Lemon quaresimali

I had no idea what these would turn out like, given the rare lack of accompanying picture in this shiny book – I was drawn to the name, so Italian and operatic-like, and I had lemons to the rafters; the double-baking technique wasn’t something I’d done before, so there was the curiosity factor. As it turned out, they’re just big, lemony, nutty cantucci biscotti.

And not for those with sensitive teeth until they’ve had a good dunking in a beverage of choice – not for nothing are they Lenten biscuits of penance.

Adapted from David Lebovitz’s Ready for Dessert, p219

245g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
2 large eggs, plus 1 egg for brushing
265g sugar
3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
Fine zest of 2 lemons
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
250g whole almonds, toasted – I used half hazelnuts

Preheat the oven to 180C. Line a tray with baking paper.

In a small bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, vanilla, lemon zest and juice. Stir the dry ingredients into the egg mixture until well blended, then mix in the whole almonds.

With wet hands, shape the dough into two logs about 30cm long and 6cm in diameter and place on a tray lined with baking paper. Stir the remaining egg in a small bowl and brush each log generously with it, then give them a second coat. Don’t feel compelled to use up all the egg – it’ll be much too much and will run everywhere, take it from me. Better to toss the remainder into a handy omelette or give it to the cat.

Bake the logs for 25–30 minutes until golden-brown and firm; they’ll expand and flatten while baking. (I baked two side-by side on the one square tray, and feared they’d run into each other, but they missed that by a whisker – still, if you have a fancy Italian oven that accommodates two trays on the upper rack, probably best to separate them.) When done, remove the tray from the oven and reduce the heat to 150C.

Allow the much-expanded golden shiny logs to cool for 10 minutes before slicing them crosswise 2cm apart with a sharp serrated knife. Arrange the slices cut-side-down on the tray and return to the oven for 20 minutes, after which they’ll cool to a hard lemony crunchiness, excellent for coffee-dunking.

Oat and barberry biscuits

I haven’t made Anzac biscuits since Year Eight. These have tiny sour-sharp barberries to tart them up a bit – and are the first thing to make from the promising Bourke Street Bakery cookbook before I attempt its sourdough starters and croissants and ginger crème brûlée.

Adapted from Bourke Street Bakery p304

165g rolled oats

220g plain flour

100g desiccated coconut

210g brown sugar

50g dried barberries

45 mL boiling water

185g unsalted butter

60g golden syrup

1 ½ teaspoons bicarb soda

60 mL water

Preheat oven to 170C. Combine barberries, boiling water and 35g of the sugar in a bowl.

Combine oats, flour, coconut and the remaining 175g of the sugar in a bowl and mix.

Put the butter and golden syrup in a small saucepan over low heat and stir until the butter has melted. Add the barberries and sugar mixture. Combine the bicarb and water in a cup and add to the pan. While it’s still foaming, add to the dry ingredients and mix well. At this point the barberries look so shiny and rubylike and somehow evil against that bland beige Anzac lumpiness.

The recipe says to take 3 tablespoons of the mixture at a time to roll into balls, which would yield a total of 12 huge biscuits – I took much smaller-sized scoops and formed walnut-sized balls, which I pressed lightly with a fork rather than pressing to be very flat with a spatula as advised. They need to be placed far apart to allow for spreading – I could bake only 9 at a time – and baked for 15–20 minutes.

After cooling on the trays, mine were that softer, chewier end of the Anzac spectrum than the thin crisp version in the BSB’s photo. Moreish, if inelegant, and the barberries did give it a whole new dimension.

Olive oil crackers

I noticed these in the Ottolenghi cookbook last weekend when I made eight of its dishes including the Parmesan and poppy biscuits on the facing page to these, which is a story for another day. These are the sort of thing for which one always has the ingredients, for a change. And they’re pretty good, even without the dip one has failed to procure for Friday-night office wine.

