Early Happy Easter? Dorie’s Cookies Meringue Vanilla Snowballs

I was meeting up with some friends around Easter last year [yes, I am posting this a year late…], and I wanted to bring an Easter-esque treat that didn’t involve chocolate. Don’t get me wrong – I love chocolate more than the average person, but Easter tends to be pretty choco-ful and I wanted something a little different.

Enter the Meringue Snowballs.

I figured if I made these “cookies” (can they really be called cookies?!) in pretty springtime pastels, they would fit with the Easter theme – and nary a cocoa bean in sight.

I have made meringue a few times before, and Dorie’s version is decidedly unfussy. It’s relatively quick, easy, and foolproof – at the expense of perfection. My meringues cracked a little and yours might too, but they still looked good and – most importantly – tasted like the perfect little sugar clouds that they are.

The ingredient list for meringues is short and sweet (hey… kind of like the final product!): granulated sugar, icing sugar, egg whites, cream of tartar, and a wee bit of sea salt. The Dorie’s Cookies cookbook offers some flavourful variations – mint chocolate chip! rose! green tea and pistachio! Wanting to add a little something – but not wanting to make a trip to the grocery store – I opted to make the Vanilla Snowball iteration (just add vanilla… easy as that).

Although the recipe is easy, you do have to be a little careful in the preparation. For one, the sugars must be sifted. Second, all of your baking gear must be perfectly clean – fat is the murderer of meringues, so be ultra careful when separating your whites from your yolks. I always break each egg individually before putting them in a communal bowl – that way, if you mess one up and break the yolk, you won’t contaminate all the other whites.

The whites, cream of tartar, and salt get sent to the stand mixer, where they whisk away until they start forming soft peaks. At this point, all but one tablespoon of the sugar is slowly added until the mixture is stiff and perfectly shiny. (This is where I added the vanilla, too.)

I always mix a little longer than I think I’ll need to – otherwise, I tend to end up with a mixture that is slightly too runny. I think I nailed it on this go. Once the mix is looking good, you gently – gently – fold in the last bit of sugar.

At this point, I divided the glossy goop into a few different bowls and played around with some of the colours. The book suggests spooning the meringue out onto your silicone mat-covered baking sheet, but I knew they were look prettier if I took a little extra time to pipe them. I didn’t bother washing out the bags between colours because I figured a little marble/tie dye effect would look kind of cool and very dip-dyed Easter eggy.

Don’t these look like these dot candies from your childhood?

I couldn’t decide whether the tame the little cowlicks or to leave them as is. I tried patting a few down (I do this by wetting my finger and tapping the tops), but ultimately I decided to leave most of them up. I kind of like the look.

Slow and steady is the name of the meringue game: these puppies baked at 250 degrees for 75 minutes, then I propped open the oven door and left them in there overnight.

They kept their colour nicely and didn’t brown at all.

What do you think? I think they’re a cute – if not quite traditional – Easter option. Bookmark this one for next year, perhaps?

Bobbette & Belle’s Decorative Sugar Cookies: Valentine’s Cookies from the Heart (puns!!!)

I know everyone thinks that their mom is great, but mine really is.

For example, she made my lunch for school every day until the day I graduated Grade 12. From time to time, she would surprise me with a decorated cookie in my lunch box (store bought – my mom is an exquisite cook, but a reluctant baker).

After high school, I moved across the country – and for special occasions, my mom would ship me holiday-themed decorated sugar cookies in the mail. She’d often include one for whatever roommate I had at the time, too. And sometimes, I even managed to save the extra one for the roommate and not eat it myself!

A few weeks before Valentine’s Day, I received a parcel in the mail with a couple of these beauties:

Frankly, it made my day – and it inspired me to try my hand at baking my own special cookies for a few of my beloved Galetines.

I have long admired people who pipe and flood beautiful cookies, but I have never really given it a try myself. One of my goals for 2018 (besides measuring my ingredients by weight, not by volume) is to work at making my baking more “pretty”. [Note – yes, I wrote this blog post LAST YEAR for Valentine’s Day…] My baked goods usually taste wonderful (which is the top priority, I would argue), but they are sometimes lackluster from an aesthetic point of view. Prettily piped cookies seemed them to be a good exercise for flexing my beautiful baking muscles.

