Cinnamon Sugar Biscotti

isn't that mug pretty? i never use it.

Perhaps it’s a result of my upbringing in cider mill country (if you’ve never eaten a cinnamon sugar cider mill donut while drinking fresh apple cider, you haven’t lived), or of my Grandma Bev’s much loved snickerdoodle recipe (I didn’t know she didn’t invent them until I went to middle school and wondered who in the hell had stolen my grandma’s recipe when I saw snickerdoodles in the lunch line), but I’m a real sucker for cinnamon sugar things.  Churros, elephant ears, donuts, cookies, cinnamon toast, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, leftover pie dough sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and rolled up into perfect little swirls (without cinnamon also called, in some adorable Nebraskan circles, Sugar Pie).  All delicious. Cinnamon sugar biscotti is like a grown up version of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, in that it’s elegant, you can dunk it in coffee and no one judges you for eating it, but it pretty much tastes like Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

I think my personal baked goods provider (Linda) originally made me cinnamon sugar biscotti, but now I don’t live with her anymore and recently when I asked her to make me some she said make it yourself.  So I did.

Cinnamon Sugar Biscotti, adapted from Giada de Laurentiis’ recipe

1/2 cup butter, room temperature

3/4 cup sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 eggs

1 tsp cinnamon

2 cups flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

cinnamon sugar, for sprinkling

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  In a large bowl, beat together the butter, sugar, cinnamon and vanilla.  When fluffy, beat in the eggs one at a time.  Beat in the flour, salt and baking powder until just combined.

On a parchment lined cookie sheet, arrange the dough in a kind of long, oval blob, like this:

i sprinkled some cinnamon on it and forgot to tell you to do that.

Bake the blob for 40 minutes, until golden.  It will expand a lot, like this:

gigantor cookie blob.

Let the blob cool for about a half hour or so, move it to a cutting board, then cut it diagonally into strips with a serrated knife.  Arrange the slices on the cookie sheet, cut side up, and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar.  Bake for another 15 minutes, turn all the biscotti over so the opposite cut side is facing up, sprinkle with more cinnamon sugar and bake another 7-10 minutes.  The idea is to let them get as dry and crunchy as possible without burning them.  This will probably be easier for everyone not living in the drippiest, moistest region of these United States.

Notes:

I store these in a container with a lid, but I just lay the lid on the container, I don’t close it up.  That way, they’ll stay drier instead of moisten up in there.

You don’t have to make this biscotti cinnamon sugar flavor.  Remove the cinnamon from the batter and you have biscotti base that you can add anything to!  Here are some ideas: orange zest and almonds, then dip the biscotti in chocolate; cranberries and pecans, then dip the biscotti in chocolate; pistachios and chocolate chips, then dip the biscotti in chocolate; espresso powder and chocolate chips, then dip the biscotti in chocolate.

- Cat

Homemade Oreos

I thought about making homemade Hostess cupcakes this weekend, but it turned out that there were 4 separate things to make for those, and homemade Oreos only required 2 things.  Laziness absolutely dictates my cooking style.  Homemade versions of store bought things are all the rage in the Land of Cooking Blogs, and I am as susceptible as anyone to the lure of people saying “these are even better than the store bought kind!”

Truth is that these ARE much better than the store bought kind, and I will have words with anyone who says otherwise.  Also, they’re easy.  REALLY easy.  So easy that I made them and absolutely nothing went wrong, which is a rarity in my baking endeavors.

Homemade Oreos, from Smitten Kitchen

Cookies:

1 1/4 cups flour

1/2 cup Dutch process cocoa

1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp unsalted butter, room temperature

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup sugar

1 large egg

Filling:

1/4 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

1/4 cup vegetable shortening

2 cups powdered sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

Method:

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees, and spread parchment paper on two cookie sheets.  In a large bowl (or the bowl of your standing mixer) cream together all the cookie ingredients.  Probably you’re supposed to do them in phases, or whatever, but I didn’t, and everything was fine.  It will come together into a mass, like this:

a little sandy, a little sticky. you mix it for awhile until it gets here, don't be afraid.