Adapted from Ottolenghi: the Cookbook, p186

250g plain flour (I used 100g each of plain and bread flour, and 50gm wholemeal flour)
1 tsp baking powder
115ml water
25ml olive oil, plus extra for brushing (I used extra virgin)
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1/2 tsp cayenne
¼ teaspoon black pepper
course sea salt for sprinkling – I found Maldon a bit too coarse on the first tray’s worth, so ground normal salt over the rest

Combine all the ingredients except the sea salt in the mixer bowl, and knead it with the dough hook until it all comes together in a firm consistency. (Or do it by hand.) Wrap in cling film and leave it to rest for an hour in the fridge.

Preheat the oven to 220°C. On a well-floured surface, use a rolling pin to roll walnut-sized bits of the dough as close to paper-thin as possible – or at least attempt this for one long, oval ‘witch’s tongue’, feel despairing at the result, have a brainwave and GET OUT YOUR PASTA MACHINE!

It really does look like a sulphurous witch's tongue...

Oh, it’s so inexpressibly pleasing when I find an unexpected use for such a guilt-provokingly underutilised utensil as the Imperia Tipo Lusso SP150. Putting the bits of dough through the largest setting and then the second-or-third-smallest to produce perfect thinness was the easiest task in the world, even though I’ve carelessly lost the attachment that bolts the machine to a benchtop, so that most of my left hand was employed holding the machine down while a few leftover fingers had to elevate the dough as it fed through the rollers.

Lay the pieces on trays lined with baking paper, brush generously with olive oil, then sprinkle on the sea salt, or topping of your choice – I tried fennel and cumin seeds for the third tray. Next time I might try chopped rosemary or thyme.

Bake for about 6 minutes, until crisp and golden brown. Allow to cool and store in an airtight container.

Peanut-Butter Pillows

I had a dream, a terrible dream, in which every one of my colleagues went on a detox diet.

I woke with the remnants of a scream in my throat, thrashed my way out of the twisted sheets and went straight to make something chockablock with as much fat and sugar as I could find. Maida Heatter’s Peanut-Butter Pillows seemed just the thing to stabilise my universe.

Her recipe would make about 16 filled cookies, she said. Well, that wouldn’t do for force-feeding my workplace out of any consideration of diets, so I doubled everything.

Adapted from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies, pp 142–3
 

380g plain flour
1 teaspoon bicarb soda
½ teaspoon salt
230g unsalted butter
260g smooth (not chunky) peanut butter
200g raw or white sugar
170g light corn syrup (I used glucose syrup)
2 tablespoons milk
an additional cup or so of peanut butter for filling

I added about 50g roughly chopped dark chocolate

Sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt, and set aside. Cream the butter. Add the peanut butter and sugar and beat thoroughly. Beat in the syrup and the milk. On low speed, add the sifted dry ingredients, scraping the bowl as necessary with a rubber spatula and beating only until smooth.

Turn out the dough, knead it briefly and then form it into an even log about 20cm long and 5cm in diameter. Wrap the dough in clingwrap and refrigerate for at least a couple of hours.

Preheat oven to 180°C. Line trays with baking paper.

With a sharp knife, cut slices 5mm thick and place them 3cm apart on the trays – they spread quite a bit. My dough was still fairly soft and lost its roundness as I sliced it, but this is magical self-healing dough, and the most messy, oval, cracked biscuit sorted itself out in the cooking – not that these are exactly the epitome of elegance, they’re more your hearty gobstopper variety of biscuit.

Place a teaspooned blob of the additional peanut butter in the centre of each round, flattening it slightly to leave a 1cm border. Still enmeshed in my nightmare, I extended a chopped bit of dark chocolate to each, as garlic to a vampire.

Slice the remaining dough and place the rounds over one of the peanut-butter-topped biscuits. Let stand for a few minutes to allow the dough to soften slightly. Then seal the edges by pressing them lightly with a fork. Don’t worry about slight cracks in the tops – all that will happen is that peanut butter (and chocolate) will glimmer shinily through them, and since when was that a bad thing?

