Coconut Butter Thins

Jayne of The Barefoot Kitchen Witch picked this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe: Coconut Butter Thins. For the complete recipe, visit her blog. I look forward to the cookie recipes that people have selected, since cookies are my favorite thing to bake. The introduction to this recipe states that it almost wasn’t included in the cook since the cookies were so delicate. I hoped that they wouldn’t be too bad and got started baking.

These are a variation of a shortbread cookie, with coconut and macadamia nuts mixed in. I only had unsalted macadamia nuts, which are quite bland. We are so used to eating them salted that they taste quite different. The recipe said “don’t be afraid” to use salted macadamias. I just was hoping that using unsalted would be ok, too. I chopped mine in the mini food processor and added a pinch of salt, just in case.

I had read through the recipe and it didn’t sound too bad. Most of the shortbread cookies that I have made bake in a pan like a bar cookie, but these are different. You put the dough in a gallon-sized freezer bag and roll it out to a rectangle. I was a bit worried about this because I had a bad experience in the past with trying to roll out cookie dough to a specific size. When I’m reading a recipe and it says “roll dough into a 11 x 17 inch rectangle” I usually head the other way. In this case, you just rolled the dough to fit the bag, which was really simple. Then you chill the dough for a few hours and then cut away the bag and you have a perfect bit of dough to work with.

My rectangle was a little bigger than Dorie’s, so my cookies were a little bigger and I got 40 cookies rather than the 32 to that recipe specified. I used a pizza cutter and a ruler to cut the cookies, which made the cutting very simple. I think the hardest part was figuring out the math of where to do the cuts. My cookies ended up being 2” x 1.25”.

I placed mine a little too close together on the baking sheet, but I had barely just enough room. I forgot how much cookies with lots of butter can spread! I had a couple of cookies that were joined at the hip because they were too close together, but they easily came apart when I moved them to the wire rack to cool. They look kind of plain, but they taste really good. They are really crumbly and just melt in your mouth.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, page 145.

Golden Syrup Flapjacks

My husband had to put together a demonstration to show off a new software product and rather than doing something computer related, he decided to demonstrate how to make flapjacks. (The software records and archives presentations and makes them available to publish on the web.) Now these flapjacks are different than what you may think of at first. In England, flapjacks are an oat-based bar cookie. There are as many recipes for flapjacks in England as there are for chocolate chip cookies here in the states. Some are more complex than others. This recipe is very simple.

The first time I visited England with my husband, he really wanted me to try flapjacks. One of the first days we were in London we visited the Victoria and Albert Museum. We hadn’t had breakfast yet so we decided to get breakfast in the museum cafeteria. I have found that museums and especially department stores are a terrific place to get quick meals. That morning we grabbed several things to eat, including a flapjack. We had taken our cafeteria trays up to the register to pay for our breakfast but they weren’t quite set up yet so they said to eat our breakfast and come back to pay. They were so friendly! Quite a bit different than the service I have received here in the states sometimes.

I can’t tell you what that first flapjack tasted like. That was my first trip to England and I was pretty overwhelmed. I didn’t adjust very well to the time change and I was meeting all of my husband’s family so I was a bit stressed. I did have a good time, but I admit parts of the trip are pretty much a blur. These flapjacks were very good, nice and sweet but not too dry. You can also make them with honey if you don’t have golden syrup.

This recipe is from England, which is why some of the measures are by weight rather than volume. I also left the word “whilst” in the directions. This is such a great word and you never hear it here in America!

3 oz. butter

4 oz. brown sugar

2 rounded tablespoons Lyle's Golden Syrup

6 oz. rolled oats

Grease an 8 inch square baking dish and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Heat the butter, brown sugar and Lyle's Golden Syrup in a saucepan until the butter has melted. Stir in the rolled oats. Press the mixture into the baking dish and bake for about 20 minutes. Cut into squares whilst still warm then leave to finish cooling in the baking dish before turning out.

Recipe from Lyle’s Golden Syrup

Blueberry Crumb Cake

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, Blueberry Crumb Cake, was selected by Sihan of Befuddlement/Walking in the Rain/Fundamentally Flawed. Check out her blog for the complete recipe.

When I was growing up, the house we lived in had blueberry bushes in the back yard. I don’t quite know how many bushes we had, maybe an acre? When you are a little kid everything seems so much larger, so while it seemed we had vast quantities of blueberry bushes, I don’t really know. I do recall picking blueberries when I was very little, and that there were spiders in the bushes. I really don’t like spiders, although I am better around them now that when I was 4 years old. Never the less, despite the spiders, I have a particular fondness for blueberries.

I think that too often blueberries are just thought of as something you but in blueberry muffins and I’ve had my share of hum-drum blueberry muffins. I was excited to try this cake, while it had normal everyday ingredients, I was pretty sure that this cake would be great. It was very quick to assemble, maybe about 20 minutes from start to finish. It takes about an hour to bake, but that’s fairly standard for a coffee cake. The batter is super thick when it goes into the pan!

I think the best part of this recipe is the crumb topping. It’s very yummy! I think I had a little more crumb topping than I really needed, but I used it all up and I was glad that I did. Make cake turned out really well, but I noticed that there was one section that had a little pool of butter on top when I finished baking. I imagine that there was a section of the crumb topping that was more butter than anything else, and that’s what had happened. As the cake cooled, this section became a bit of a sinkhole. So I have this beautiful with a little sinkhole near the center. Oh well.