I was surprised to find that my Dorie’s Cookies cookbook – a book devoted entirely to cookies – didn’t have a simple sugar cookie recipe. Too simple for Dorie, maybe. Luckily, my Bobbette & Belle cookbook has a recipe for Decorative Sugar Cookies. Theirs includes piped flowers, those little silver balls, and some edible gold paint. Mine would be simpler, but still pretty (I hoped).

All too often, sugar cookies are more about the decorations than the taste, but this is actually a wonderful, flavourful recipe. And it’s easy to whip together, too.

First, you cream butter and sugar together until it is nice and fluffy. You add an egg and some vanilla, then mix in some flour/baking powder/salt.

That’s it! Those are all the ingredients! Easy peasy.

The dough looks really crumbly, but if you pour it out onto some plastic wrap and smush it together, it comes together just fine.

It has to chill in the fridge (literally and figuratively) for at least an hour before you can play with it, but one it has had a chance to rest, it is pretty easy to work with.

I kept my shapes simple: two sizes of cookie cutter hearts.

 

The cookies were baked until just barely golden (well… some of them were more golden than others), and while they cooled, I started working on the icing.

Making the icing was easy. Getting it to the right flooding consistency was HARD!

I kept it relatively simple by sticking to just two colours: white and pink. I filled a piping bag with each, only to discover that it was way too thick for proper flooding.

No problem – it’s easier to thin out icing than it is to thicken it, so I just squeezed out the bags and added some water. That should do it…

Not. The icing was still too thick to achieve the flood consistency. Impatience prevailed (the probable cause of my inability to make pretty baked things), and I started piping anyways. I decided to go for a minimalist approach and just outline the cookies. They looked nice, but plain.

I had heaps of leftover icing, so I started playing around with a few, and guess what? They kind of flooded! Only because I’d already outlined all of them (and the outlines were setting), it was impossible to achieve the perfect flood.

Don’t mind old bite marks in the top right…

So I decided to just have fun with it – after all, that’s how you learn, right? I doodled on my cookies for at least an hour, then realized that my day was wasting away rather quickly and I still had a large to do list to accomplish. I ended up tossing quite a bit of icing, which was disappointing and wasteful.

Next time, I’ll devote more time to piping. I haven’t given up hope and the cookies are so simple to make that I’m sure I’ll get the chance to give it another go soon.

Luckily, my Valentines aren’t too critical – they loved the cookies, so all’s well ends well.

Thanks for the inspiration, Mom!

I Shall Never Eat Biscotti Again: Dorie’s Cookies Chocolate Chip Not-Quite Mandelbrot

Bad news: I’m pretty sure I can never make biscotti again.

And these cute looking “Chocolate Chip Not-Quite Mandelbrot” cookies are to blame.

You see, I whipped this batch of cookies up for a book club meeting I had early in my first trimester juuuuust as my food aversions were starting to hit. [PS – I am posting this during my third trimester – my lagging blog post trend continues.] Thankfully, this stage only lasted a week or two – but at the expense of my love of biscotti*.

*These are technically not biscotti. They are technically not even Mandelbrot, which is what the recipe is supposed to be modeled after. But they are an awful lot like biscotti – twice baked and everything – and so the entire biscotti genre of cookie shall suffer.

I enjoyed eating the ends and broken bits of the cookies as I was baking them, but as soon as the whole thing was done, suddenly they seemed awful to me. I can’t explain why – all I know is that when I brought them to book club, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with them, and the thought of them today makes my stomach turn a little.

It’s not the recipe’s fault – I promise! Everyone else who ate them said they are fantastic.

Anyways, this blog post is devoted to the memory of biscotti. I didn’t eat you very often, but I will probably never eat you again for the rest of my life.

Dorie’s Cookies Parmesan Galettes: Ooh La La

Here’s something delightfully intriguing: the Dorie’s Cookies cookbook has a chapter devoted to savoury cookies. I’m not used to seeing non-sweet things in my baking cookbooks, but there are plenty of interesting (and weird: I’m looking at you, hot-and-spicy togarashi meringues and honey-BLUE CHEESE madeleines) recipes here.

(I am never going to make those madeleines. I hate blue cheese.)

A little while ago, I was supposed to head to a friend’s house for a pre-dinner birthday gathering. I thought the Parmesan Galettes sounded perfect for an appetizer, so I decided to try my hand at my first savoury cookie.

