Lavender Shortbread

Ever since visiting France in the summer of 2004 and sampling a large range of floral-flavored and infused treats, a couple friends and I have challenged ourselves to incorporate the less popular flavours here in our cooking at home. From violet ice cream to ginger-lavender cake, we are always looking for new ways to enjoy the powerful, clean taste of flowers.

These slices of shortbread are light and crumbly, buttery and fragrant. If you're a fan of lavender scented things, you might like these. Criticized for tasting like soap or smelling of old ladies, lavender as a cooking spice has a lot to overcome. But there's a good reason these cliché ideas are what come to mind when you hear lavender -- it's strong and fresh, a clean herby scent.

The texture is kept light while the lavender permeates it. The butter balances the sharpness of the flower and the biscuit is only lightly sweet so as not to overwhelm the palate. It's a refreshing cookie perfect for Spring.



Lavender Shortbread

Ingredients:
2 cups flour
1/2 cup superfine/bakers' sugar
2 Tablespoons dried lavender, finely ground
1 cup butter, room temperature

1/4 cup coarse sugar

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375F.
   
2. Combine flour, sugar, and lavender in medium bowl.
   
3. Using a fork, mix in the butter. The mixture should be evenly grainy looking and loose, not clumpy.
   
4. When mixed, transfer the mixture into a non-stick baking pan. I use an 8"x8" pan because I like my shortbread a little thicker. Spread evely.
   
5. Press the mixture down firmly.
   
6. With the tines of a fork, poke holes throughout the shortbread to vent it and prevent it from cracking.
   
7. Bake for 20 minutes, or til the edges brown just a touch.
   
8. Remove from the oven and immediately cut the shortbread. I did three columns and about 7 rows. Leave it in the pan to cool, on a cooling rack.
   
9. When cooled, pop the shortbread out of the pan by turning it over.
   
10. Since it's not an extremely sweet biscuit, dot the top surface of the biscuits with water and lightly sprinkle coarse sugar.

Enjoy!

Sticky Toffee Pudding Cookies

While studying abroad in Brighton, England, a good friend and I became addicted to a British dessert served at our favourite vegetarian restaurant, Wai Kika Moo Kau. The dessert? Sticky toffee pudding.

It was a small bread-based pudding, like the texture of a warmed brownie, served with toffee sauce. It was delicious. We asked for a recipe but there was none to be given, they were an ordered food, not house-made, so we wrote down characteristics and ingredients we thought we could taste, and the owner of the restaurant wrote down the ingredients on the box; we were mostly right, we only missed the preservatives. Still, that wasn't enough. When I got home I knew I had to re-create this food for my friend, or at least the flavour.

Buttery, brown sugary, and date-studded, these are best served warm.



Sticky Toffee Pudding Cookies

Ingredients:
1 c unsalted butter, softened
1 c dark brown sugar + 1/4 c reserved to coat outside of cookies
1/4 c dark corn syrup/golden syrup
2 eggs, room temperature
1 tsp vanilla extract

2 c flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder

2 oz finely chopped dates

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
   
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, salt, and baking powder.
   
3. In a large bowl, beat butter and 1 c dark brown sugar together. Add dark corn syrup, eggs, and vanilla extract. Beat until well incorporated.
   
4. Gradually add dry ingredients. Blend until even and smooth.
   
5. Place in freezer with scooping spoon for approximately 15 minutes – this dough needs to firm up to be rolled into balls.
   
6. Set aside a small dish with about 1/4 c dark brown sugar – the reserved sugar – for coating. Scoop dough balls out with a teaspoon and drop onto non-stick cookie sheet.
   
7. Lightly press dough balls down. Top with light dusting of brown sugar.
   
8. Bake for 8 minutes (at 0 sea level).

Enjoy!

Red Velvet Sandwich Cookies

I should just move to the south, I think. There's pretty much nothing I love more than southern cuisine, including (especially?) the regional peculiarities and delights. This is one reason I am a huge fan of the Red Velvet Cake.

Somehow that delightful southern dessert has made its way into the spotlight pretty recently – I've seen it popping up a lot in the last couple years, and now it seems every restaurant or bakery you patron offers their variation on it. This is, of course, good and bad; it's become a bit of a Red Velvet crapshoot.

I'm lucky to live just a couple miles from Phoenix's award-winning "Best Red Velvet Cake" winner, Lo Lo's Chicken and Waffles. It's enough to compete with the best I've had while in the south. It's amazing.

But… it's time to make a confession: I hate cake. Red Velvet Cake is pretty much the only cake I like, and it really has to be dense and moist for me to attempt to eat it (luckily, Lo Lo's is!). And what's the alternative, cupcakes? The frosting-to-cake ratio always makes me a little queasy, especially the more upscale the cupcake shop, where there always seems to be an icing competition going on; the greater the mountain of instant-diabetes piled on the top of a good-sized hunk of denser cake does not determine a better cupcake and, frankly, I think it downplays the deliciousness (and star!), the cake part. Now that everyone's churning out their own version it's easy to find it, but they often miss their mark. That's why I played with this recipe a bit and tried to make something combining my favourite parts.