When it’s a mass like that, wet your hands slightly and start rolling little balls of dough between your fingers, about the size of a cherry tomato, or maybe 1 inch in diameter.  Try to get them as round as you can, because that’ll make the sandwiches prettier.  Place them on the paper lined cookie sheets, about 2 inches apart.

err on the side of "put them really far apart". that's what i say.

Due to my long history of baking cookies that are too close together and run into each other and make me really upset, I did 9 per sheet, which took me exactly two batches of two sheets each.  Bake them for 9 minutes, take them out of the oven, let them sit on the cookie sheets for 2-3 minutes, then remove them to a cooling rack while you do the next batch.

For the filling, cream together the shortening, butter and vanilla until combined, then cream in the powdered sugar about a half cup at a time until all combined and relatively thick.  It’s not perfectly white like Oreo cream, but I don’t trust perfectly white things anyway, so that’s okay.

the filling should be nice and thick- like, you could potentially make a tiny baby duck out of it and it would stay that shape.

Spoon the icing into a pastry bag and set side.

did you think i have pastry bags? that's a ziploc bag, i cut a hole in the corner. works just as well for this kind of thing.

When the cookies are cool, set them in little stacks of two (matching size as much as you can, you’re probably better at making the dough balls uniform than I am and so are less apt to end up with mutant cookies), and pipe a swirl of filling onto the flat side of the bottom cookie.  Take care to do a circle on the very outer edge, which also helps with prettiness.  Smoosh the top cookie on the filling and Voila!  Homemade Oreos.

booyah, nabisco. booyah.

There are no notes for this, it was the easiest thing I ever baked.  They’re pretty, tasty and hard to mess up.  If you’ll excuse me, I have to go eat 13 more.

- Cat

Julie Biolchini’s Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

 

When I was a kid, we lived in Royal Oak, Michigan.  On our street was a lovely family called the Biolchinis.  They have 4 boys.  (Only one of whom, I was happy to learn, is in college already, because I used to babysit them occasionally.)  We moved when I was 13, and the Biolchinis moved as well, but for the past, oh, 15 years or so, my mom has gotten together once a month for cards with ladies from that neighborhood.  Every Christmas, they do a cookie exchange.  Every Christmas, Julie Biolchini makes these chocolate crinkle cookies.  Every Christmas, my sister and I fight over the Chocolate Crinkles.  To me, they are the perfect cookie.  I used to hoard them when my mom would come home from the cookie exchange, and I referenced them recently in a post about brittle.

JULIE BIOLCHINI SENT ME A BATCH OF CHOCOLATE CRINKLE COOKIES IN THE MAIL.  BECAUSE SHE IS COMPLETELY AWESOME.

I ate them all.  Maybe Dom snuck one.  I knew I should have counted them.  Chocolate Crinkles are melty and fantastic, like brownies but crunchier and more tender.  They’re also rolled in powdered sugar and they’re so, so attractive.  My dad says that the best cookie in the world is Sue’s mom’s Buffalo Chip cookies, and they are REALLY GOOD, but Chocolate Crinkles are my favorite.

Lengthy sidenote – Sue stayed with us a lot the summer after senior year of high school, because her parents had moved to Indiana and she and I decided that she would live with us for the summer.  Her mom used to regularly send bags full of Buffalo Chip cookies back to my parents’ with her and my dad would – I’m not kidding – hide them so no one else could eat them.  I once saw him receive a bag of the cookies from Susan, go fetch a batch of cookies my sister had made, throw them (with considerable emphasis) into the garbage, and exclaim “Finally I don’t have to eat this crap anymore, the real cookies are here!”.

Anyway, Chocolate Crinkles are awesome.  Here’s the recipe.

