Irish Cream Chocolate Sandwich Biscuits

I checked my BBM the other day to find a colleague changed her avatar. This in itself is not remarkable--pretty much everyone on BBM (except for me) seems to change their avatars regularly. Sometimes it's a wee self portrait or image of their child. Sometimes is a vacation snap or some other image that strikes their fancy.

What caught my eye was an image of an Oreo cookie, with a note wishing the popular sandwich cookie a happy 100th birthday.

Oreos are 100 years old?

Really?

Like so many people, I have a soft spot for Oreos. Some people are crunchers, others like to pry apart the sandwich and lick off the filling. I prefer mine dunked in milk until the biscuits practically melt away on my tongue.

But here's a confession. I really don't like the icing. It's too sweet and the texture is just...meh. I think it's because it's made with shortening (or so I've been told)--I've never really been fond of shortening. Give me lard or butter any day. Well...for icing, give me butter. I'm sure one can make an adequate icing from lard, but I'd rather not find out.

So when I saw the birthday wishes on my phone's screen, I thought 'why not bake my own Oreos?'

So when I saw the date, I thought 'Why not start my St. Patrick's Day foodishness a wee bit early?'

I've been rather busy as of late, so I haven't had the time to develop my own cookie dough for this recipe. After looking up a few recipes, I decided to use one based on a recipe from Gourmet Magazine. Flavouring the filling with Irish cream was pretty much a foregone conclusion (well, in my mind, it was).

The resulting chocolate sandwich cookies were delicious--nicely chocolatey with a soft Irish cream flavour. I'm sure you can change up the filling flavour with another liqueur...but for March, Irish cream just seems fitting.

Irish Cream Chocolate Sandwich Biscuits (Oreos)
adapted from Gourmet Magazine's Double Chocolate Sandwich Cookies
Yield 24

Ingredients

For the biscuits
200g (1c + 6 Tbsp/330ml) all purpose flour
40g (6Tbsp/90ml) cocoa powder
0.25tsp (1.25ml) baking powder
pinch salt
150g (0.66c/185ml) butter, softened
2Tbsp (30ml) milk or cream
0.75tsp (3.75ml) vanilla

for the filling
55g (0.25c/60ml) butter, softened
100g (0.75c/185ml) icing sugar
2dspn (20ml/4tsp) Irish cream liqueur (maybe a drop more, if you wish)

Method
For the biscuits

Sift together the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt. Set aside

Cream together the butter and sugar. Beat in the milk and vanilla. Mix in the flour mixture in two additions, until the dough comes together. Form into a disc, wrap in cling and chill for about an hour.

Preheat the oven to 170C/350F. Line two cookie trays with parchment.

Roll the dough out between two pieces of wax or parchment paper, until it's about 3mm (1/8th") thick. Using a 3.75cm (1.5") round or fluted cutter, cut out the biscuits and place them on the prepared sheets, approximately 1.25cm (approx 0.5") apart. Gather the scraps, form into a disc and rechill before re-rolling.

Bake the biscuits for 10 minutes. Remove to a cooling rack and let fully cool before assembling the cookies.

For the filling:
Beat together the butter and the icing sugar until well mixed. Add in the Irish cream and beat well. Chill for at least an hour before using.

To assemble: smear about a half to three-quarter teaspoon of icing onto the flat side of a cooke. Press a corresponding cookie top to the icing. If the icing is soft, chill, uncovered, in the fridge for about an hour until the filling firms up.


cheers!

jasmine

I'm a quill for hire!

Elvis has left the building: Meet my nemesis

Meet my nemesis: Tamias minimus.

Yes. You read correctly. Nemesis.

Many of us have one. Heck. Some of us have more than one.

It could be the guy who always gets the last double chocolate doughnut with the sparkly sprinkles on the rack leaving you with the stale unglazed-because-they-forgot-to-ice-them generic-things-that-could-be-better-used-as-hemorrhoids-cushions doughnuts; the woman who, regardless of which store she's in, can always get an eager and helpful sales clerk, while you've an armload of items to try on and the clerk guarding the changerooms is too busy texting her friend to bother unlocking a door for you, or the gal who can always get the cutest pair of shoes in her size, at 60 per cent off regular price because her feet are just so dainty. (Umm...yeah--I'm the one who usually gets the last good doughnut, sales clerks (and waiters) fawn over me and umm...I have teeny feet).