Bake for 15 minutes until lightly browned. Let the biscuits stand on the trays for about a minute. Then, with a wide metal spatula, transfer them to racks to cool.

And they were good, all crunchy and buttery and salty and sweet. There was no stopping at just one, or three. I stand by the chocolate, too.

Maida must have been making dinner-plate sized ones (perhaps to better allow for the pillow mound of peanut butter, which I didn’t achieve – more of a flattish layer in mine) to get only 16 out of one quantity – I got about 60. Too many, in fact, for the kitchen biscuit jar, but my colleagues were quick to resolve that issue.

Pinwheel biscuits

I’ve always had a thing for a spiral (and in fact am frittering away my life looking for a suitably worthy garment on which to sew the red-and-white spiral buttons I got many moons ago from Buttonmania. (I have a lot of buttons experiencing that fate. Button paralysis, it’s called – a subcategory of that infamous scourge of the amateur sewist, stash paralysis.) And I fear I would be one of those unfortunates to be sucked into a whirlpool just by contemplating it a moment too long).

These are Vertigo-in-a-biscuit! I’m sure I remember these on a table at a school fete in 1982, and I was pretty delighted with them then, and curious about how they were done – in the same way that I remain curious about Castlemaine Rock.

I made the straight chocolate-and-vanilla recipe from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies, and no sooner had I slid the rolled log into the fridge than I got to thinking of all the other two-toned flavours that could be made. So I immediately got to making a matcha and white chocolate version.

220g plain flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

30g unsweetened chocolate

115g butter

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

150g sugar (I used raw)

1 egg

1 teaspoon powdered instant coffee (I used not-instant ground coffee)

¼ teaspoon almond extract

1/3 cup pecans, finely chopped (I used walnuts)

Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. Melt the chocolate in the microwave. (Or in a double boiler like Maida, although 30g would get lost in the corners, I’d imagine.)

Cream the butter, add vanilla, sugar and egg one by one, beating well. Drop the speed to low and add the dry ingredients just until it all comes together.

At this point, Maida says to take out a cup of the dough. That didn’t seem exact enough for me, so I added up the weight of all the ingredients and took out 270g. The melted chocolate and coffee went into one half, and the almond extract and pecans into the other.

Sandwich one lump of dough between two sheets of baking paper and roll out to a 14"x9" oblong. I have no concept of what this would look like even in centimetres, so I took a leaf out of My Little Kitchen’s book and taped the dimensions on the bench, where they showed through the paper as a guide. When it was more or less the right size overall, I peeled off the top layer of paper and trimmed off the excess from the sides, using it to fill in the corners. The dough was sticky but quite malleable, so this wasn’t too hard. Same for the other lump of dough, and then carefully, carefully laid one evenly atop the other.

Then the paper beneath the dough can be used to help roll up along the long side to form the roll. It all seemed to come together pretty well, and into the fridge to firm up for a few hours.

Then it’s all fun – slicing the log into ½ centimetre rounds, exposing the nice even spiral.

They’re baked for 12 minutes at 180C until golden at the edges, and out they come, pretty and buttery and crunchy.

For the second version, I simply replaced the chocolate and coffee with a tablespoon of matcha, and the almond extract and walnuts with 30g white chocolate. They were okay, and nice-looking, although the white chocolate didn’t come through strongly – to be expected, really. I might try more white chocolate next time, paired with lemon.

Korova Sablés

These elegant, rich choc-chip slice-and-bakes are also known as World Peace Cookies in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking, but I prefer Korova Sablés, as they’re named at Pierre Hermé’s in Paris and in Dorie’s little earlier cookbook, Paris Sweets. Anything that touches on A Clockwork Orange is fine by me, my droogs, and these are good – in fact, you’ll be out of your rasoodocks with radosty to have these in your rookers, along with a nice moloko or chai.

