Short and sweet...

...describes these little gems to a T. Crispy, too, and thin, with a buttery vanilla flavor that melts out from the tiny golden crumbs as they fall onto your tongue. Best enjoyed with a good cup of coffee midmorning, or perhaps post-call, if that's how you roll.

Happy Valentine's Day!


Cinnamon vanilla sugar cookies for M
Adapted from 'Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-In-Your-Mouth Cookies' by Alice Medrich

Ingredients
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened slightly
- 1 large egg, room temperature
- 1/2 tbsp pure vanilla extract
- Cinnamon sugar, for sprinkling (instructions below)

Yields about 50 1 1/2" heart-shaped cookies

Prep time (1): 20 min
Chill: 2-3 hours or overnight
Prep time (2): 40 min
Bake time: 8-10

1. Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and set aside.

2. Using an electric mixer, cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy (about 3-4 minutes). Beat in egg and vanilla.

3. Slowly add flour mixture, mixing until just incorporated. Turn dough onto the counter (it will be a bit crumbly) and knead it a couple of times. Divide the dough in 2, shape each half into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for 2-3 hours (or overnight).

4. Preheat oven to 350F and remove dough balls from the fridge; let sit at room temperature until supple enough to roll. Line 2 large baking trays with parchment paper.

5. Turn one of the dough balls onto a large piece of wax paper and place another piece of wax paper on top of it (so that the dough is sandwiched between the papers). Alternatively, cut a large freezer Ziploc bag into two and use the pieces in place of the wax paper. This step allows you to roll the cookies out and prevents sticking without adding additional flour.

6. Roll the dough ball out until it is about 1/8" thick. Using a cookie cutter of your choice, cut out cookies from the rolled out dough, lift them carefully, and place on the baking sheet. Repeat until all of the dough has been used, but try not to over-work the dough as this will make the cookies denser.

7. Just before baking, sprinkle cinnamon sugar on top of the cookies. If you wish, you can also add colored sugar or sprinkles.

8. Place the tray in the oven and bake for 8-10 minutes, or until cookies are golden brown. Remove from oven, cool slightly on the tray, then lift onto a baking rack and finish cooling completely.

Cinnamon sugar

Ingredients
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon (or more, to taste)
- 1/8 tsp salt


1. Mix all ingredients together well, and adjust to taste. Store at room temperature in an airtight container.  You can substitute the cinnamon for any other spice, as you see fit!

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