Archive for the 'cookies & squares' Category
I may have shared this tidbit with you already: when I was in grade 3, I told my class that when I grew up I wanted to be the food editor of Canadian Living magazine. I even read my Mom’s subscription. I began my career as a food nerd early.
The food editor at the time (and still today), Elizabeth Baird was one of relatively few food writers of the eighties and the only I knew, and I wanted to be her. (8 year olds, unless they happen to have been born into a food-writing family, tend to not know of food writers, let alone idolize them like their friends might Avril Lavigne. And it wasn’t just a phase; as a teenager, I wanted to dye my hair silvery-white and get bangs.
There were other food writers of her time – Rose Reisman, Rose Murray, Anne Lindsay – they were the faces and voices of Canadian cuisine, and I thought of them as pioneers, trendsetters – the ones dialing in the menus and trends of our Canadian kitchens. I still have old copies of the magazine, and their books are still some of the most weathered on my shelves; the ones I learned to cook from, they made me feel like an adult when I moved away from home and (eventually) the novelty of Hamburger Helper and Eggos wore off.
Yesterday, a copy of Anne Lindsay’s new tome, Lighthearted at Home, the very best of Anne Lindsay, arrived at my door. It’s like an encyclopedia, or a phone book – a large volume containing every possible kind of recipe one might ever need – the best of her cooking career, in a single volume. Flipping through, I was instantly sucked into the nostalgia of the baking section – Elizabeth Baird’s Chocolate Angel Food Cake, Best-Ever Date Squares (known in my grandma’s day, and referenced here, as Matrimonial Slice) and Raisin Cupcakes with Lemon Icing, the same recipe I recall transcribing into a notebook a couple decades ago; raisins soaked in boiling water and then drained, reserving some of the liquid for the cakes – the recipe comes from her mother-in-law, Olive Lindsay. I can’t possibly not make them. W, who loves raisins almost above all else (all superheroes excluded, of course) might become ecstatic at the notion of turning them into an actual cupcake.
But I liked the look of her Easy Cranberry-Chocolate Cookies – made with oat bran, wheat germ and whole wheat flour, they seemed potentially tweedy-crispy, rather than heavy… they turned out crisp-edged and nutty, with the rough texture of an oatmeal cookie and none of the heavy doughiness you might expect from something so loaded down with grains.
Out of oat bran, I used barley flour, and a little less of it – about half a cup. I turned the butter down to half a cup, added a tablespoon of vanilla instead of water, added some chunky toasted walnuts and fewer dried cranberries.
Grainy Cranberry-Walnut-Chocolate Chip Cookies
adapted from Lighthearted at Home, by Anne Lindsay
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 large egg
1 Tbsp. vanilla
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup oat bran or 1/2 cup barley flour
1/4 cup wheat germ
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup chocolate chips or chopped dark chocolate
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup chopped toasted walnuts
Preheat the oven to 350F.
In a large bowl, beat the butter and brown sugar until fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla. Add the flour, oat bran, wheat germ, baking powder, baking soda and salt and stir until the batter starts to come together; add the chocolate chips, cranberries and walnuts and stir or beat on low speed just until the batter is combined.
Drop the dough in large spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet that has been sprayed with nonstick spray or lined with parchment; flatten each cookie a little with your hand or the back of a fork. Bake for 12-14 minutes, until just set around the edges but still soft in the middle. Transfer to a wire rack to cool. Makes 2 dozen cookies.
For dinner we ate very mediocre frozen thin-crust chicken and spinach pizza while W had a bath, having slid through a pile of newly-thawed dog poo (ah, spring), and then went to watch Where the Wild Things Are at the Lantern in Inglewood. A bag of cookies came with us, warm from the oven.
And guess what! Being as it’s Friday, I have a copy for you. 500 recipes, almost as many pages – it’s a whole lotta cookbook. If you have a cookie recipe that makes you the most happy, I’d love to hear it. (And share links, if you like!) Otherwise, I always love to hear what you ate/made for dinner last night.
(I do a random draw on Tuesdays, and am happy to ship it anywhere it needs to go!)
March 06 2010 | cookies & squares | 88 Comments »
Before I share my new favourite cookie with you, I need to get this out of my system, if I may:
COO LOO COO COO COO COO COO COO! Have you had enough rah rah Canada yet? No?