175g plain flour

30g dutch-process cocoa

½ teaspoon bicarb soda

150g unsalted butter, room temperature

120g brown sugar

50g raw sugar

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

150g dark chocolate (I used Callebaut Strong 70%, the very last of my 2.5kg)

Beat the butter until creamy. Add the sugars, salt and vanilla extract and beat for a couple of minutes.

Sift in the flour, cocoa, bicarb, add choc chips and beat on the lowest speed or by hand only until the mixture looks crumbly – don’t overwork it. 

Scrunch the dough into a rough ball and then divide in half. Form each chunk into a log, wrap in baking paper or Gladwrap and put in the fridge to chill for at least 2 hours – it can stay there for three days, or can be frozen for future reference.

Preheat the oven to 165C. With a sharp nozh (I find a little serrated one good for getting through the choc chips), shive the logs into rounds about 1.5cm thick. If they crumble or break, just push them back together again – they’ll come good in the baking (I also roll their edges in sugar, for prettiness, but this is also a good moment to get them shapely again). Place lomticks onto a tray lined with baking paper, a centimetre or two apart.

Bake for 12 minutes. They mightn’t look cooked, but will firm up as they cool.

And then, oh my brothers, bliss and heaven, horrorshow gorgeousness and gorgeousity as you cram these into your rot.

Chocolate and Peanut Butter Ripples

Adapted from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies, pp32–3

Chocolate dough

55g unsweetened chocolate*

120g unsalted butter

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon salt

150g raw sugar

1 egg

150g sifted plain flour

Preheat oven to 170C and line two trays with baking paper.

Melt the chocolate in the microwave or a double boiler and leave to cool a bit.

Cream the butter; add vanilla, salt and sugar and beat well. Beat in the egg and then the melted chocolate. Reduce mixer speed and gradually add the flour just until combined. Roughly halve the dough and set aside in a couple of cereal bowls.

Peanut-butter dough

30g unsalted butter

¼ cup smooth peanut butter

100g brown sugar

2 tablespoons plain flour

Cream the butter with the peanut butter until smooth. Beat in sugar until well mixed. Add flour and mix until just combined.

Maida says to drop barely rounded teaspoonfuls of the chocolate dough on the trays, topped with the peanut-butter dough and then another layer of the chocolate. There was no way this cement-like dough was dropping anywhere, so I used fingers to shape then into something roughly circular and flat. The first lot of chocolate dough made the promised 30 biscuits, so I shaped the peanut-butter and remaining chocolate dough into roughly even logs and cut each of them into 30 even pieces to make sure it would all work out in the end. Even though Maida suggested only flattening them lightly at the very end of the process with a fork dipped in sugar, they were toppling towers of dough, so I flattened each layer – gentle I was not.

 Bake for 15 minutes, and not more – they did crisp up as they cooled, as Maida promised. But they were hardly the ‘rather thin, crisp, candylike cookie’ that had to be ‘handle[d] with care – these are fragile’ as they were described. Not at all thin, and crisp only around the edges. And the concentric circles as illustrated were far from the reality.

*I had some Trader Joe’s unsweetened chocolate in the house, which has never been the case before I went to the US in April and brought it back. I probably would have used a 70 percenter or so if I hadn’t had this. I tasted a bit out of curiosity – like taking a mouthful of bitterest Droste even for one who likes chocolate sufficiently dark to put hairs on the chest.

Cardamom biscuits

Did you ever use cardamom? I did, but I never really tasted it until I tried this recipe.

Maida Heatter’s Brand-New Book of Great Cookies p169–70

A freezing Sunday evening at the end of a weekend lacking in that indefinable something a lot of them lack in these days, and a sudden need to get into the kitchen accompanied by Björling and de los Angeles doing that lacking-sound-quality but still-bloody-heartrending Madama Butterfly, and make what Maida calls rolling-pin cookies, usually to be avoided like the plague due to an inexplicable lack of marble worktop.