I hear you cooing over the cute, fuzzy wittle woodland cweature above. "How could such an adorable little thing be a nemisis?" you ask.

Trust me. They're only cute and fuzzy when they're in a woodland setting. They are NOT cute and fuzzy when they're running through and hiding in your main floor. When they are running through and hiding in your main floor, they are what I call "vermin."

And while I've not had dealings with this particular chipmunk before, I've lived the main points of this tale before. We have a history.

I had a rotten morning, punctuated by miscommunications and my jumping to conclusions; by noon I was hoping for a do-over. Since I don't have a TARDIS, my next best option was to ponder my stupidity by planting some lovely violet and plum coloured icicle pansies and assess the bunny damage to my plants. The front doors were wide open, so I could traipse in and out as my little bewildered heart pleased.

That's when the little begger decided to stage a home invasion.

Sure...strike when I'm down. I expect that from my enemies.

Admittedly, I didn't notice anything was wrong at first. I cleaned up from playing in the mud continued my contemplative therapies, this time armed with bucket, broom and mild abrasives.

And that's when I saw him...standing all cock-of-the-walk-like on my credenza. Sure he could have been mistaken for a stuffed animal (my little stuffed Cthulhu does live in the dining room), but really given my B&E history with others of his ilk, I have no desire to keep reminders around.

Insert monosyllabic expletive *here.*

It scampered into hiding, behind the stack of cookery books I have yet to review.

Insert monosyllabic expletive *here.*

There's poo and pee all over the credenza. There's poo and pee all over a shelf I've set up for food photography. A teak shelf. A teak shelf that's now chipmunk pee stained.

Insert monosyllabic expletive *here.*

I clean it up and go into the kitchen. There's poo in several places...including the cat's water dish and my aprons' tails.

Insert monosyllabic expletive *here.*

Darn you, you little cute furry little woodland creature who's out of his element!

I summoned the cats.

The cats did not come.

I went to look for the cats.

Hagia was on in the TV temple, snoozing on the couch. She opened her big pumpkin eyes.

"Hagia. Time to earn your keep. Go stalk and eat the chipmunk."

She closed her big pumpkin eyes and went back to sleep.

Zeus was in the carton behind the fireplace, willing himself to be invisible...or so I think...I couldn't see him.

Insert monosyllabic expletive *here.*

After almost three hours, camped out in the dark, eyes trained on the open kitchen door, ironically quiet as a mouse (well, not so quiet--I was occasionally updating my Twitter feed about this), the chipmunk exited my condo.

Yes, after a few false starts, Elvis has left the building...

...but not before helping himself to the cats' food and water. The door was closed after him.

YAY

I went into the dining room to take a look at whatever damage the critter caused.

I might as well have not cleaned up the dining room after lunch. I'd heard little animals void their bowels while running, to make them lighter, ergo, faster. Apparently chipmunks are poo-propelled as its output rivalled that of a bull moose.

I even found poo in the bowls of my mini muffin tin.

Insert monosyllabic expletive *here.*

A few hours later, my fingers wrinkled from rinse water and the air pungent with bleach and other cleaners, and every surface Elvis obviously touched, ran over or simply looked at was scrubbed within an inch of their anthropomorphic lives, I was in need of a bit of sweet solace.

I've been preoccupied with chocolate chip cookies as of late. It's very much unlike me--to crave chocolate chip cookies, that is. Growing up, My Dear Little Cardamummy baked the occasional batch, but returning to a cookie-perfumed house was not the norm.

My little kitchen must have churned a score or two of chocolate-studded biscuits since the end of August. The main problem being I've misplaced the slip of paper that holds my favourite chocochip cookie recipe. I've tried several recipes and while I've not replicated the *one,* This version by Alton Brown is a step in the right direction.

Unlike most other cookie recipes where you start by creaming butter, sugar and eggs and then add the dry ingredients, this one is put together as you would muffins: sift the dry ingredients together, then mix the wet ingredients, tip the wet into dry, give it a stir and drop onto the prepared sheet.