Not surprisingly, the majority of food consumption in our house today occurred during the gold medal hockey game (yay Canada! that goes for the women’s hockey team, too) and was served from our coffee table. What a game. What a couple weeks. For Vancouverites, tomorrow is going to be the morning after the four years before. (By the way, if you’re in the Vancouver area and are up before 7am tomorrow, I’ll on CBC radio discussing that very topic! Having been through the same in Calgary in ‘88 and all, I guess I’m somewhat of an expert on what to do when you wake up in the morning and the Olympics aren’t coming anymore.)
My mom brought a Hunter’s Pie, filled with lean elk simmered in dark ale gravy with mushrooms, carrots and pearl onions, from Wapiti Ways.
Ali made Greek salad and garlicky guacamole and I did up some potato skins – not that I ate much of anything after filling up on half a dozen chocolate puddle cookies, warm from the oven.
And wow, did I make fast friends with these. OK, favourite cookie might be a little extreme – I could never be faithful to any one cookie. I’m fickle. I have food moods. But although I can’t promise to be monogamous, I think it’s safe to say I’ll love the chocolate puddle cookie for the rest of my life.
I had seen them on 101 Cookbooks, which triggered a memory of a similar cookie I used to make a decade ago. Within days an email came from my mom in Tofino, raving about a particular nutty chocolate cookie they kept cleaning SoBo out of, and her description matched them exactly. So since they’re freshly home from a few weeks away and came over to watch the game, I made a batch. They’re as simple to make as any cookie – you stir together icing sugar, cocoa and salt, add chopped nuts, egg whites and vanilla, drop in glops and bake.
They don’t come across as meringues, and aren’t as ridiculously sweet as one would think they’d be with 4 cups of icing sugar. They were crackly on the outside but wonderfully chewy and intensely dark, likely due to my Bernard Callebaut cocoa – completely devoid of butter but loaded with nuts (read: healthy fats) – SoBo uses pecans, my Mom recalls – but I jammed them with nice fresh walnuts. Next on my to-do list: pecans or toasted hazelnuts. Trust me: make these.
Chocolate Walnut Puddle Cookies
adapted from 101 Cookbooks
3 cups walnuts, pecans or hazelnuts
4 cups icing sugar
2/3 cup cocoa
1/2 tsp. fine sea salt
4 large egg whites
1 Tbsp. good vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 325F.
Toast your walnuts or pecans, cool them and roughly chop them. In a large bowl, stir together the icing sugar, cocoa and salt. Add the nuts, then stir in the egg whites and vanilla. Stir until well combined.
Line a baking sheet with parchment and drop the batter in large mounds (about 2 Tbsp. each – I used a heaped soup spoon) spacing them well away from each other – no more than 6 cookies per sheet. Bake for 13-15 minutes – they will spread, puff, crack on top, get glossy and then turn matte. Slide the cookies on the parchment off the sheet onto a cooling rack and let them cool.
Makes 18 large cookies.
February 28 2010 | cookies & squares | 23 Comments »
Damn but I do love me a Nanaimo Bar.
I might have skipped this month’s Daring Bakers challenge, citing an unusually overloaded week (multiple article assignments, an out-of-town class, Blog Aid, traffic reporting on CBC, miscellaneous meetings and tying up of loose ends, an unpleasant, expensive and far-too-drawn-out audit) if the assignment wasn’t Nanaimo bars. They’re just my thing. So I couldn’t let my comrades down.
I’m not sure at what point I fell so head over heels in love with Nanaimo bars. It was during my childhood, surely. I don’t recall anyone making them from scratch; it could be that they were the elusive store-bought chocolate treat that made them so appealing. (My parents could be described as granola-types, who bought Bran Buds and hardcore multi-grain bio-bread, made extra-lean ground beef burgers heavily subsidized with oat bran, and sent me to school with a big old carrot for recess snack instead of a much-coveted Fruit Roll-Up. Things changed as we grew up and they got a Costco card. It wore off on me though – I now adore all things grainy and put ground flax in everything.)