½ teaspoon freshly ground cardamom seeds (about 2 teaspoons of pods, seeds extracted and ground in a spice grinder or mortar and pestle, then sifted)

2 ¼ cups plain flour

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

125g unsalted butter, room temperature

1 teaspoon baking soda, or what we would call bicarbonate of soda, not baking powder. Sigh.

¼ teaspoon salt

1 cup packed brown sugar (I used light muscovado)

1 large egg

Preheat oven to 180C. 

Sift the flour and cream of tartar; set aside. I actually followed the instruction to sift this time, as the proud new owner of a big shiny drum sifter.

Beat the butter until creamy and add the cardamom, bicarb and salt. Beat in the sugar, then the egg. Add the flour and mix in just until incorporated.

Halve the dough for ease of handling on a postage-stamp-sized work surface, and roll to about 5mm thick. It's quite a sticky dough, and the rolling pin kept sticking to it; for the second half I rolled it out on baking paper.

 I punched out circles with a glass, and placed them the recommended 1½ inch apart on the baking-paper-lined sheets and into the oven for 20 minutes, only twice as long as recommended. They didn’t spread or puff up as described; it seems I made the classic error of reading ‘baking powder’ for the bicarb, thanks to the USian betwixt-and-between ‘baking soda’.

They were the sort of unassuming neat flat golden disc that is what it is, and exactly the sort of unchallenging baking the evening called for. The cardamom gave them a nice warmth and also misled several colleagues who held them in esteem for their gingeriness. The texture was crispish and shortbready and pleasant even with the incorrect raising agent, other than which I have every confidence they would have been infinitely more fascinating.

Sesame biscuits

I don’t get Okashi by Keiko Ishida out enough, but like its simple, familiar recipes with often-unusual ingredients such as soy flour and brown-rice syrup. I’ve made the green tea sables, which were great, and the tofu cheesecake, which was the weirder end of great, which probably makes it just okay.

I’ve been looking at the photo of these black-and-white sesame cookies for ages, taken by their handsomeness-rather-than-prettiness, and the way the miniscule black seeds are sliced into a cross-section; it took me a while to find an opportunity where I happened to have both white and black seeds in the fridge.

And they’ve turned out to be delicious – just sweet enough, with a buttery, nutty flavour. I do love a sesame seed. These are like a Sesame Snack in a biscuit.

220g plain flour

50g white sesame seeds

50g black sesame seeds

100g unsalted butter, softened

100g icing sugar

1/8 tsp salt

40g egg yolks, from about 2 eggs

Put flour into some sort of container and chill in the freezer (not sure why, perhaps it’s a texture thing, but why not). Toast sesame seeds at 160C for about 15 minutes, or until the white ones develop a slight tan. Set aside to cool.

Beat butter, icing sugar and salt until pale and creamy. Add egg yolks and mix well. Add flour and sesame seeds and fold in with a spatula. At this point the dough will seem very dry and crumbly, but it can be scrunched together.

The recipe says to divide the dough in half, transfer each half to a piece of baking paper, and shape into an oblong 12x7x2.5cm. That looked a bit difficult to achieve, so I lined a small oblong container that had once held quince paste with gladwrap and compacted the dough into it with a coffee tamper. 

Refrigerate for at least 3 hours.

Preheat oven to 160C. Slice the chilled dough 5–7mm thick. Bake for about 20 minutes until golden brown and the toasty, sesame-y fragrance fills the kitchen.

Lemon sablés

Sablés are plain and buttery, like a lighter shortbread, and are just the thing sometimes when baking must be done for the sake of one’s sanity, yet there’s not a lot of time or desire to spend on anything involved and complicated. I’d made chocolate and green-tea versions before, but never these sablés au citron from Dorie Greenspan’s Paris Sweets.

I don’t pull out that book often enough for my own good. It presents well-tried recipes from various Parisian cafes, Pâtisserie Lerch in this case, and everything I’ve ever done from it – burnt-butter financiers, sablés Korova (reborn as the famous World Peace Cookies in Baking) – has been simple and pleasing.