The number of cookies you get are entirely dependent upon the generosity of your cookie spoon. I used my 1.5 tsp sized spoon and could get about five dozen cookies.

The result are lovely chewy-crisp flat cookies, perfect with a cup of coffee.

Even more perfect after yet another run in with your nemesis.

Chocolate Chip Cookie No. 10
from I'm Just Here for More Food by Alton Brown (opens into my Amazon.ca shop)

150g ap flour
1tsp bicarbonate of soda
150g sugar
145g brown sugar
225g salted butter, melted
2 eggs
1tsp vanilla
300g chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 180C/375F; line baking sheets with parchment.

Sift dry ingredients together.

Mix wet ingredients together; Tip into dry and stir until combined. Fold chocolate chips into batter.

Drop by spoonful onto prepared baking sheet, leaving about 2.5 cm between each blob. Bake for 6-9 minutes or until golden brown.


cheers!
jasmine

Chipmunk photo credit: Douglas Haase, via Flickr.

I'm a quill for hire!

I think my laptop caught porcine apoplexy

Even though we all know we cannot catch H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) from a good old bacon sandwich (okay, not all of us know this as a friend mentioned her cafeteria pulled BLTs from the menu because of the swine flu), I think all the online news coverage I've been following brought out the hypochondriac in Zippy the laptop.

She's going into the repair shop for a few days (hopefully it's not a lost cause) -- I'll be back when I can reliably get this thing to boot up.

Anyway... I leave you with an idea...especially appreciated by those in the midst of calming others and monitoring the various health websites: Piggie-shaped cookies, complete with little face masks (of coloured sugar). The recipe is Butter Cut-Out Cookies from Nigella's How To Be A Domestic Goddess (p 212).

Have fun but remember to wash your hands...talk soon.

cheers!
jasmine

What I'm reading: The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

Daring Bakers: Tuiles

• Recipe's origins: Savoury tuile/cornet fromThomas Keller's "The French Laundry Cookbook"
• Recipe's orginator: Thomas Keller
• Our hostess: Karen of Bake My Day
• Our co-hostess: Zorra of 1x umrühren bitte

This month's challenge is brought to us by Karen of Bake My Day and Zorra of 1x umruehren bitte aka Kochtopf. They have chosen Tuiles from The Chocolate Book by Angélique Schmeink and Nougatine and Chocolate Tuiles from Michel Roux.

"What? Wait a minute, " I hear you say. "You wrote that the recipe is savoury tuiles are from Thomas Keller's The French Laundry, but the next paragraph says the challenge is chocolate tuiles from either Angélique Schmeink or from Michel Roux for what's suspiciously resonant of sweet tuiles.

Well, yes. The original challenge was for sweet tuiles...but the savoury recipe kindasorta snuck its way into a challenge variation.

Hurrah for savoury choices!

Don't get me wrong, I love my sweets, but my sweet tooth has been on strike for a while, so when given the choice between savoury or sweet, I choose the former.

"What the heck are tuiles," I hear some of you say. "I thought that was ballet tutus were made of."

That's tulle.

A tuile is a crisp and thin biscuit, usually shaped. According to our lovely hostesses, traditionally they are gently molded over a rolling pin or arched form while they are still warm. Once set, their shape resembles the curved French roofing tiles for which they're named. In The Netherlands, this batter was used to bake flat round cookies on 31st December, representing the year unfold. On New Years day however, the same batter was used but this day they were presented to well-wishers shaped as cigars and filled with whipped cream, symbolizing the New Year that's about to roll on. And of course the batter is sometimes called tulip-paste....

Tulle is a very fine, starched, light netting that's used for bridal veils, foofoochichi gowns and ballet tutus (which one could argue is a foofoochichi gown in its own right).

"No, I meant that thin cottony cloth."

That's toile. My word...how old are you that you recall ballet tutus made of cottony cloth? Depending upon how you use the word, toile can be a painter's canvas, or a dressmaker's pattern or a repeated pastoral scene on an off-whiteish cottony cloth.

"Isn't that a person who follows Islam...what you claim the dressmaker's pattern is."