Julie Biolchini’s Chocolate Crinkles

1/2 cup vegetable oil

4 squares unsweetened chocolate (Melted and cooled slightly.  Do this in the microwave, just watch it closely and take it out to stir it around every 20-30 seconds.  You don’t want it to be so hot that it cooks the eggs when you mix those in, so if you can touch it comfortably with your finger, you’re fine.)

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

2 tsp vanilla

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

1 package semi-sweet chocolate chips

powdered sugar for rolling

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.  Mix oil, melted chocolate and sugar.  Add eggs one at a time and mix.  Add vanilla.  Stir in flour, baking powder, and salt.  (Julie does this all in her standing mixer.)  Stir in chocolate chips and chill four hours or longer.

Roll into 1 inch balls, and roll in powdered sugar.  (Dough will be pretty sticky.)  Bake 10-12 minutes at 350 degrees.  Watch the first batch for right bake time, take them out when they still look kind of raw in the cracks.  Makes 5-6 dozen.

i took this picture, then ate all three. i'm not even sorry.

- Cat

Snickerdoodles

I LOVE cookies. Love them. Who doesn’t? I have a lot of favorite cookies, and I like them all for different reasons, I love cookies with nuts in them, and cookies with butterscotch in them, and cookies with oatmeal in them, and cookies with white chocolate in them.  But what I really like are classic cookies, like snickerdoodles! This is one of those cookies where I have memories of making these with my mom and my sister, and rolling the little balls in the cinnamon sugar mix. They are a perfect “kid” cookie, because they are so fun to make! I have a secret ingredient though…a few secrets really. I’m sure all of you have a snickerdoodle recipe…but this is mine, and it’s probably better than yours. (ok, I’m just kidding, but seriously, take some of these ideas into consideration)

Ingredients:

1 stick salted butter, softened

1 stick margarine softened, or 8 tbs butter flavored Crisco

½ cup dark brown sugar

½ sugar

2 eggs

2 ¾ cups all purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

Pinch of salt

½ tsp fresh grated nutmeg

Rolling sugar:

¼ cup sugar

2 Tbs cinnamon

Method:

Cream the butter and the sugar (use a wooden spoon, cookies always taste best when you do it this way!) Add the eggs, and beat until combined. Add 1 cup of the flour, the baking soda, the salt, and the nutmeg. Beat until combined. Add remaining 1 ¾ cup of flour and beat. Cover and chill dough for at least an hour (or overnight) for easier rolling.

Combine the ¼ cup sugar and 2 Tbs cinnamon in a small shallow dish. Form the dough into ½ inch balls (or close to that, it’s snickerdoodles, they can be bite size or huge!) Roll the ball in the cinnamon sugar mixture and place on a parchment lined baking sheet. Make sure to place the balls 2 inches apart (Snickerdoodles spread a lot).

Bake for 8-10 mins at 400 degrees. ** (that means see notes below)

Don’t they look delicious? Maybe if you’re really nice, I’ll send you some for your birthday.

Now for the notes section:

** How large, or small, you make you’re snickerdoodle balls is going to affect your cooking time. I would start with 8 mins, but keep an eye on them. Snickerdoodles are notorious for cracking on the top. So watch closely, when they have a few cracks in the top, they are ready to come out. Remember, cookies continue to bake for a few minutes out of the oven.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, nutmeg is the “secret” ingredient. It’s nothing that special or amazing, but I think it gives just another hint of flavor to the cookies that is really delicious. Cinnamon and nutmeg are a great little pair.

Also, dark brown sugar. This will make the dough a little bit darker in color, but again, it adds depth of flavor. You could of course use light brown, or just use white sugar if you like.

Last but not least- margarine or butter Crisco. Yes, it’s not my favorite ingredient…but in cookies, it makes them soft! If you use all butter your cookies will be really crispy. I like to use both because butter has better flavor, and the “other stuff” makes it soft.

-Sue