I might have gone on about this before, but Dorie’s recipes are so meticulously detailed and clearly explained in terms of expected outcome that they’re a pleasure to follow and hard to stuff up. She’s one of those writers whose recipe books can be read like novels, especially this one with all its Parisian backstory and diminutive size.

This recipe’s a classic slice-and-bake, dough mixed together in moments, formed into logs and refrigerated until needed – the zesting took the longest to do of any one stage, but that clean, sharp lemon-oil aroma that floats up is worth a few minutes. Before baking, the logs are painted with an egg-yolk wash and rolled in sugar, which gives them a crystally, crunchy edge. And that’s it – simplicity in a biscuit.

Of course, it should be that simple, but my oven let me down as usual – the biscuits around the edges of the tray gained the slight goldenness I wanted for all of them, but most were pale and their texture not as good. And my logs never form perfect circles, as noted before, and this time I really wanted them to be like buttery coins. I'm sure it’s because I am deprived of a marble benchtop. 

But they were good with tea anyway, all fifty of them, and in terms of baking-lite as relaxation, sablés are it and a bit. 

Wienerstübe cookies

These are Austrian. They are coal-black, chocolate, black-pepper cookies – buttery, crunchy and spicy.

Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies pp128­–9

These are every adjective Maida came up with above, and a damn easy slice-and-bake besides. The mixture can be thrown together while you’re waiting for a pasta to cook, rolled up, and put in the fridge for later. Or in the freezer, for that matter. Then whenever you feel like an elegant chocolate biscuit with your afternoon espresso or mug of Moccona, whichever the case may be, slice a good few off and bung them in the oven. They have a mouth-warming array of spices that set off the cocoa, and they’re about a million times better than a Chocolate Ripple.

1 ½ cups plain flour

1 ½ teaspoons baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

¾ teaspoon cinnamon

¼ teaspoon allspice

½ teaspoon ground black pepper

Pinch cayenne

¾ cup dutch-process cocoa

180g unsalted butter

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup sugar

1 egg

Sift together the dry ingredients.

Cream the butter, add the vanilla, sugar and egg and beat well. On a low speed, gradually add the dry ingredients, mixing only enough to blend.

Tear off a couple of pieces of baking paper about 40cm long. Distribute half the dough on each, shaping into a long, even sausage by rolling in the paper. There is no way I know of to be able to get this perfectly tubular, so I go for a squarish result instead by flattening each side on the bench. Refrigerate the snakes in their paper for at least two hours.

Preheat oven to 190C. Unwrap one of the snakes and cut into 6mm discs. 

Place on a tray lined with more baking paper – a centimetre or two apart is enough.

 Bake for 10–12 minutes. 

Lemon walnut wafers

These are semisoft with a tart lemon flavor—an old-fashioned cookie from Florida.

Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies, pp 45–6

It had been a sorry while since any biscuits were baked. And to my horror and despair, when the time was finally found to bake biscuits, Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies was nowhere to be seen. I could see the empty space between its chronologically-ordered sisters of Maida’s prolific late-70s period. I searched high and low. I checked that I hadn’t put it in the fridge. I blamed The Guitar Teacher, one of his students and the estate agent in that order, as the only souls to darken our door in the last fortnight.

‘It’s probably fallen down the back of the cabinet,’ TGT suggested, unhelpfully, as it was clearly impossible that such a hefty tome could fall down there.

‘What utter codswallop,’ I said dismissively, or words to that effect. ‘Anyway, it’s too hard to drag that great thing out to have a look.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll just grab the torch, shall I?’

Lo and behold, there it was, caught in the web of cords from the stereo, its little Post-it flags waving. You didn’t see that coming, did you, dear reader? A happy ending! Albeit one with some degree of egg on my face! I can’t help feeling that a happy ending makes this tale a tad flat and pointless, as it would Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, and I have no idea how I got onto them, so without further ado, to Lemon Walnut Wafers.