A friend asked for a Red Velvet Cookie of some sort for her birthday. I knew I wanted something that was a nod to the original but played more to the proportions I liked: 1/3 frosting, 2/3 Red Velvet. I wanted to work with a different texture and still keep it portable. I wanted the tang of the cream cheese frosting (don't even talk to me about Red Velvet if you're a buttercream fan… it has to be cream cheese base! I'm a purist!). I wanted a bastardized (but delicious!) version of one of the southern comfort classics. It's more portable and digestible -- it's small but still filling and completely over-indulgent. That's how these cookies came to be.





Red Velvet Sandwich Cookies

COOKIES

Ingredients:
3 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt


1 cup superfine/bakers' sugar
1 cup of unsalted butter, softened
1 egg
2 Tablespoons buttermilk

2 Tablespoons cocoa powder (heaping)
4 Tablespoons red food colouring

1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
   
2. Mix the dry ingredients, the first group of ingredients. Set aside.
   
3. Cream first group of wet ingredients, the soft butter and sugar. Add the egg and buttermilk after it's creamed. Blend well.
   
4. Add the third group of ingredients to the other wet ingredients; add cocoa powder, slowly. Be careful, if you add it too fast or blend it too quickly you will be breathing this stuff in. When it is well incorporated, add the red food colouring to the creamed mixture. The 4 Tbl is an approximation; I had a small bottle of colouring and simply added the whole thing, the point is to make it very red. Blend well.
   
5. Add the last ingredients to the wet mixture. To do this, combine the baking soda and vinegar in a small dish and mix well until the reaction is done (Science experiment in the kitchen! Anyone feeling the urge to papier mache a volcano?). Add the vanilla to that well-mixed paste. Combine the mixed vanilla, vinegar, and baking soda into the wet bowl. Blend well.
   
6. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet ones.
   
7. Form teaspoon-sized balls of batter and roll into small balls with your hands. Squash the ball down a bit with the ball of your hand before popping the baking sheet into the oven.
   
8. Bake for 7 minutes.
   
9. Allow to cool.
   
10. Layer frosting (recipe following) between two cookies and eat!
    

FROSTING (Thanks, Pinch My Salt! I'll only ever use your recipe, it's the tangiest!)

Ingredients:
16 oz. cream cheese (2 packages), softened
1/2 cup unsalted butter (one stick), softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
pinch of salt

Directions:

1. Cream together cream cheese and butter until smooth.
   
2. Blend in powdered sugar, salt and vanilla extract into creamed mixture.
   
3. Turn mixer on high and beat until light and fluffy.
   
4. Use immediately or refrigerate, covered, until ready to use. If refrigerated, the frosting will need to be brought to room temperature before using (after frosting softens up, beat with mixer until smooth).
   

Enjoy!

Scottish Shortbread

I told you, I looove caramel. And chocolate. And butter. That's all these next cookies are.

When I was in Brighton, England for my foreign exchange I kept seeing all these signs for shortbread around. I've never been a solely-shortbread kind of person. I like mine flavoured or scented, or with something, but all that was ever written was shortbread. Finally, toward the end of my stay, a visiting friend bought some on a whim and shared it with me. It was AMAZING. It was rich, buttery, sweet, salty, crumbly, melty, and all at once. Unfolding the simple ingredients in my mouth, sorting them out, I determined this to be the finest offering of a baked good the UK could offer me. I got boxes of them before I left, packed my small carry-on with them for the trip home. They were good.

I got home, though, and nothing. A dry spell of deliciousness! I knew I had to go to the internet to find what I was looking for.

Soon I came across the information that what the Brits in Brighton were calling shortbread was actually short for Scottish Shortbread. It was regular shortbread layered with thick caramel and milk chocolate on the top. I hunted down a score of recipes and tried more than a handful until I found one that was reminiscent of that first taste I had. That's what I present to you now, with my helpful hints alongside it because it can be a bit dangerous – boiling molten lava-like caramel, melting chocolate… it's kind of full of unpleasant tasks, but it is so worth it.

I made these for a Christmas party this year at my parents' place and they were devoured in no time at all, so fast that I had to make another double-batch Christmas night for the Boxing Day party with my friends the next morning. Be careful, though, they're overindulgence in a 1-inch square (it's saving grace!) and they're very filling.

If you're not a caramel fan, I apologise, I was asked to post this recipe next. I'll be packing the caramel recipes away for a while and will be moving on to something else just as tasty soon!





