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.

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