I have memories of Nanaimo bars on the Christmas party buffet table, and of me hiding underneath, reaching out from under the tablecloth to sneak more from the dwindling pyramid. (I loved it when my parents were distracted by the taking of coats to the upstairs bedroom and the filling of glasses as company arrived.) With their chocolate bookends and thick band of frosting spiked with Bird’s custard powder within (I’m the one who goes for the corner slice -loaded with icing roses- from a cheap grocery store cake, then finishes the ones politely left on plates too) how could you not love them? PLUS: they are Canadian. (Although I have seen them in cookbooks labeled New York Slice – probably for the benefit of those who have never heard of Nanaimo, BC, and wouldn’t know how to pronounce it, let alone spell it.) They were invented in a small town on Vancouver Island – a lovely place we take the ferry to from Horseshoe Bay on our way to Tofino, where we shop for groceries and gas up before crossing the island. They are no-bake treats of the very best ilk; generally I glaze over the no-bake section of a cookie book, but these are worth every calorie. And quick to make, really – if you don’t count the chilling of each layer, which you shouldn’t, because it’s not actual work.
Lauren, a Canadian (Calgarian, even) food blogger over at Celiac Teen (hi Lauren!) chose this one. Good pick. She went one further and offered up a gluten-free graham cracker recipe that I wish I could have tried – experimenting with gluten-free baking is on my to-do list – but I just couldn’t swing it this week. You can mosey over to her site and check them out, if you’re interested.
So here’s the text we have to include for the sake of the webcrawler who checks up on us to make sure we did our posts proper-like: The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca.
And here are my two cents: Baked goods need a little bit of salt, otherwise they taste flat. The original recipe called for unsalted butter (not always necessary – in this case not worth a special trip to the grocery store) but no salt – if you do use unsalted butter, add a pinch of salt. Otherwise go for salted.
The recipe calls for almonds, but you could swap pecans or walnuts, or ditch them altogether (add a bit more coconut) if you can’t use nuts.
Nanaimo Bars are notoriously high in fat. They’re tough to whittle down, but I managed to (after giving up once or twice) – I posted a lower-fat version on Canada Day 2008.
Nanaimo Bars
Bottom Layer:
1/2 cup butter
1/4 cup sugar
5 Tbsp. cocoa
1 large egg, beaten
1 1/4 cups graham crumbs
1/2 cup finely chopped almonds, pecans or walnuts
1 cup shredded coconut
Middle Layer:
1/2 cup butter, softened
2 Tbsp. cream or milk (plus a bit extra if needed)
2 Tbsp. custard powder (Such as Bird’s – available in the pudding section)
2 cups icing sugar
Top Layer:
4 oz. semi-sweet chocolate, chopped
2 Tbsp. butter
Bottom Layer: Melt the butter, sugar and cocoa in top of a double boiler. (Or if you promise to be gentle, you can do it on the stovetop in a regular pot over low heat.) Whisk in the egg and stir to cook and thicken. Remove from heat and stir in the crumbs, nuts and coconut. Press firmly into an ungreased 8″x8″ or 9″x9″ pan.
Middle Layer: Cream the butter, cream and custard powder in a large bowl with an electric mixer; gradually add the icing sugar and beat until smooth and spreadable, adding a little extra sugar or cream if needed to achieve a frostinglike consistency.
Top Layer: Melt chocolate and butter over low heat. Cool. Once cool, pour over middle layer, spread evenly, and chill. Cut into squares.
Makes about 20 bars.
One Year Ago: Caramelized Onion Dip, then Shepherd’s Pie
January 27 2010 | cookies & squares | 53 Comments »
The challenge: come up with something Olympic-y to serve to the crowds watching the torch pass through Kensington this morning-something that can be eaten easily, in gloves, with coffee, at 7am.
The solution: biscotti. Made Olympic-y by way of a Greek theme: I made them with olive oil, honey, almonds and cinnamon for a baklava sort of flavour, and then decided to throw in some figs at the last minute. The first batch had grated orange zest, too – but I only had one orange.
By the time I got home all that was left were the trimmed-off stumps. They were delicious too.
Baklava Breakfast Biscotti
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup olive or canola oil
1/4 cup honey
grated zest of an orange
3 large eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. cinnamon (or to taste)
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup sliced almonds
1/2 cup chopped dried figs (optional)
Preheat oven to 350°F.