When I cut the cake, I was worried that it might be dry; it wasn’t at all. The blueberries did tend to sink in the batter, but that’s fine. Again, the crumb topping is really excellent and has a perfect sweetness and crunch. I think some of the other Tuesdays with Dorie bloggers made muffins, and I’m sure those are much better than your run of the mill blueberry muffins! Check out the Tuesdays with Dorie site to see what some of the other bloggers made this week.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, page 192

Amaretto Chocolate Decadence

Yet another birthday celebration at work! You would think I work in a really large group, but I don’t. Really, there are only about 20 of us all together! This cake originally called for Kahlua, which I thought I had on hand but I didn’t. I substituted amaretto and I hoped it would taste ok. I hoped that the amaretto wouldn’t clash with the ground pecans in the batter. They didn’t and this cake was very decadent, just like the name!

This recipe was odd in that you let the cake cool completely in the pan. I thought that was strange and almost didn’t follow that in the recipe but I am glad that I took their advice. This cake was super delicate and every time I touched it little bits of the edges crumbled away. I think that it would have completely fallen to pieces if I had removed the sides of the springform pan before it was cool. As it was, when I removed the bottom of the pan it cracked fairly significantly. Luckily it was so moist that I could just press it back together and it seemed to hold.

Another oddity of the recipe was that you were supposed to stir additional liquor into the 2 oz. of melted chocolate that you drizzled over the top of the cake. Well, when I stirred the amaretto in to the melted chocolate, it curdled! Eek! So I’m really happy that I have extra chocolate of hand since I had to melt some more for the topping. I decided to leave it as is and not add amaretto. Perhaps the cake was less boozy, but I figured that was ok since I would be serving it at work.

As delicate at this cake was, it was so good. It had a fabulous fudgy melt-in-your-mouth consistency. It was pretty tricky to cut, since it was delicate around the sides and fudgy in the center. I think I liked the amaretto better than I would have liked the Kahlua. This was the perfect rich chocolate cake with great flavor and texture. I think it would work well with any liquor. (I almost used Grand Mariner, I’m sure that would have been good too.)

½ cup butter

6 oz. bittersweet baking chocolate

3 eggs

¾ cup sugar

1-1/4 cups finely ground pecans

2 tablespoons flour

3 tablespoons amaretto

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 oz. bittersweet baking chocolate

Powdered Sugar

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Butter a 9-inch springform pan.

Melt the butter and 6 oz. chocolate in a double boiler, set aside to cool. In a large mixer bowl, beat eggs and sugar on high for 3 minutes, until light and lemon colored. Stir together ground pecans and flour and then gradually add this to the egg mixture.

Stir the amaretto and vanilla into the cooled chocolate mixture, and then gradually beat the chocolate into the egg/pecan mixture. Stir until well combined. Pour the batter into the prepared springform pan and bake 35-45 minutes until the top is set. Cool completely in the pan.

After the cake is cooled, remove from the pan. Melt the 2 oz. chocolate and drizzle on top of the cake, and then sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Recipe adapted from The Favorite Brand Name Bake Sale Cookbook

Chocolate Cherry Cookies

I keep a folder in my internet browser favorites for recipes that I see that I want to try. I look at Taste Spotting quite frequently and I have found a number of ideas there. I came across this recipe on Taste Spotting and I bookmarked I right away because I knew I wanted to try it. My husband loves chocolate cherry cordials, and this seemed very similar. I make another chocolate cherry cookie where you shape the cookie dough around maraschino cherries. This seemed a lot simpler. I’ve had this bookmarked since early December, so it was high time to make them!

The blogger who made these used dark cocoa powder. Since I needed to buy cocoa powder, I did pick up the dark cocoa powder. It gives the cookie a nice dark color, and the dark cocoa powder reminded me a lot of Oreos. I think that they have a bit of a richer flavor because of the dark cocoa powder. It will be interesting to see the difference that this cocoa powder makes in other recipes.

These cookies take a bit of work, but that aren’t too bad. The dough was very simple, adding the cherry half was easy. I had the most trouble with the chocolate topping. You really need to use up all of the topping right away, or it gets too cold. I waited in between batches and by the time I got to the last batch the topping was too cold to use. I had to make a bit more topping to finish up the last cookies. Not too much of a problem but did messy up a couple more dishes.

These taste so good. They are definitely worth any extra effort that I had to take. My husband thinks that they taste a lot like cherry cordials. I thought that they might be very sweet, with the maraschino cherries and the chocolate topping, but the dark chocolate flavor of the cookie balance the other flavors and the sweetness very well.

1 1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
10-oz jar maraschino cherries
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup sweetened condensed milk

Preheat oven to 350 F. Line baking sheets with silicone baking mats.

Mix the flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder & salt together, set aside. In a mixer beat the butter until

softened. Add the sugar & cream until like & fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla. Add the flour mixture & beat until well mixed.

Roll the dough into 1-inch balls & place them 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheets. Use your thumb to make an indentation in the center of each cookie.

Drain the cherries reserving the juice. Remove the stems & cut the cherries in half. Place 1/2 of a cherry into the indentation in each cookie.

Put the chocolate chips and condensed milk in a small saucepan. Stir over low heat until the chocolate is melted. Stir in 4 teaspoons of the cherry juice. Spoon 1/2 teaspoon of chocolate topping over the top of each

cherry covering it completely. If the chocolate is too thick add a little more cherry juice.

Bake for 10 minutes and then cool completely on a wire rack.

Recipe from A Good Appetite