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sapotelunchLet's just start with the very important lesson: when making cookies in a shared and somewhat haphazardly supplied kitchen, it is very important to count one's cookie sheets and make additions / borrow accordingly before one makes 2.33 bar batches of spritzer dough, which must be pressed directly onto a hot cookie sheet from the cookie press. (I should take a picture of mine, which is old, metal, and scary-looking). To make a long story short, after two hours and about twenty rounds of pressing, baking, checking, removing, de-sheeting, and re-pressing cookies on a ten inch pizza pan, I had a minor meltdown and begged my erstwhile assistant to take over while I literally cooled my head. Let this be a lesson to, well, me.
What I cooked: Spritzar cookies, aka almond shortbread from a cookie gun.
My mother's recipe, from email:
2 c flour (I used King Arthur's Mill White Wheat)
3/4 c sugar (I used the grainy fair-trade kind)
2 egg yolks
1 c butter
1.5 tsp almond extract
cream butter. add sugar and cream again. mix in egg yolks and extract.
stir in flour. Mix well. (ETA: add any food coloring at this point). fill press and force dough onto ungreased cookie sheets.
bake at 375 8-10 minutes.
butter works much better than margarine, which doesn't go thru press right. If dough doesn't move thru press,
try wrapping your hands around the press until dough begins to flow correctly.
Star and tree are made with ruinously expensive natural food coloring (see end of entry); half-eaten blob is made with beet juice
How much it cost: I did not keep good track of this one! I will find the receipts. However, see below for notes on my ridiculously expensive natural food coloring, which doubled the price of the recipe.
How it worked: Mix, mix, load spritzer into cookie gun, deploy cookies, bake. That all went pretty well: the major failure was the unloading/cooling step, in which lack of space and cooling racks meant I stacked the cookies to cool them, and so they're soft and kind of sticky instead of crisp and crunchy. My mother has instructed me to clear an end table or other flat surface and cool these in a single layer on a cut-open brown paper bag next time.
Taste: The yellow food coloring had a strong tumeric taste which did not go away with cooking; the beet juice cookies, despite shaping fail, had this nice fruity note. Spritzer's general almond buttery-ness makes them my favorite xmas cookie, hands-down. I did use a grainy fair-trade sugar instead of Dixie Crystals, and that did affect the texture somewhat, to the degree that next year I might look for something less turbinado-y or pulverize my sugar in my coffee grinder first. The white whole wheat was weird and definitely tasted whole-wheaty, more than a 50/50 cut of white all-purpose and whole wheat pastry flour would have. But it was what I had on hand.
Storage: Note to self never to put these away while still warm. Oops. Otherwise, shelf-stable for about a week in tupperware.
SO, about that natural food coloring.
Traditionally, this recipe incorporates a hearty dose of artificial red and green (this is a good example of how red-and-green we are talking) and I have this theory that Red 40 makes me grouchy. So first, I set out to make all-natural at-home aren't-I-something red food coloring out of beets (also suggested were berries and red cabbage). I cut a beet into slices and rubbed it through a bowl of sugar; then I microwaved the remaining sugar-encrusted beets and mixed the resulting syrup through the pinkened sugar. I put it all in a mason jar in the fridge; in the morning there was a solid crystallized layer of pink sugar under a separated layer of red syrup. I poured off the syrup and used the crystallized bit in lieu of all the other sugar in the recipe.
As you can see from the above picture, this did not work. The sugar that settled to the bottom was still distinctly wet; the wet-dry ingredients balance was thrown off drastically, and the cookies puddled instead of holding firm. The taste, however, was not beety at all; it was fruity, and lighter than the other cookies, and these actually got eaten first.
I was already aware that this was going to be kind of disastrous before I made the cookies, so I went to Whole Foods and bought India Tree food coloring. First, it's good that I put money aside for Xmas baking, because that little box you see on the page? That was twenty bucks.
Secondly, you know what's in those tiny bottles? Annato seed, red cabbage (acidulated) in glycerin, and beet juice in glycerin. So basically the same stuff I was already making, except concentrated.
The red cabbage extract tastes (when eaten straight from the bottle) kind of like paint, the yellow tastes like curry, and the red just tastes sweet. The curry taste did, to some degree, persist into the cookies themselves, with the result that the green trees do have kind of an odd aftertaste.
Am I completely slamming this product? Not at all. It did allow me to at least reference the technicolor cookies of Christmas past, and it didn't make my dough collapse in the oven because the job of concentrating the juices was already done for me. But as you can see, the green doesn't get any greener than split-pea/avocado, and that pink is already about a fourth of the bottle. I don't think I'm going to ask for my money back - I think there's probably some cupcake icing or mashed potatoes in these bottles' futures - but I do think that my ideal cookie coloring solution has not yet been found.