(I ended up having to turn the car around and skip the party because the roads were horrible – so I had these all to myself.) (Note: I wrote this post back in February when snow was still a thing…)

The ingredient list is short and sweet: all-purpose flour, butter, Parmesan cheese, and a bit of sea salt. If you’re reading this, I probably don’t have to tell you to buy the kind of Parm that you have to grate yourself. But just in case… there you go.

This recipe doesn’t require a mixer; it uses the food processor to mix the butter, flour, and Parmesan. Here’s how the dough is described: “process in long bursts until you have a moist curds-and-clumps dough”. Although that sounds incredibly vague and non-scientific, somehow, I knew exactly what Dorie meant when the time came.

I’m pretty sure this is what moist curds and clumps looks like?!

It’s super easy to smush the dough into a log. I was surprised at how teeny tiny the log was, but the recipe yielded 15 galettes, as the book said it would. Before slicing, you pop the log into the fridge for a couple of hours (or the freezer for just one hour, if you’re of the opinion that time is money).

After the dough has chilled, it’s time to slice and dice. The sidebar of the recipe says that these galettes pair nicely with a variety of herbs and spices, so I experimented (conservatively) by grinding a bit of fancy pepper over each galette. (If you’re wondering what fancy pepper is, it comes from France and includes tasting notes – thanks Mom and Dad!!!)

Note: If you look closely, you can see that some of my galettes have a tiny hole in the middle. This is because I didn’t roll my log quite tightly enough. Lessons learned!

The cookbook says that you can either bake the sliced galettes in a muffin tin (for a perfect circular shape and satisfying edges) or free-standing on a cookie sheet.

I baked 12 in the muffin tin and the rest on a baking sheet, and while the muffin ones looked prettier, I found they took a little longer to bake than the designated 15 to 17 minutes. They were more like 20 minutes.

Here’s the verdict on the galettes:

I LOVED them. They reminded me of dinner parties when I was younger. I feel like my mom used to serve cheese straws or something that were just like this. I loved the slightly crumbly texture and I thought they tasted just the right amount of Parmesan. I like Parmesan, but usually as a side cheese, not as a cheese on its own. Like, I wouldn’t typically eat Parmesan alone on crackers. These galettes were fantastic and felt fancy to me.

Cedric did not like them. I did not see this coming from a mile away – in our relationship, I am the one who favours sweets and he likes all things savoury (though he’s never met a chocolate chip cookie he didn’t like). Not only that, but he LOVES cheese – including Parmesan. He will gladly slice Parmesan and put it on a panini (which is exactly what he did with the leftover Parmesan from this recipe). But for whatever reason, this recipe didn’t do it for him.

Oh well. More for me!

Dorie’s Cookies’ Vanilla-Brown Butter Madeleines: A Two-Bite Cupcake

There’s something about madeleines that seems so wonderfully precious to me. Maybe it’s because they share a name with the little French private school character. Maybe it’s because they require their own special pan for baking. Maybe it’s because they’re just so gosh darned dainty and cute that it’s a wonder they haven’t blossomed into macaron-territory popularity. (Mark my words: madeleines will be the on-trend dessert of 2019 or 2020).

My own history with madeleines is somewhat hazy. Until Christmas morning, I didn’t own madeleine pans, so I never got the chance to try to bake my own. Until now, my exposure had been limited to some store bought ones I tried when I was around 10. I can’t remember especially liking them – but I also can’t remember not liking them.

Nonetheless, I was eager to put my new pans to work and decided to test them out with the most simple and classic of madeleine flavours: vanilla-brown butter, from my Dorie’s Cookies cookbook.

Here’s the thing with madeleines: Dorie stresses that they should be consumed as shortly after being baked as possible. I was preparing these for an evening book club meeting, so I started to bake them just as the sun was going down. This means that the pictures get progressively worse – sorry for that. Is anyone else counting down eagerly until the days get long again?

Step one is to prepare the special madeleine pans by greasing them and flouring them. Check and check. Next, you whisk the dry goods together: all-purpose flour and baking powder. So far so good.

Now, the butter. The butter gets melted and swirled on the stove top for a little while – after all, this recipe is called vanilla brown butter. When the butter is amber-esque and smells nutty and delicious, it gets pulled off the heat.

