Cookies for one



There are four problems with baking for one. 1) recipes for baked goods are often difficult to halve. This leads you to 2) make way too much cake, far too many cookies or more loaves of bread than you can possibly consume. Therefore 3) you end up eating more than you really should, and unfortunately, 4) you have no one to lie around with and moan about how gluttonous you were. First world problems? Most definitely.

The cookbooks that I own are mostly made to serve “4 or more”, and the recipes for after dinner sweets are no different. Determined to make my way through the “The Gourmet Cookie Cookbook”, a lovely compilation of the best recipes from Gourmet magazine from each year between 1941 and 2009, I came across one that was fairly simple and made with ingredients I had on hand. The recipe was for “lace cookies” but in my hands, the cookies, while still thin, were crisp only on the edges. The centres were slightly chewy and richly almond-flavored, and with a drizzle of dark chocolate, perfectly sweetened. The original recipe ostensibly yielded 8-dozen cookies, but halving the ingredients (despite my misgivings) revealed that the magazine was perhaps making their cookies smaller than I had imagined. My final tally: 13.

Lace Cookies
Adapted from “The Gourmet Cookie Cookbook”

Ingredients (full recipe)

-       3 tbsp butter, softened
-       1 cup brown sugar, slightly packed
-       4 tbsp flour
-       1 cup ground almonds
-       1 egg, beaten and at room temperature
-       ½ tsp almond extract
-       1 tsp vanilla extract
-       Bittersweet or dark chocolate, to drizzle (optional)

1.     Preheat oven to 375C and butter a cookie sheet; set aside.

2.     Cream together butter and brown sugar. Beat in flour and ground almonds.

3.     Beat in egg, almond and vanilla extracts until well mixed.

4.   Drop batter by the teaspoon on a well-buttered cookie sheet, leaving about 2 inches of space between cookies.

5.    Bake for 8-10 minutes, watching the cookies closely. Remove from the oven when the edges turn a dark golden brown.

6.     Transfer to a wire rack and cool completely.

7.     Melt chocolate and drizzle on top of cooled cookies; let harden at room temperature.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scone Witch

Image
There is an amazing little restaurant in the outskirts of downtown Ottawa called The Scone Witch, which makes scones in more varieties than you can imagine.   Savory scones with ingredients such as fragrant rosemary, cheese and scallions; sweet scones in which are embedded bits of candied ginger and tiny, tangy currants. M and I ate there recently, and our exceptional lunch reminded me of how much I love the decadent and infinitely adaptable pillows of butter and cream. I have previously only attempted to make scones once – the effort, thought valiant, was somewhat subpar – but this week I decided to try my hand at it again. In browsing the web, a recipe caught my eye, from my favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen (featured prominently in many of my posts). The recipe, though not too labor-intensive, took more time than I had anticipated, and M and I ended up indulging quite late in the night. A delicious bedtime snack, no doubt, but also the recipe for a b...
Read more

Birthday torte

Image
M loves chocolate, adores it in fact. He will always make a beeline for the chocolatiest dessert on the menu at dinner, and we always have some iteration of dark chocolate stashed away somewhere in the apartment. So, it seemed appropriate that his birthday cake request was as chocolately as birthday cakes get, in the best way of course. Home for the weekend, we spent a lovely, relaxed evening together, starting with a fantastic dinner at Brooklyn Warehouse, a low-key bistro in Halifax's North End; definitely a culinary gem in the city. Dessert was, of course, M's cake of choice; a luxuriously rich torte made with a sinful amount of dark chocolate and butter, bourbon syrup and just a touch of flour to hold the whole thing together. We paired it with a sweet-tart mixed berry-orange compote, scotch, and 'Blade Runner'. Bayou chocolate torte with bourbon and dark chocolate, with mixed berry-orange compote (recipe to follow) From 'Rebar Modern Food Cookbook...
Read more

Decadence

I am recovering from a weekend of gastronomic hedonism. Too much sushi, wine, 4 am pizza (incidentally, the best ever, even the next morning), poutine, more ethanol, maple syrupy French toast etc etc etc….so good, but 48 hours of indulgence leaves one feeling a bit….heavy. As would be expected, lethargy descended upon us on a cold and rainy spring Sunday night, and all I wanted to was to eat something filling, that was easy to make, and that was light . Because let’s face it, this squid’s diet can only take so much of a beating. So I turned to my old stand-by, Madhur Jaffrey, the queen of vegetarian and Indian, cooking. She hold a special place in my culinarily-inclined heart, ever since I discovered her classic cookbook in my mother’s cupboard a few years ago, “An Introduction to Indian Cooking”, which is unfortunately now out of print. Her’s is one of the only cookbooks that my mom has that is not annotated to death – it’s as though every recipe she writes has been tested to perfe...
Read more