Seven Kinds of Cookies

In the 1800s, when cookie baking reached its peak in Scandinavia, there ensued a competition among households in which the host of a gathering would try to produce more types of cookies than that served at the previous party. The competition grew so extreme that eventually everyone tired of it and settled on a reasonable number: seven.

To this day, a coffee table must include seven kinds of cookies or small cakes. And so, my contribution to the Christmas smörgåsbord this year were those seven batches of cookies. Running clockwise, starting with the hazelnut biscotti, are jam cookies (made with ground almonds, egg whites and cloudberry jam), pepparkakor (gingersnaps), spritz (almond-flavored butter cookies), sesame cookies (made with tahini and whole-wheat flour), flourless chocolate cookies, and pretzel-shaped cardamom butter cookies.

The Leftover Challenge

Articles about Thanksgiving leftovers usually talk about turkey. But their focus is misguided, because cooked bird is easy to find uses for. The mild meat takes on almost any seasoning, and it can be repurposed into all kinds of dishes: enchiladas, salad, soup, mole, casserole (if you’re so inclined), hash, and pasta. And hardly anyone’s going to thumb their nose at a turkey sandwich.

Here’s the real challenge: cranberry relish (from Joy of Cooking: grind 1 pound of cranberries with 1 orange, add 2 cups of sugar and let it sit in the fridge for two days). Every year I make the cranberry relish, and for that reason, it always comes home with me. Because no one takes more than a tablespoon, I leave with nearly as much as I arrived with.

So this year, on that nothing-to-do Friday after Thanksgiving, I got to baking and created this recipe. It’s a sweet bread whose slices are dotted pink and orange. I’m guessing it will work with any leftover cranberry dish as long as it’s well sugared and has a texture of thick tomato sauce.

Mandy’s cranberry relish bread

2½ cups flour
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup salad oil
1½ cups cranberry relish
2 eggs

Preheat the oven to 350°. Grease and flour a regular-sized loaf pan.

Sift the dry ingredients together. In a separate bowl combine the oil, relish, and eggs until well blended. Add the relish mixture to the flour and stir until just combined.

Pour the batter into the pan and bake for 50 minutes. Let it sit until it’s completely cool before cutting.

Cooking Peachy

Peach pie is one of those foods I just don’t get. Cooking peaches destroys their delicious, fruity essence, so why ruin a batch of the fresh fruit by turning it into a pie?

Still, I have found one recipe that will lead me to sacrifice a peach to the oven: Lee Bailey’s peach cake. While the heat eliminates the peaches’ perfume, the peach-batter interface that results is so good it’s a worthwhile trade. The recipe produces something closer to a pudding than a cake, and its crisp, peach juice–enhanced top is to die for.

I have found good peaches at many markets, but the most reliably excellent ones are sold at the Alemany Farmers Market. I will drive up to city and fight the traffic early Saturday morning just to buy peaches from Regier Farms of Dinuba. I often buy a flat — enough that I’m willing to donate a few to the cake.

Incidentally, this recipe comes from Lee Bailey’s Soup Meals, whose soup recipes are ho-hum while its dessert recipes are fantastic.

Peach Pudding Cake

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 cup plus 3 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 cup softened butter

2 eggs

3 or 4 peaches, peeled and quartered

1 - 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice

Heat the oven to 350°. Butter an 8- or 9-inch springform pan. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt. Mix the 3 tablespoons of sugar and the cinnamon and set aside.

Cream the butter and the rest of the sugar well, and add eggs one at a time. Slowly add the flour mixture until well mixed, and spread the batter in the pan. Top with the peaches and sprinkle with the lemon juice, then coat with the sugar-cinnamon mixture.

Bake about an hour, until the cake is a dark golden color. Serve warm. 

Foraging

Last weekend we headed up to Cazadero, near Guerneville, to pick up Alex from music camp. We didn’t know when he’d be performing, so we arrived what turned out to be 90 minutes early. I was prepared, though, because I know what can be found all over the coast range in August.

