies.

In spite of an Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe I'd been making for nearly 15 years, I came upon my current favorite last year via The Amateur Gourmet who got it from Top Chef Just Desserts chef Eric Wolitzky. The recipe gives the measurements by weight and could not be easier. It also makes an enormous amount of dough. My tweak to the recipe is using a combination of chocolate chips and cut up chunks of bittersweet or dark chocolate. I like the little shaved bits that spread throughout the cookie as well as some oversized large chunks. I also brown the butter. That's a little tip I got from Smitten Kitchen. The browned butter adds a nutty richness in flavor.

Who knew that when I stumbed across this recipe at AG that my cookie production would be amped up in some pretty awesome ways. The best was the strategy of freezing cookie dough (form the cookies and freeze them on a cookie sheet, then transfer them into a ziplock freezer bag) so that freshly baked cookies are only 15 minutes away, any time, any day. Brilliant. It also propelled me to buy a kitchen scale. I was amazed by the variance between weights and measures, especially when you get into larger quantites like flour when baking bread.

At the same time, I got another great tip from watching America's Test Kitchen. I bought a small ice cream/portioning scoop for consistency. Restaurant supply stores and Smart and Final sell portion scoops in numbered sizes from about 10-30 which corresponds to the number of scoops per quart of ice cream. I use a 16 if I want a big cookie, something I would give as a hostess gift maybe. If I'm making them for a crowd I go 24.

I've given these out a lot in the last year and in spite of all the great feedback they are still a work-in-progress. Just like me.