1½ cups plain flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon kosher salt (Because I have bought some now, so often do recipes call for it. Does it differ from Saxa? Don’t ask me. But you could probably use whatever salt you like, really.)

Generous pinch ground ginger

120g unsalted butter, left out to soften if you manage to plan ahead. Me, I zapped it in the microwave for 10 seconds.

1 cup sugar

1 egg plus 2 egg yolks

1 lemon, zest and juice

60g walnuts, roughly chopped

Preheat oven to 180C.

Sift together flour, baking powder, salt and ginger and set aside.

Cream the butter by electric means (or hand – I don’t wish to exclude you, Alida Irwin), then add sugar and beat well. Add the egg and yolks, beating until the mixture is light and fluffy. On a low speed (you just stir normally, AI), gradually add sifted dry ingredients, mixing only until smooth. Mix in the lemon zest and juice and the walnuts by hand.

Blob rounded teaspoonfuls of the mixture onto baking-paper-lined trays, at least an inch apart (Maida recommends two inches, but I have a puny oven and meagre trays, and the biscuits didn’t spread far). It’s a sticky mixture and the blobs weren’t prettily rounded, but they sorted themselves out in the baking.

Bake for 20 minutes, or until the tops spring back when lightly pressed. Maida says, ‘These cookies will not brown on the tops, but there will be a thin brown edge.’ As always, she recommends reversing trays to ensure even browning, and, this time, I would have done well to follow this instruction – as it was, the front row had browned on their peaks while the rest were fish-belly pale.

Cool on racks. Do I even need to mention that?

As I suspected, these bore no more relation to wafers than this blog does to tragic nineteenth-century realism. They tasted pleasingly lemony, but were  US-style soft and cakey; a bit more browning and crisping all over would have been an improvement rather than something to avoid. One to file away for the false-teeth years, which are not, after all, so far off. Or perhaps I should refer to those as the naked-gums years – with all signs pointing to my generation not being able to afford housing in retirement, dentistry probably won’t be on the cards either. We could end up living out a Russian novel after all.

Charlie Brown’s peanut cookies

Couchbound illness prevails while the sun shines gloriously outside. In an attempt to drag this fledgling blog from congee back to baking, let me tell of Maida’s Charlie Brown’s Peanut Cookies I made a couple of weeks ago.

I was drawn to the name, and these got an enthusiastic wrap by other Maida Heatterers online, and the very American approach of focusing a cookie upon peanuts had previously gone down well with the workmates flocking around the biscuit barrel.

Well. Not bad, but never again. These ‘hand-formed cookies’ took up an outrageously hefty chunk of valuable Sunday evening.

Wait a tic, or feel free to skip the following digression. Baking often strikes me as a weird and paradoxical pursuit to be drawn to, and not only because the image of apronned, Betty Draper feminine domesticity traditionally associated with it brings me out in hives politically. Here it is, the true heart of the matter: I loathe the feeling of any flour or eggwhite slime or dough gunk on my hands. I seem to get past both the hands thing and the feminist ambivalence, but still. Weird. It helps not to wear a floral pinny, I guess, and also to let the KitchenAid take care of kneading. Dried crusted flour on fingers. Under nails. Shudder. Anyway, apologies, this is a discussion for another day and merely a longwinded and tangential way of relating that I was washing my squeamish mitts every five seconds here.

From Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies, 1977, pp231–2

Makes 36 (more like 46 for me, and they didn’t seem small…)

2 cups (220g)* plain flour, sifted

1 teaspoon double-acting** baking powder

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

236g butter***

1 cup (200g) dark brown sugar, firmly packed

2 eggs (one whole, the other separated)

1 teaspoon water

285 g roasted salted peanuts, chopped medium fine

smooth peanut butter – just spoon from the jar.****

dark choc chips

*Your devoted correspondent has taken account of the fact that US cups are different to ours, and has found online converters that offer cups by weight. Place your trust in me; I’ve placed it in an online converter. I’ve offered you the original cup measurement if you’re not with me on this journey.