Meanwhile, you mix white sugar with eggs, vanilla, salt, and honey – the wets.

For those keeping track, we now have three bowls going on: the butter, the dry, and the wet. It is now time to unite them as one: you gently stir the wet with the dry, then fold the butter, bit by bit. Finally, you add a bonus ingredient. The bonus ingredient is a tablespoon of either Scotch, bourbon, dark rum, or milk (… one of these things is not like the other…). I had some bourbon left over from the sticky toffee pudding I made somewhat recently, so I threw it in there – and you know what? The boozy kick was pretty noticeable, considering it was only a tablespoon! I’d like to see how the taste differs if I use milk instead.

The batter then gets poured into the mad-pan. The recipe says it yields 12 madeleines, but mine made 20 (bonus!!). They bake at a high-ish temperature (400 degrees) for a short-ish amount of time (12 minutes), then you have to tap them out of their shells right away.

Aaaaand this is about where the sun had totally gone down and the pictures really suck.

(I’m not sure why it’s so urgent, but the recipe told me so. Maybe because they would keep baking and they’d dry out quickly? Who knows.)

I decided to kick my madeleines up one final notch by dipping them ever so slightly in some melted dark chocolate. This was not part of the recipe directions, but it was the right call – otherwise the madeleines may have been just a bit too plain.

The last step: a dusting of icing sugar (this step was called for by the recipe).

I tried to get an inside shot so you can get a sense of the texture. Kind of springy, kind of bouncy – very tasty.

Now, I don’t know exactly what madeleines are supposed to taste like, but I’ll do my best to sum it up and someone can let me know if I made them correctly. They kind of taste like a mini two-bite cupcake – they’re light, and they have a nice springy texture. They’re not overly sweet, but they’re not terribly exciting either. Or maybe that’s just because I picked a boring flavour. The good news is that I’ve got some more exciting varieties to try both in this cookbook and another. Stay tuned – exciting madeleines coming your way soon.

Dorie’s Cookies “My Newest Chocolate Chip Cookies” Recipe Review

A picky comment – the photography in Dorie’s Cookies is not my favourite. But as I continue to bake (and photograph) my own cookies, I’m realizing it is kind of hard to photograph cookies in exciting, unconventional ways. Respect to food stylists!

It is no secret that Cedric is a fan of chocolate chip cookies.

As I have previously explained, in our household, we like to make a batch of cookie dough and freeze individually portioned cookies so that when the need for something sweet hits, we simply have to throw a few cookie pucks in the oven and voila: instant fresh-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies.

Recently, our freezer stash dwindled down to dangerously low supply levels and I decided it was time to make a new batch. Naturally, I knew I had to try a chocolate chip cookie recipe from my new Dorie’s Cookies cookbook – but which one?

I should have known that a cookbook devoted entirely to cookies would contain more than one chocolate chip cookie recipe – it is, after all, a classic. Here were my options:

• Kerrin’s Multigrain Chocolate Chip Cookies
• My Newest Chocolate Chip Cookies
• My Classic Best Chocolate Chip Cookies
• Two-Bite One-Chip Cookies

I opted for “My Newest Chocolate Chip Cookies” – Dorie’s latest remix of her original “My Classic Best Chocolate Chip Cookies” recipe.

So what’s different about this recipe? Most chocolate chip cookie recipes vary only very slightly – but even the smallest change in sugar/butter/flour ratio, type of sugar used, cooking temperature, and cooking time can have radical effects. (Yes, chocolate chip cookies can be radical.) This particular recipe features a blend of all-purpose and whole-wheat flour and white and brown sugar for optimal chewiness. It uses baking soda, not baking powder, and it calls for a couple of unconventional spices (for chocolate chip cookies at least): nutmeg and coriander.

I didn’t have any coriander on hand (isn’t coriander cilantro? do I really want that it my cookie?), but Dorie says that we can use our discretion when it comes to including or omitting the spices. I kept the nutmeg but left out the coriander.

This recipe is as quick to make as any chocolate chip recipe is, though it calls for at least an hour in the fridge before baking. I rolled up most of my dough into individual cookies to freeze for later, but I did bake a few so that I could give this recipe the review it deserves.