Scottish Shortbread

Ingredients:2/3 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup white sugar
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
1/2 cup sweetened condensed milk

1 1/4 cups milk chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
   
2. Combine the first group of ingredients in a medium bowl – the 2/3 cup butter, the 1/4 cup white sugar, and the 1 1/4 cups flour with a fork. It should be light and crumbly, even throughought. The softer your butter is for this step, the better the shortbread will come out, texture-wise.
   
3. Press this mixture into an 8x8 or 9x9 baking pan. I prefer disposeable because it makes for easiest removal, and glass after that. You really don't want to have to use non-stick spray on metal here.
   
4. Bake for 20 minutes at 350.
   
5. Remove from the oven and allow to cool. Turn off the oven, you're done with that part.
   
6. In a medium saucepan, combine the next set of ingredients: 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup packed light brown sugar, 2 tablspoons light corn syrup, and 1/2 cup sweetened condensed milk over medium-high heat and bring to a boil with constant, vigilant stirring. If you leave this mixture for more than a few seconds without agitating it it can scorch, brulee, and other unpleasant things that you just don't want. I suggest using a wooden spoon here, too, because it doesn't distribute heat differently through the mixture like a metal spoon could, plus it's easier to clean. Continue to boil the mixture for 5 minutes from the point when it just begins to boil.
   
7. Remove from the heat and vigorously stir the caramel mixture for an additional 3 minutes.
   
8. Pour the caramel mixture over the baked shortbread and allow it to cool until it begins to firm.
   
9. Once the caramel and shortbread have cooled move to the last ingredient, the milk chocolate chips. I suggest getting a high quality brand here because the chocolate is extremely important to this recipe. It needs to be chocolate you'd be willing to eat without anything else, not waxy or mockolate or something you'd throw into a three year olds' Easter basket – this needs to be indulgent. Anyway, follow the instructions from the Salted Caramel Cookies -- melt the bag of chocolate chips in a microwave safe bowl. Try 1 minute, stir. If it still needs more heat to melt, add 20 seconds, stir again. Keep adding 20-second increments until the chocolate is still thick but melted. It shouldn't be lumpy or fudgy at all, it should be smooth and just the point of having been solid.
   
10. Pour the chocolate over the caramel layer of the shortbread pan and chill in a refigerator for a bit but not so long that the chocolate will crack when you cut it.
    
11. Tradition dictates that these squares ought to be cut into 1-inch squares or so because they're so rich. Cut them and store them in an airtight container.

Enjoy!

Other Mother Cookies

My first Gaiman-inspired cookie, and just in time for the premiere of the feature film!

I just read Coraline this past autumn while I was on my study abroad for university in the UK. I read it in the plane as I went to meet my friend who lives in Munich and I couldn't put it down.

It's a delightfully twisted book. I know if I had been a kid when it came out I would have loved it, because as an adult I thoroughly enjoyed it; it's Gaiman's usual dark, sharp wit and tells a story gentle enough for kids to read it, like it, and get something from it. Perfect.

This Friday, 6 February, the film version of Coraline will be hitting the theatres in the US. I am so excited. It looks amazing.



I had to make a cookie in the excitement and tried to think of something iconic. What better than a button?

This cookie is named after Coraline's Other Mother. It's meant to be a sweet, comforting cookie… with a bite. It's anise seed, a flavour reminiscent of black liquorice, a flavour people either love or hate. The clove is smoky and tangy, a spice that brings comfort to upset tummies and carries a bit of a shock to a biscuit. Together, they make a strongly scented cookie, one that's like a lot of spice cookies, but something's not quite the same… And pressed into a big button, these Other Mother cookies are just like her -- familiar, only not.




Other Mother Cookies

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp ground anise seed

1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp anise oil (picked up from a local Italian delicatessen)
1 egg
1 cup fine sugar
1 cup butter

black icing dye (mine was a gel-like consistency)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
   
2. Combine flour, baking powder, salt, ground cloves, and ground anise seed in a medium bowl.
   
3. Cream the butter and sugar. Add egg, anise oil, and vanilla. Beat well.
   
4. Gradually add the dry ingredients.
   
5. Work in the black icing dye. I ended up using approximately 1/2 teaspoon but I didn't keep track much -- add more if it's not dark enough. You want the dough black.
   
6. Divide the dough into a few sections so it will be easier to work with. Roll out one section to approximately 1/4 inch thick, or a bit thicker, onto a lightly floured surface.
   
7. Using a large circular cookie cutter, cut as many circles of dough as you can, then place them on your baking sheet, not too close to one another. Press a smaller circular cutter into the dough, but do not go all the way through -- you only want to make an impression that will last through baking. Poke four holes into the center with a chopstick or skewer, all the way through the dough.
   
8. Bake for 9 minutes.

Enjoy!