** Double-acting, you cry? WTF is that? I’d never come across it before either. It’s about chemical compounds and what happens when. From googling, I think pretty much any baking powder you can buy these days from Woolies is what decades ago was considered double-acting, reacting in two stages to the liquid of the batter and then to the heat of the oven, distinct from a single-acting baking powder, which only produces a reaction when first encountering the batter and needing immediate baking.

***Being American, Maida calls for 2 ‘sticks’, which my research has established are 118g each. Want to round it up to 240g? Oh, fine then. In fact, just use those 50g-increment lines printed on the butter paper, like I do all the time. What could go wrong?

****Don’t look at me like that, I’m not being inexact here – Maida says: ‘it is not necessary to measure this; you may use it right from the jar’! It was probably about half a cup I used, perhaps not even.

Sift together the flour, baking powder and cinnamon and set aside. Cream butter with electric mixer. Add sugar and beat to mix. Beat in one whole egg and one egg yolk. Lower the mixer speed and gradually add the dry ingredients only until thoroughly mixed. As in, don’t let it sit there mixing away for ten minutes while you’re catching up on Twitter – it’ll overbeat the mixture and really I can’t say what might happen then. That’s because I don’t actually know, but suggest it’s not good if Maida warns against it.

Preheat oven to 190 C and cover a couple of flat trays with baking paper or that reusable silicone stuff.

This bit to follow differs from Maida’s way, which calls for long strips of waxed paper and division of dough into 36 equal mounds and then flouring hands before rolling each mound into a ball. You’ve endured my rant on how I feel about floury hands, so this is my way, which I learned in the making of chicken meatballs. It’s the dead opposite – keep wetting your hands to roll the dough into balls. They’ll turn out shiny and slippery and leaving no residue until it’s time to wet your hands again – about every five balls. I put them to rest on a dinnerplate or two, rather than great sheets of waxed paper I have no bench-room for. Also, waxed paper may have changed since Maida’s day, but the Home Brand crap which was all Woolies had last time I was in the market for it soaks up any liquid and dissolves. ‘Greaseproof paper’ my foot.

Put the chopped peanuts in a shallow pasta bowl or dinnerplate. Beat the egg white and water with a fork in a small bowl or cup, and dip each dough ball into it, sliming the egg white all over it before proceeding to roll it around and coat thoroughly with peanut bits. Place these 4cm apart on the prepared baking trays as you go, but the mucking-around is by no means over yet.

Next, you need to form a depression in each ball. Maida suggests you use either the handle of a wooden spoon or your thumb. I tried both and found much greater control with the latter, which handily had a very short nail for once, from lute practice. You want the impression fairly big, but not so much you breach the bottom or sides, and you can use your thumb to shape it out better than a rigid handle. Then I used a small pointy coffee spoon to fill the impression with peanut butter, topping it with 5 choc chips.  

Bake until browned a bit – Maida says 12 to 13 minutes, but in spite of that broad span, mine took more like 20. I used that time scrubbing and anointing my hands. Let them rest on the trays for a few minutes before lifting them onto a cooling rack with an eggflip. I overlooked Maida’s instruction to put them in the fridge once they’d cooled to room temperature, to solidify the peanut butter and choc chips, but take heed from my error. The choc chips never regained their solidity, and stuck to each other when layered in a Décor container to take to work, so that some lucky colleagues ended up scoring double their biscuit entitlement, with the peanut-butter-choc-chip component of the biscuit below theirs.

 

They tasted great, and were moreish, but in a very one-note, unsophisticated way – the attractions of chocolate and peanuts were right up front, so to speak, and in appearance they were far from elegant.  Meh. The peanut butter cookies I’ll tell of another day were far simpler and just as crowd-pleasing.