No. An adherant of Islam is a Muslim...not muslin. And yes, muslin is a material used to mock up dresses and clothes.

"Then what's Muesli?"

An oaty cereal made with oats and fruit. It's like granola.

"I thought that was French for "frog."

Non. Le mot pour "frog" est "la grenouille."

"Isn't that in the Alps?"

Grenoble is a city in the French Alps. Les grenouilles are found in ponds and rivers and other wetlands...although there may be ponds in Grenoble..."

"The Alps. Isn't that a god or something?"

You're thinking of Apollo, who's in both Roman and Greek mythology. He's associated with music, light, intellectualism and a raft of other things.

"Yeah, but wasn't he in the stars or something."

Maybe you're thinking of the Apollo missions and the moon landing.

"I love looking at the moon and stars and all that outer space stuff."

(SIGH) Yes. I know (even though, if I were you, I'd be more concerned with your inner space).

"Hey. You know French. What's the French for moon and stars?"

The moon is "la lune."
Stars are "les étoiles" or the singular is "l'étoile."

Etoile. Isn't that a cookie?

That's a tuile...as in this month's Daring Baker's challenge.

The recipe called for black sesame seeds to be sprinkled on the biscuit before baking. That, I did. But I also sprinkled on some nigella seeds (hey, January is her birthmonth) on some others. We were asked to pair our biscuits with a light-ish topping. Well...it's January. In Canada. I'm not so into light and am firmly entrenched in hearty. Sorry ladies...well, not really. I paired the sesame seed tuiles with black olive tapenade (store bought) and the nigellan lotus cups (square biscuits cooled in cupcake bowls) with a white bean hummous, specked with nigella seeds.









To see what the other Daring Bakers did, please visit our blogroll.

cheers!
jasmine

Hurrah for cookie-eating small children with snow shovels

It's no great secret that my lower back might as well have been bestowed upon me by Loki himself.

Anything can send me in wincing in agony. Moving the wrong way as I walk, heavy lifting (no, cuddling Beanie does not count as heavy lifting), even sitting on the wrong type of fabric can cause great shooting pains down my spine and render me almost immobile.

How did I originally hurt myself? Gr. IX Phys Ed and the absolutely *lovely* teacher we had...heck, any 40-something woman with sun-damaged skin a bad orange dye job (I think she was going for blonde) who gloats about wearing her nine year-old daughter's skirts (which didn't fit the mother in the least) really does have the necessary psychological fortitude to be put in an authoritarian position over students.

So when it comes to snow shovelling, I rely upon the kindess others. Some I know (like the exbf and my father) and others I don't...like the mystery snowshoveller who cleans my driveway so incredibly pristinely before I get in from work. In my old neighbourhood, teenaged boys with shovels would show up expecting $10-20 to move your snow. They'd do a wretched job of it, and I'd wind up getting the exbf in to do it properly.

But in my new neighbourhood...

Christmas week-ish we had a gloriously amazing series of snowfalls. Environment Canada christened it "snowmaggedon" -- highly melodramatic, I know. But it was a highly melodramatic amount within a short period of time (most of which has since melted). Out I popped to survey what Ullr himself deemed necessary to drop on my doorstep, path and driveway. Back in I popped, hoping the snow really wasn't there. A short while later, the doorbell rang.

Two boys, vaguely recognisable as being from the neighbourhood, bundled in their winter warmies, toting shovels larger than they themselves asked if I wanted to be dug out.

"But I don't have any cash."

"That's okay, we want to do it."

Apparently these boys were very, very bored.

"Okay...do you want cookies instead?"

"Oh wow! Yes, please!"

Good gawd...and they say "please" without their mothers being present.

Needless to say, as they shovelled I packed a dozen cookies for each of them. Afterwards, I surveyed my small patch of asphalt. My word...it looked as if a snowblower had done it.

A few days later, after the next dump, I poked my nose out in much the same fashion. This time the boys saw me and came running over to see if I needed to be dug out again.

And again, they did it for a dozen cookies each...with delivered commentary from their families as to how much they liked the first load.

So now, I try and keep three dozen cookies on hand, in case the snows return, and with them cookie-eating small children with snow shovels.