The recipe says to bake for 9 to 11 minutes. I left mine in for 10, and they looked perfect coming out: pale in the middle (chewiness galore!), brown on the edges. The pictures in the cookbook look a little darker than mine, but after I let mine sit for a few minutes, they were the perfect texture. If I had let them get darker, I think they would have been too crispy for my liking.

Right out of the oven

The greatest challenge with chocolate chip cookies is knowing that they taste even better if you let them sit for a little while and cool fully – but also knowing that there is nothing better than a still-hot cookie with chocolate that oozes. I compromised: I ate my cookie straight out of the oven, and I left two cookies to cool fully for Cedric to sample when he got home.

We both really liked this cookie. I’ll have to try a few more of the freezer ones before I make a final judgment call, and I’m definitely looking forward to trying some of the other chocolate chip cookie recipes in this book (the Kerrin’s recipe includes buckwheat flour and kasha – I don’t even know what kasha is!)

One final note on chocolate chip cookies: some people wonder if there is really such thing as a bad chocolate chip cookie. Oh, but there is – and for some reason, cafes and bakeries often serve substandard versions. As a kid, I loved the Tim Horton’s and Subway ones, but now the texture bothers me and so does the crystalized sugar taste. One local cafe (I won’t name names) serve puck-like chocolate chip cookies that are too hard and crumbly; another is disappointingly bland and low on actual chocolate.

So yes, it is possible to botch the chocolate chip cookie. And no, that is not a concern with this recipe – thankfully.

Dorie’s Cookies Chocolate Creme Sandwiches: a.k.a. Homemade Oreos, Baby

My new Dorie’s Cookies cookbook is seriously daunting.

There are so many cookie recipes. I get it – that’s the point. After all, it is a cookbook about cookies. But if you want to make cookies – any cookie, no particular kind specifically – it can get overwhelming.

I decided to try the Chocolate Creme Sandwiches for a friend’s birthday because they seemed pretty easy to make and I thought they would appease most palates – after all, this is Dorie’s approach to the classic Oreo. She describes her sandwiches as “a little less brittle and a little less sweet than the originals, but they’re just as snackable”.

There are two components to this recipe: the cookie and the “creme” (i.e., the delicious cream filling that is arguably the best part of an Oreo).

The cookies require perfectly average ingredients: all-purpose flour, cocoa powder, butter, sugar, salt, vanilla, and an egg white. The filling is even easier: butter, icing sugar, vanilla, and salt. You can colour and flavour your filling to your heart’s desire (anyone remember neon Oreos? The best!), but I decided to keep mine original for the first bake.

Making the cookie dough, I got the feeling that something wasn’t quite right. I mixed the butter, sugar, and salt without any issues, added the egg white and vanilla as directed, and then introduced the dry ingredients. The whole thing seemed really dry – like I was missing a key liquid ingredient to bind the whole thing together. But after reading Dorie’s thorough cookbook introduction, she has convinced me that all of her directions are just so for a specific reason. I decided to have a little faith. Plus, this line helped me accept that this wasn’t going to look like a traditional cookie dough right away:

“… until you have a dough that holds together and forms clumps when pinched – it shouldn’t come together in a ball.”

I dumped the crumbly contents onto the counter and kneaded the mass, and wouldn’t you know – it came together beautifully! Sorry I ever doubted you, Dorie.

I split the hunk of dough into two and rolled each out between sheets of parchment paper – it felt somewhat wasteful, but it made it wonderfully easy and non-sticky. (I used the parchment dough for the actual baking of the cookies, too.)

The flatted dough rectangles rest in the freezer, then it’s time to stamp out the circles. I have a decent collection of cookie cutters, but oddly enough, I don’t have plain circles, so I used a little heart cookie cutter instead.

The recipe says it makes 22 sandwiches, so 44 cookies total, but I was able to get way more out of my dough. (I re-rolled the scraps into fresh dough while the first two trays were baking).

Pre oven

These cookies are chocolatey, so it’s hard to tell when they’re done. I trusted the cookbook’s guide of 12 to 14 minutes and kept mine in for about 13. The cookies maintained their shape nicely, though a few of them had little bumps of air.

Post oven

After they cooled, they had a satisfyingly crisp texture and tasted almost like a chocolate shortbread.

This is the whole recipe?!?!

In the meantime, I got to work on the cream filling. It came together easily, but it didn’t look like an awful lot of cream. I prefer my Oreos on the double-stuff side of things, so I wasn’t sure how this would fare.