In a large bowl, beat the sugar, oil, honey and orange zest until well blended. Beat in the eggs one at a time, mixing until well combined.
Add the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt and beat on low speed with the paddle attachment or mix by hand until it starts coming together; add the almonds (and figs, if you’re using them) and stir until well blended.
Divide the dough in half and with dampened hands, shape each into a log (wider and shorter, or longer and narrower – depending on whether you want short or long biscotti) on a greased or parchment-lined baking sheet. (If you make them narrow, you might be able to fit two on one pan.) Bake for 30 minutes, until firm. Set aside to cool completely and reduce the oven temperature to 250°F.
Once cooled, slice the logs on a slight diagonal into 1/2″-1″ slices using a sharp serrated knife. Place them upright on the baking sheet, spacing them about 1/2″ apart. Bake for another 30-45 minutes, until crisp and dry.
One Year Ago: Asparagus, Tomato and Spinach Frittata
January 19 2010 | breakfast and cookies & squares | 16 Comments »
Last night called out for chocolate chip cookies. Yelled, actually. (And whimpered for wine.)
A meeting with my designer friend over the look and layout of the Blog Aid cookbook ran into dinnertime, and when my sister got home she whipped up nachos for us all, made a little more square by the addition of beans and halved kiwis to scoop out with small spoons. We hammered away on the project for a bit, put the boys in the bath (here’s an idea: fill the tub with water and plenty of bubble bath, toss in your old junk jewelry and let them search for treasure at the bottom of the ocean. If you can come up with a small “treasure chest”, all the better) and set to the task of reclaiming the basement, which you may (or may not) recall was turned upside down when we replaced the furnace and subsequently had to replace a corner of the floor that turned out to contain asbestos. Since then it has been off limits, the ankle-deep pile of stuff that was once neatly moved out of the way rising slowly to knee-deep.
So Mike installed shelving and we started shuffling things around, designating some for the Sally Ann and others for recycling. And then someone suggested cookies. (OK, it was me.) The memory of browned butter shortbread made me think that perhaps chocolate chip cookies could be improved upon by the browning of the butter first too, and so I tried it; melted the butter and then kept on cooking until it was a nutty brown, proceeded with the cookie dough and then chilled it to restore its shape, lest we wind up with chocolate chip pancakes. The dough was fantastic – nutty and caramelly with the browned butter, but much like the maple in those Maple Walnut White Chocolate Chip Cookies, the flavour wasn’t nearly as intense once the dough was baked. Still, they were wonderfully chewy and dense, with crisp edges; all the things I want my chocolate chip cookies to be. And still half the fat of the ones made from the recipe on the back of the Chipits bag.
I brought them downstairs and balanced them on the only relatively clear horizontal surface we had – the top of the water heater. But even then it was at a harsh angle; like a game of cookie Jenga, we took them off either side alternately to keep the rack from tipping over into the pile of dust on the floor. My sister suggested I get a shot that included the background.
(I swear I’m not a candidate for Hoarders – it’s just that the contents of the basement have been collectively shoved to one side, and the order of the resulting pile has disintegrated over the course of December and January…)
Browned Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
1/2-3/4 cup butter
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
2 cups all-purpose flour (or half all-purpose, half whole wheat)
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1-2 cups chocolate chips
In a small saucepan, heat the butter over medium-high heat until melted. Keep cooking, swirling the pot occasionally, until it starts to turn brown and smell nutty. Remove it from the heat, pour it into a bowl (scrape out all the nice browned bits at the bottom) and stir in the sugars. This should cool it down somewhat, but wait a few minutes anyway before stirring in the eggs and vanilla. Then add the flour, baking soda and salt and stir with a spatula until almost blended; add the chocolate chips and stir until the dough comes together. Refrigerate for at least an hour or two, or overnight.
When you’re ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350F. Scoop out walnut-sized balls of dough and space them an inch or two apart on a cookie sheet that has been sprayed with nonstick spray or lined with parchment or a silpat mat. Bake for 12-14 minutes, until golden around the edges but still soft in the middle. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.
Makes 2 dozen cookies.
One Year Ago: Chickpeas with Roasted Peppers, Parsley & Garlic
January 16 2010 | cookies & squares | 21 Comments »
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