The highway leading to the camp is lined with blackberry bushes, and the berries were ripe. While waiting for the concert, I filled a container and a Ziploc bag. The next day I folded part of the berries into cake batter for a blackberry buckle (a cake with a crisp topping, like coffee cake).

I’ve found that blackberries don’t freeze well, but maybe I feel that way only because I know what a blackberry eaten warm off the vine tastes like. Perhaps if I had the opportunity to taste a freshly picked blueberry I’d cop the same attitude about the frozen variety.

At any rate, I can’t pick enough that I need to freeze them. After only an hour in the blackberry vines I look like I lost a wrestling match with a cat. Fortunately, an hour’s worth of picking produced enough berries for a cake and a pie. 

Win Some, Lose Some

I planted zucchini this year — just one plant, but of course it’s producing pounds each week. I don’t even like zucchini, but the teenager makes a couple of recipes that include it, so I thought I’d be a supportive mom and provide him with a supply of squash.

I’m finding, though, that if I harvest the zucchini early, when they’re 4 to 6 inches long, they’re less bitter and watery than their larger cousins. Chopped, they make a nice veggie saute along with corn kernels and tomatoes. Sliced, they’re great in a frittata. And when I miss a day of harvesting and they grow too large, I make zucchini bread.

I made four mini loaves for my first match in my tennis league. I lost the match, but my bread won, receiving praise and multiple requests for the recipe. It’s modified from The Victory Garden Cookbook, a lifesaver for gardeners.

The difference between this and other zucchini bread recipes is that the squash is salted and squeezed of its moisture, making it more like bread and less like pudding.

1 pound zucchini

1-3/4 cups flour

1 cup whole-wheat flour

1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

3 eggs

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup canola oil

rind of 1 lemon, grated

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup chopped walnuts

Grate the zucchini, salt it well, toss it in a colander, and let it drain for about 30 minutes.

Combine the flours, baking powder, soda, and cinnamon. In another bowl, beat the eggs, then add the sugar, oil, lemon, and vanilla.

When the zucchini is ready, combine the wet and dry ingredients. Squeeze out all the moisture you can from the zucchini and add it to the batter along with the walnuts.

Bake in a greased bread pan (or four mini loaf pans) at 350 degrees for about an hour (about 40 minutes for the mini loaves). When the bread is done, it will have a golden brown top, and a toothpick inserted into the center will come out clean. Let the bread cool before you slice it. 

When Fruit Falls off the Tree, Make a Tart

Last night, while minding my own business in my own living room, a neighbor knocked on the door and handed me a shopping bag filled with Santa Rosa plums. I believe these plums, a consequence of his backyard tree, were in retaliation for all the cucumbers I foisted on him last summer.

But they were gorgeous, deep-purple plums, their skins almost bursting with juice. I set them on the kitchen counter, where the warmth of the evening lifted their fragrance, begging me to eat them or turn them into pastry.

So pastry they became. I have a list of pies and cakes that I must make every year when the appropriate fruit is ripe, and plums demand that I make plomukaka, or purple plum tart. This recipe, from Beatrice Ojakangas’s The Great Scandinavian Baking Book, is too easy. The butter for both the crust and the filling need not be hard-cold, but it should not be soft.

Dough

1/3 cup sugar

1/2 cup butter

1-1/2 cups flour

2 tablespoons ice water

Filling

1 pound fresh plums, cut into quarters and pitted

1/4 cup butter

1/2 cup flour

1/3 cup brown sugar

Preheat oven to 425°. For the dough, combine the flour and sugar, then cut in the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles cornmeal. Quickly stir in the water and form into a ball. Roll out into a 12-inch circle and place the pastry inside a 10-inch tart pan with a removable bottom. Turn the edges over so the rim is double thickness.

Arrange the plum quarters, skin side up, over the dough. Combine the remaining ingredients until well blended, but still crumb-like, and sprinkle over the plums. Bake for 20 or 25 minutes, until the crust is golden brown. Cool slightly; serve while it’s still warm. 