Oatmeal Cookies
Yield 3 dozen, depending upon the generosity of your cookie spoon

112g butter
110g brown sugar
100g granulated sugar
0.5 tsp salt
0.75 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 eggs
0.5 tsp vanilla
175g ap flour
0.5t cinnamon
115 g rolled oats

Preheat oven to 170C/350F.

Cream together sugars, salt and butter; add eggs and vanilla and stir well.

Sift together flour, bicarb and cinnamon, then fold with the oats into the wet mixture. Drop by onto prepared cookie sheet and bake for 10-12 minutes.

cheers!
jasmine

Happy Christmas!

Photographed are the lovely, lovely biscuits as part of the Cookie Exchange I organised this year. I'm never disappointed with the sweet, buttery, creative and delicious things my colleagues produce. Even Beelzebub mostly behaved--the true Christmas miracle, I think.

So, what did we get? Top: Cherry-Nut Christmas Cookies, Brown Buttercrunch cookies, Middle: Button Cookies, Chocomint Crinkles, Bottom: Whipped shortbreads







Personally, I think Christmas screams shortbread as far as biscuits go. For such a simple treat -- butter, sugar and flour--it's amazing the variations out there. Here's the recipe, for those of you looking for something that's virtually foolproof:

Whipped Shortbreads
1/2 cup of butter
1 1/2 cups flour
1 cup icing sugar

Preheat oven to 170C/350F

Combine ingredients and beat for 10 minutes.

Drop from teaspoon on to ungreased cookie sheet.

Decorate if desired (sprinkles, cherry, etc.)
Bake for 8 to 12 minutes (or until lightly brown on bottom) and cool completely on cookie sheet before removing.

Makes approx. 36 small shortbread.

All the best to you and yours...

cheers!
jasmine

A Day That Really Schmecks: the cookies that caused a war

Before Edna Staebler died last September, she told me Wilfrid Laurier University Press will re-issue her first cookbook, Food That Really Schmecks. The cookbook, a favourite in many kitchens across Canada and beyond, was first published in 1968 and provided readers and cooks alike a glimpse into Waterloo County Mennonite life. Thanks to the wonderful people at the Press, I secured some copies to distribute to a few bloggers for A Day That Really Schmecks, a foodblogging event that celebrates Edna and, as she put it, “irresistibly good-schmecking (tasting) food.” I’ll be posting a round up on 15 January, on what would have been her 101st birthday. My review for Canada Eats will be posted shortly.

Selecting a recipe to write about was at once difficult and easy: difficult, because this 334-page book is filled with mouth-watering recipes for simple and hearty foods that run the gamut from Apfelstruedel to Zucchini; easy, because of one point in time, when our dear Edna was caught in something called The Cookie War.

Let me explain.*

From the late 1970s to early 1980s North American corporate cookiedom was obsessed with manufacturing cookies that were both soft and crispy. Proctor and Gamble “patented” a recipe in the USA in 1979 (1984 in Canada). When Nabisco began baking similar cookies, P&G sued for infringement of copyright.

“So what?” I can hear some of you say…

You see, they were both using Edna’s Rigglevake Kucha recipe that was published in Schmecks.

Rigglevake is a Pennsylvania Dutch word meaning “railway.” No one knows how these dark and light pinwheel cookies were named railway cookies. It could be because the biscuit’s spiral is reminiscent of a steam locomotive’s wheels as they ride the tracks. The cookies are at once crisp (from the white swirl) and soft (from the molassesy dark swirl).

In 1983 one of Nabisco’s lawyers called Edna about the rigglevake recipe (the call wasn’t returned—E was busy and forgot). The following year, a lawyer for Proctor and Gamble visited her about the recipe. Edna talked to Bryan Dare, (of Dare Cookies) about this. He explained that a published recipe could not be patented…Nabisco tried to prove the recipe Edna published (one received from her Mennonite friends), were crisp and chewy while Proctor and Gamble argued her recipe wasn’t the recipe they were using.