I doled out my cream conservatively among my cookie pairs. In hindsight, I may have been better off only making 22 sandwiches as instructed – this would have meant more stuffing per cookie (but it would also have meant many naked cookies). Since my cookies were heart-shaped, not round, it was a little tricky trying to spread the cream inside the cookie.

It’s hard to describe the finished product. It tasted a lot like an Oreo, but also somehow different – a little more flavourful, maybe? The stuffing tastes more like vanilla icing than Oreo creme, but it works wonderfully with the cookies. They’re sturdy, too – mine survived a little jostling in my backpack before I shared it with the birthday party-goers.

There were a few that I overcooked in the final batch. I skipped the cream and went directly to the milk.

So far, Dorie is 2 for 2. Maybe as I bake a few more cookies, I’ll stop being so overwhelmed at the massive quantity of delicious recipes to choose from.

Dorie’s Cookies’ Chocolate Oatmeal Biscoff Cookies

Christmas was very good for me this year. In addition to plenty of quality time with many of my favourite people, I was also lucky enough to land some pretty swell gifts, including a few tantalizing cookbooks. Among them was this one:

Meet Dorie’s Cookies. Yes, a cookbook exclusively about cookies – I LOVE it! In fact, this book contains more than just your traditional cookie: it has brownies, bars, madeleines, and lots of other nice things – but everything is generally cookie-like in nature and, by golly, the recipes looked darned good.

---

I’ll get back to Dorie and her cookies in a moment – but first, I want to talk about Trader Joe’s Cookie Butter.

I adore Trader Joe’s (please, oh please, let us have TJ’s in Canada one day), and I have often heard about the infamous cookie butter, but I’d never tried it myself. Before Christmas, I did a cross-border run to the Bellingham Trader Joe’s and I picked a jar on a whim to give to my friend, Jessica. I’m not sure why I had the inclination to do so – I’ve never talked about the cookie butter with Jessica, but she shares my affinity for delicious treats and I figured if it was something I wanted, it was something she’d probably like. As I wrapped it with her other gifts, I’m not going to lie: a tiny part of me wanted to keep it for myself.

Golden Retrievers not included.

You can probably guess what happened. Jessica gave me Trader Joe’s cookie butter for Christmas, too. No joke. The weirdest part is that this is not the first time we’ve gotten each other identical Christmas gifts. I am so, so grateful for our friendship and our ability to read each other’s minds.

After finally tasting the cookie butter, I can tell you that the rumours are true: it is absolutely delicious. It’s a sweet, gingery spread the texture of smooth peanut butter but with slightly crunchy morsels, and it is dangerously addicting. I loved it – but aside from eating it out of the jar with a spoon, I wasn’t sure how to use it.

---

Now back to Dorie’s. As I flipped through the recipes, tackling the impossible task of deciding which to conquer first, I came across this one for Chocolate Oatmeal Biscoff Cookies. After a bit of research, I discovered that Biscoff is the exact same thing as TJ’s cookie butter. Boom: I had my first recipe.

This is a wonderful, weird recipe that uses all kinds of good stuff: the gingery cookie butter, of course, but also oatmeal, cocoa powder, and chunks of chocolate. I knew I couldn’t go wrong.

One of my favourite sights. (Stained cutting board and all.)

I love cookies because, generally, they are pretty easy to make. (I’m sure that will come back to haunt me as I tackle some of the more complex recipes in this book). This one is no exception: whisk the dry, cream the butter and sugar (and cookie butter), add an egg, add the dry stuff, then add the chopped chocolate.

I should note here my New Year’s resolution for baking: I hereby vow to ditch measuring cups, where possible, and to solely rely on my food scale instead. I know – I should have been doing it this way all along. Now, I will.

This recipe directs you to stash the dough in the fridge for a couple of hours before baking. I read the preamble stuff in this book and my takeaway is this: if Dorie writes out a specific instruction (like pop the dough in the fridge), she does it for a reason – don’t ignore her. Another tip I liked: after preheating the oven, leave it alone for an additional 10 to 15 minutes to get it nice and hot. Since cookies don’t bake for long, the right temperature makes a big difference.