This one was definitely a cookie rough draft, rather than a cookie victory, but you know the nice thing about cookie rough drafts? People still eat the heck out of cookie rough drafts.
What I cooked: Spritzar cookies, aka almond shortbread from a cookie gun.
My mother's recipe, from email:
2 c flour (I used King Arthur's Mill White Wheat)
3/4 c sugar (I used the grainy fair-trade kind)
2 egg yolks
1 c butter
1.5 tsp almond extract
cream butter. add sugar and cream again. mix in egg yolks and extract.
stir in flour. Mix well. (ETA: add any food coloring at this point). fill press and force dough onto ungreased cookie sheets.
bake at 375 8-10 minutes.
butter works much better than margarine, which doesn't go thru press right. If dough doesn't move thru press,
try wrapping your hands around the press until dough begins to flow correctly.
Star and tree are made with ruinously expensive natural food coloring (see end of entry); half-eaten blob is made with beet juice
How much it cost: I did not keep good track of this one! I will find the receipts. However, see below for notes on my ridiculously expensive natural food coloring, which doubled the price of the recipe.
How it worked: Mix, mix, load spritzer into cookie gun, deploy cookies, bake. That all went pretty well: the major failure was the unloading/cooling step, in which lack of space and cooling racks meant I stacked the cookies to cool them, and so they're soft and kind of sticky instead of crisp and crunchy. My mother has instructed me to clear an end table or other flat surface and cool these in a single layer on a cut-open brown paper bag next time.
Taste: The yellow food coloring had a strong tumeric taste which did not go away with cooking; the beet juice cookies, despite shaping fail, had this nice fruity note. Spritzer's general almond buttery-ness makes them my favorite xmas cookie, hands-down. I did use a grainy fair-trade sugar instead of Dixie Crystals, and that did affect the texture somewhat, to the degree that next year I might look for something less turbinado-y or pulverize my sugar in my coffee grinder first. The white whole wheat was weird and definitely tasted whole-wheaty, more than a 50/50 cut of white all-purpose and whole wheat pastry flour would have. But it was what I had on hand.
Storage: Note to self never to put these away while still warm. Oops. Otherwise, shelf-stable for about a week in tupperware.
SO, about that natural food coloring.
Traditionally, this recipe incorporates a hearty dose of artificial red and green (this is a good example of how red-and-green we are talking) and I have this theory that Red 40 makes me grouchy. So first, I set out to make all-natural at-home aren't-I-something red food coloring out of beets (also suggested were berries and red cabbage). I cut a beet into slices and rubbed it through a bowl of sugar; then I microwaved the remaining sugar-encrusted beets and mixed the resulting syrup through the pinkened sugar. I put it all in a mason jar in the fridge; in the morning there was a solid crystallized layer of pink sugar under a separated layer of red syrup. I poured off the syrup and used the crystallized bit in lieu of all the other sugar in the recipe.
As you can see from the above picture, this did not work. The sugar that settled to the bottom was still distinctly wet; the wet-dry ingredients balance was thrown off drastically, and the cookies puddled instead of holding firm. The taste, however, was not beety at all; it was fruity, and lighter than the other cookies, and these actually got eaten first.
I was already aware that this was going to be kind of disastrous before I made the cookies, so I went to Whole Foods and bought India Tree food coloring. First, it's good that I put money aside for Xmas baking, because that little box you see on the page? That was twenty bucks.
Secondly, you know what's in those tiny bottles? Annato seed, red cabbage (acidulated) in glycerin, and beet juice in glycerin. So basically the same stuff I was already making, except concentrated.
The red cabbage extract tastes (when eaten straight from the bottle) kind of like paint, the yellow tastes like curry, and the red just tastes sweet. The curry taste did, to some degree, persist into the cookies themselves, with the result that the green trees do have kind of an odd aftertaste.
Am I completely slamming this product? Not at all. It did allow me to at least reference the technicolor cookies of Christmas past, and it didn't make my dough collapse in the oven because the job of concentrating the juices was already done for me. But as you can see, the green doesn't get any greener than split-pea/avocado, and that pink is already about a fourth of the bottle. I don't think I'm going to ask for my money back - I think there's probably some cupcake icing or mashed potatoes in these bottles' futures - but I do think that my ideal cookie coloring solution has not yet been found.
This one was definitely a cookie rough draft, rather than a cookie victory, but you know the nice thing about cookie rough drafts? People still eat the heck out of cookie rough drafts.