Lawyers from both sides, some from Toronto others from New York, visited Edna at her home in Sunfish Lake, and brought her Old Order Mennonite friends lovely gifts such as cookies, plants and Cuisinarts.** Edna was wined and dined at fine restaurants and some of her Mennonite friends were paid $20/hr to bake cookies (and occasional shoofly and schnitz pies) for the lawyers. Lawyers, being lawyerly took rigglewakes back to the office to be dissected (or eaten or both dissected and eaten) and approached Mennonites about being court witnesses.*** Throughout all of this, the lawyers seemed to really like the Mennonites; one lawyer called meeting Mennonites a “metaphysical experience.” ****

Edna was invited to Delaware and to New York. One lawyer suggested that if Edna were to go, the lawyer would go up to Sunfish Lake to take care of Edna’s cats. She declined both offers. And why not? Not only was Edna in NYC 30 years previous and really didn’t think it held a candle to either London or Paris, but her darling kitties would not be in the care of some lawyer from New York: “Imagine a lawyer looking after my cats!...[the same lawyer who] left cookies in the oven for half an hour!”—yes, one of the New York lawyers, who’d never baked before, decided to make rigglevakes and produced singed discs.

Canadian writer June Callwood was the first to call the entire affair a cookie war in a 1985 Globe and Mail article: even though blood wasn’t shed “the other traditional elements of human warfare are manifest: the combat is expensive; it is fundamentally silly; it is about money, vanity and power; and the people who declared war aren’t doing the fighting. Their lawyers are.”

The story was picked up by Canadian Press, the local newspaper and CBC Radio’s Morningside. Edna received calls from radio stations across Canada and the US. Reporters from Harpers, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal interviewed her. CBC-TV’s The Fifth Estate produced a segment about the issue, contrasting the goals of big business against the idyll of Edna’s life. She even received, and declined, an invitation to appear on The Jay Leno Show—much to the befuddlement of the show’s producers.

Edna, being Edna, didn’t care who won or lost the legal wranglings and got on well with both sides. All this was nonsense to her and her friends.

The entire episode finally came to an end in 1989, when Edna decided to support Nabisco, and the dispute was settled out of court.

Here’s the recipe for the cookies that started a war. Alternate measurements are in parentheses) ...

Rigglevake Kucha (Railroad Cookies)
From Food That Really Schmecks by Edna Staebler, originally published in 1968 (p193), reissued by Wilfrid Laurier Press in 2006 (p215); reproduced with permission from Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Light part
1 c sugar (200g)
1 egg
1c butter (225g)
½ c milk (125ml)
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp vanilla

Dark part
1c sugar, brown (170g)
1c butter (225g)
1c molasses (275g)
½ c water (125ml)
2 tsp baking soda
½ tsp vanilla

Enough flour in each part to make dough easy to handle (see note)

Mix the light and dark parts in separate bowls. Blend the sugar and butter for both parts. For the light part beat in the egg then alternately add the milk vanilla and baking powder sifted with flour. For the dark part add to the butter-sugar mixture the molasses, water and vanilla alternately with soda and enough flour.

Break off pieces of dough from both dark and light parts, shape them into rounds and roll hem separately about 1/8 inch (3mm) thick. Put on top of the other and roll up like a jelly roll and slice off pieces as thinly as you can. Place on greased cookie sheets and bake at 350 degrees (F) (170C) till done.

Notes:

• The amount of flour you need will depend upon your kitchen’s mood. I did try and weigh out how much flour I wound up using but, well… I recommend starting with 280g (2 cups) of flour sifted with the bicarb or powder (as requisite) and then add more as you need it. What you want is a dough that doesn’t stick and rolls out well, as if you were doing cut-out cookies.
• Baking time depends upon how thickly you slice the rounds, with (of course) thicker rounds taking longer to cook than thinner rounds. Check after 15 minutes—you want the bottoms to be tinged to a golden hue.
• This is a perfect “no-waste” cookie dough: press together scraps of the light and dark doughs, roll to about 7-8 cm and slice—you’ll get a lovely marbled biscuit…mind you , if you don’t feel like making the jelly roll, you can do this instead.
• These biscuits expand, so it is wise to keep them small/well spaced.
  