I used an ice cream scoop to produce uniform mounds of dough, then, as directed, I rolled each into a ball and squished it a little flat with the bottom of a jar. The instructions said to space the cookies about an inch apart, which ended up being about right – I had a few that spread to touch, but most kept to their own nicely.

Dorie says to let the cookies cool for 3 minutes before transferring them to a wire cooling rack. When I tried at the 3 minute mark, they were still too soft. I let them sit about 10 minutes total before moving them.

These cookies taste not quite like any cookie I’ve ever had before. The oatmeal gives texture, but I wouldn’t call them an oatmeal cookie. The cookie butter is almost undetectable flavour-wise – they don’t taste like the gingery cookie spread, but there is a little something in them that’s different that would be hard to put your finger on if you didn’t know the ingredient list. The cookies are definitely chocolatey – just the right amount.

If you follow the directions exactly, as I did, you’ll end up with an absolutely perfect cookie consistency: firm but soft and chewy, just begging to be paired with a glass of milk. Best of all, my final product looked identical to the picture in the cookbook itself – always a good sign.

Based on my first batch of cookies from Dorie’s Cookies, I have a strong feeling I’m going to have quite a nice time baking my way through this book. More cookies coming your way soon!

Bobbette & Belle’s Soft & Chewy Ginger Cookies

I’ve got to say – compared to baking bread, making a simple cookie is soooo wonderfully easy. I have a newfound appreciation for straightforward recipes.

I recently made Bobbette & Belle’s Soft & Chewy Ginger Cookies on a whim. I wanted a sweet treat and I happened to have all of the requisite ingredients on hand, so I gave it a whirl.

The result was a delicious, classic ginger cookie – but be warned: this is the one Bobbette & Belle recipe that you don’t want to leave in the oven longer than recommended. Read on, folks.

Let’s start with the ingredients: as I mentioned, I already had them in my pantry and chances are good you’ve got most of them, too. Flour, baking soda, salt, ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, unsalted butter, brown sugar, a single egg, fancy molasses, and some granulated sugar to give it a sparkly finish – and that’s all it takes.

Totally smells like gingerbread house batter

It’s a typical quick and easy cookie recipe: mix the dry, cream the butter and the sugar,  add the wet stuff (egg, molasses), then add the dry. There is one additional crucial step that you don’t find in every cookie recipe, and that is to pop the dough in the fridge for at least an hour before baking. If you skip this, the dough is a bit finicky to handle.

(As you can imagine, this hour waiting time didn’t particularly mesh well with my desire to eat something sweet instantly. Patience is a virtue.)

I used a small ice cream scoop to fill two cookie sheets. Each scoop then got rolled into a ball and then each ball got rolled into a dish of sugar. I’m a firm believer that just about everything is better coated in sugar.

Alright, the only hiccup I encountered occurred relates to the bake time. The recipe instructs 15 to 18 minutes, but EVERY Bobbette & Belle recipe I’ve made thus far takes way longer (like, 20 – 30 minutes more in some cases) to bake than instructed.

I made two cookie sheets worth of cookies and I took one out at 20 minutes and the other out at 25. Both looked softish when I took them out, and because the dough is a golden brown, it was hard to determine done-ness based on colour. The 20 minute batch straddled the line between chewy and not, while the 25 minute batch was decidedly crunchy. Delicious? Yes – but the recipe is called “soft and chewy ginger cookies” and I think they would have been tastier if I’d cooked them as per the instructions.

Look at that gorgeous crackle!

Oh well – that didn’t stop me from enjoying them.

I kept these in a closed tupperware and found that after about three days, they’d gone a bit stale. Solution: each them faster and/or share them with friends next time.

Bonus: here’s another ginger cookie recipe that I have made a few times. It calls for REAL ginger, not ground. The cookies are super soft and pliable – I highly recommend this recipe.

---

I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

A Ranking of the Ice Cream Sandwich Flavours from Tall Tree Bakery

When I heard that Tall Tree Bakery was making ice cream sandwiches using their own cookies, I nearly cried.

This is what dreams look like.

I also nearly cried when I paid them a visit and discovered they were sold out. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought this could very well be the best thing ever.

Luckily, they upped their production to keep up with the demand of the ravenous dessert lovers of Squamish, and I’ve had the chance to work my way through their ice cream sandwich menu throughout the summer thus far.