Visual Appeal

Ever since I wrote an article about the baking competition at the San Mateo County Fair, I’ve been meaning to enter a cake, a loaf of bread, or a plate of cookies. I tasted the goodies along with the judges, and I think I could give the winners a run for their money. But here’s what holds me back: I can’t make anything look pretty. While taste is the most important factor, cuteness counts, too.

My pies are always dripping juice, my cakes break apart when I try to ease them out of the pan, and my breads come out lopsided. They look appetizing in a rustic, homemade sort of way, but they’re not for show.

The cookies sitting inside the glass cabinets at this year’s fair were adorable, and way beyond my capabilities. I’m thinking I’ll start next year with a quick bread — if there’s no frosting or cutting involved I might do okay.

Chocolate Science

For several years now I’ve been cultivating a hypothesis that baking soda corrupts chocolate. I’ve noticed that brownies, cakes, and cookies made with baking soda or powder (which contains baking soda) have a bitter edge and less chocolate taste than those without. I’ve never liked chocolate layer cake (which uses baking soda to make it rise), though I adore chocolate torts (whose rising agent is egg whites), and in my mind Oreos are an abomination—chocolate in color only.

In keeping with the principles I learned in Mr. Freeman’s seventh-grade science class, I conducted an experiment. I made a batch of brownies from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Chocolate Desserts—her West Coast Brownies, as I am on the West Coast and it was the only brownie recipe that included baking soda. 

To avoid variances in ingredients, mixing, and baking times, I made a single batch of brownies up to the point of adding the flour. I divided the batter in two using a scale, and added flour, baking soda, and salt to one batch; flour and salt only to the other. I baked them in a single jelly roll pan, divided in the middle with aluminum foil. A green sticky note, which went from the mixing bowl to the pan to one side of the oven, noted which was the baking soda side. 

When I pulled the pan out of the oven, I saw that the baking soda batch was darker and riddled with pockmarks—which had me panicked that I had gotten the sides mixed up, as I figured the soda side would look nicer. But after I cut the cakes into individual brownies, it was obvious I hadn’t, as the soda brownies had risen higher. They also held together better than the soda-free brownies.

The taste test, conducted by family members present at baking time, determined that the baking soda brownies were more bitter and had an unpleasant baking soda aftertaste. The soda-free brownies were yummier, with a more prominent chocolate flavor.

My hypothesis about soda was correct: It does interfere with chocolate. But I think the amount of flour may play a larger role. My favorite chocolate brownies, which contain a third of the flour, are much better than either of the experiment batch.

One thing is certain: More research is needed.

The Good Friday Baking Curse

On Good Friday, following a centuries-old European tradition, I make hot cross buns. They’re simple sweet rolls dotted with currants, scented with cinnamon, and topped with an X of vanilla icing. The recipe is really a no-brainer, but almost every year something goes wrong.

Frequently the buns mysteriously fail to rise; other years I can’t get the consistency of the icing right — either it adheres to the buns in globs or it melts into a shiny coating. I’ve overproofed the dough so it exhausts itself in the first rising and has nothing left for the second; I’ve undercooked them so they’re still raw inside.

This year, I left them in the oven too long, and they produced a hard, chewy crust — great for sourdough bread, not for a sweet roll.

The curse of Good Friday haunts my baking, yet still I try for a decent batch of hot cross buns. It’s a tradition, after all.

Bûche de Noël

The bûche de Noël, an edible Yule log, is France’s greatest contribution to the Christmas season. A sponge cake baked into a thin layer is topped with chocolate buttercream and rolled up—then decorated with more buttercream, meringue mushrooms, and perhaps a marzipan mouse—to resemble a log that happens to be lying on the forest floor. 

My 15-year-old niece Isabel created this bûche de Noël as extra credit for French class. I remember when her mother, Anna, made a similar one at the same age. It reigned over the holiday sweets during a Christmas party until someone couldn’t stand it anymore and snuck a slice.