* Summarized from Veronica Ross’ To Experience Wonder: Edna Staebler, A Life, and conversations I had with Edna last year.
** A point to those of you who can figure out what’s wrong/hilariously funny about this.
***Another point to those of you who can figure out what’s wrong/hilariously funny about this.
****I always giggle when I hear of city slickers going off to the Hinterland to find enlightenment…I guess I’m just lucky that I know life can be happy and peaceful outside of skyscrapers, traffic jams and frozen dinners.

Thanks to Wilfrid Laurier University Press for providing the "cookie eyes" photo of Edna. It was taken in 1987, when the war was still waging...

cheers!
jasmine

tags: Edna Staebler

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Persian Cardamom Biscuits

Well....I've "upgraded" my blogger accounts. I can't say it was painless--the system didn't accept my Gmail accounts, so I had to come up with a new one...I'm sure it made sense to someone at Google/Blogger/Gmail/Whatever. I've spent part of today and yesterday playing with the new features (Sensual Gourmet: Kitchen Diaries is my testing site for this)--much more user-friendly, but I seem to have lost my banner. I'll need to play with it some more, I think.

Back to business at hand.

It's been a while since I last posted a cardamom recipe--mea culpa, mea culpa--things got a tad busy last month :)

For our office cookie exchange, I searched for a Swedish cardamom biscuit recipe. I found several, but the one I followed wasn't Scandinavian in root, but Persian.

Last year I bought a copy of Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid's Homebaking: The artful mix of flour and tradition around the world. Beautifully photographed--quite honestly, if you weren't a baker or a cook, you could easily use it as a coffeetable book--this hefty tome is a record of baking traditions around the world. I hadn't cooked from it before (for fear that something so beautiful would be cullinarily useless), so I was rather hesitant to try this recipe.

I really shouldn't have been timid --the biscuits turned out beautifully. Light and crisp, and beautifully snowy white, this shortbread alternative was a definite hit (at the office, with friends and at home). These are very delicate cookies--too much of a jostle will cause them to crumble. I wouldn't recommend them for a cookie exchange, but they do dress up a sweet platter quite nicely.

Persian Cardamom Biscuits
Adapted from Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duiguid's Homebaking: the artful mix of flour and tradition around the world

225g very, very soft unsalted butter OR 1 cup melted unsalted butter
110g icing sugar
1 large egg yolk
3/4 tsp ground cardamom seeds OR freshly and finely ground seeds from five or six cardamom pods
275g very soft, rice flour mixed with a pinch of salt
2 Tbsp chopped pistachio nuts
gold dragees

Cream together butter and sugar until it's a very pale primrose yellow. Mix in the yolk and the cardamom. Add the flour mixture about a half-cup at a time, scraping down the bowl after every two additions. If it's too stiff for your mixer, turn it out onto a lightly floured (with rice flour) surface and knead by hand for a few minutes. You're looking for a very soft dough that's similar to a buttercream icing that's speckled with cardamom. Wrap the dough in cling film, and pop it into the fridge for anywhere from two to 12 hours.

Preheat the oven to 350F/190C oven and place two racks in the oven--one just above and the other just below the centre position. Line two baking sheets with greaseproof paper (parchment/waxpaper).

Take the dough out of the fridge and divide it into thirds--wrap two pieces and put them back into the fridge. Divide the dough into 12 pieces. Roll them into balls and place them onto the prepared baking sheets. Flatten them slightly and make sure to leave at least 2.5cm between cookies (they do spread quite a bit). With a thimble or a fork (what I use is a meat mallet) gently press a pattern onto the biscuit tops. Sprinkle and pat on some of the pistachio and dragees.

Bake for 15-18 minutes or until the biscuit bottoms have turned a very light brown. Rotate the racks at about the 8 minute point.

Let the cookies cool on the baking trays for a few minutes before transferring them with a wide spatula to a wire rack for cooling. Like many delicate shortbreads, these will crumble if not given the respect they deserve, so be careful when transferring them to the rack. After they've cooled thoroughly, you can transfer them to an airtight container.

Notes:

• Use the softest rice flour you can find for this, otherwise you might end up with a "gritty" biccie.

cheers!
jasmine

tags: Baking Biscuits Cookies

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