Cedric took this picture because he was making fun of my dirty face

The sandwiches are delicious. The flavours are inventive. The price is insane(ly low): $5 for two big cookies and a thick slab of high quality ice cream. The cookies alone would set you back $3 if you bought them individually. I say with utmost confidence that this is the Official Squamish Treat of Summer 2017 – and beyond, I hope.

Bring a friend = try two kinds at once! Brilliant.

What follows is my official ranking of the Tall Tree Bakery Ice Cream Sandwich flavours.*

*Sadly, I seem to have missed the boat on the coconut cookie with coconut ice cream flavour. I think I would have loved this one, but it appears to be off their menu. I’ll edit this post if it resurrects.

#1: Cranberry White Chocolate Cookie with Black Raspberry Cheesecake Ice Cream

I won’t lie – at first, I was intimidated by this combination. I thought it might be too much of a good thing. I forgive my earlier, naive self, for I was used to simple pairings, like vanilla ice cream and chocolate chip cookies.

A friend raved over this flavour and said it was the only one she ever got – it was too good to risk trying anything else. Well, with a testament like that, I made the leap and ordered one for myself. I got it after a hike on a hot, sunny day, and three words describe my experience: Oh. My. God.

The combination is not too much – it is utterly perfect. The tartness from the cranberries, the sweetness from the white chocolate, the cold creamy ice cream, and the fruitiness of the black raspberries are the TOTAL, MAGICAL PACKAGE. It’s a brave combination, but it works better than basically anything I’ve ever had before.

(I’m still dreaming about this one.)

#2: Ginger Molasses Cookie with Salted Caramel Ice Cream

Wait… you don’t bring a knife to the bakery so that you can split ice cream sandwiches?

If you’re a little intimidated by some of the bold flavour combinations of the Tall Tree Bakery ice cream sandwiches – in other words, if you’re like my brother-in-law and choose to order vanilla when you’re at an ice cream store with 50 flavours – I recommend the ginger molasses/salted caramel sandwich. The flavours complement each other rather harmoniously, because the ice cream flavour is pretty mild. It tastes good, but relatively neutral – like vanilla with pops of caramel swirl.

The aforementioned pop of caramel swirl

The ginger molasses cookie should be familiar territory for most cookie fans, and this one is good. I recommend letting the sandwich thaw juuuuust a little to let the cookie get that classic ginger cookie chewiness. Overall, this is a delightful combination and is sure to be a crowd pleaser – a safe bet, for instance, if you’re buying a sandwich for someone else and aren’t sure what to get.

#3: Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookie with Grasshopper Ice Cream

This was the first sandwich that I tried. It seemed like a relatively safe bet. The grasshopper ice cream is a mint concoction, and I already know I love mint chocolate chip ice cream.

Obviously, the flavour combo works, and though it is delicious, it isn’t my favourite. The cookies shine bright in this sandwich (it is also mighty good in a standalone state), but the ice cream falls just a little flat for me. It’s just mint – I think it could use some chocolate chunks or a fudgey swirl to add a little texture. Plus, the chocolate on mint is very sweet – and that’s coming from a lover of all things sweet.

But the fact of the matter remains that chocolate and mint is a killer combination – so there are absolutely no complaints from me.

#4: Peanut Butter Cookie with Heavenly Hash Ice Cream

If I’m not mistaken, this combination was a later addition to the ice cream sandwich offerings (i.e., not one of the original menu items). On paper, I loved it: the nuts from the heavenly hash ice cream were the perfect tie in for the nuts in the peanut butter cookie. Nuts on nuts – what’s not to like?

Individually, the peanut butter cookie and the heavenly hash ice cream are both stars. Together, it’s a lot – not in a bad way, but almost like both are competing for your attention. It’s like the peanut butter cookie is so good that it needs to be enjoyed on its own to be fully appreciated. It’s got the classic peanut butter cookie crumbly texture and it has full, non-crushed peanuts mixed in for a bonus crunch. The ice cream layered between these two, thick peanut cookies has it battle it out to get noticed.

(Am I weird for talking about treats in this much detail?)

Here’s how I recommend making the most of this sandwich without going overboard on the flavour train: take the top cookie off for an open-faced ice cream sandwich. Sure, your hands might get a little messy, but you’ll strike the perfect nutty balance. As a bonus, you’ll have an extra peanut butter cookie to enjoy later on. It’s a win-win.