Tag Archives: Desserts

Banana Cream Cake

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So, guess what?

In last week’s post I said that rather than wait for the autumn weather to kick in before I started posting ‘autumn recipes’ and comfort food, I would just start baking & posting autumn recipes and let the weather catch up to me later.

This week, the temperature dropped around 10-15 degrees in our area.

Iiiiiiiii would like to think I had a thing or two to do with it.

(Probably not, it’s likely due to some natural–or rather unnatural, because, global warming–causes but I’m claiming the credit for it anyway.)

The weather is cooling down because it’s trying to align with my autumn baking. What can I say except, you’re welcome?

This week’s recipe happened because of a tale as old as time.

Girl goes to store. Girl buys green bananas, thinking she has plenty of time to eat them. One days passes. Bananas are still green. Two days pass. Bananas are just barely starting to yellow. Three days pass.

Bananas are ripe. Too ripe to eat. Girl is now stuck with four overripe bananas.

I guess ‘stuck’ is a little harsh. Bakers know that overripe bananas are really a blessing in disguise–they give you an excuse to put a healthy fruit into a not-as-healthy baked treat. Oftentimes, that treat is banana bread. Banana bread is great and easy, as are banana muffins. This time around though, I decided to try to go with something a bit different than what I was used to. It’s not too much more difficult than the bread or muffins, but I’ll tell you what: it IS a good deal greater.

One of the reasons that I love using bananas in cake is that they lend themselves really really well to cake batter. Why? Because the fat and moisture content in them helps keep the finished cake INCREDIBLY moist. So long as you’re using overly ripe bananas, it’s going to be quite difficult to overbake/dry that sucka out. This is a perfectly delicious banana cake all on its own. It’s then made even more delicious by a ribbon of vanilla cream cheese filling that gets poured on top of half the batter, then the other half of the batter is poured on top of that. The smells alone as it bakes are glorious. As for the taste…you can probably guess.

What can I say except…you’re welcome?

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Banana Cream Cake

Recipe Adapted from NordicWare

Ingredients

For Cake

  • 2/3 cup milk
  • 1 teaspoon lemon juice
  • 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
  • 1 1/2 cups white granulated sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 1 1/4 cups mashed ripened banana
  • 2 cups all purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt

For Cream Filling

  • 8 ounces cream cheese, softened
  • 1 egg
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For Icing

  • 2 cups powdered sugar
  • Milk, to thin

Directions

Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease and flour a 12 cup Bundt or tube pan and set aside. In a measuring cup or small bowl, pour the milk, vanilla extract and lemon juice together and set aside. In a medium sized bowl, combine the flour with the baking soda and salt. Stir together with a fork and set aside.

In the bowl of a standing mixer (or using a handheld one) use the paddle attachment to cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing just until the yellow disappears. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides of the bowl as you go to ensure even mixing.

Add the mashed bananas, stirring just until combined. With mixer on low speed, gradually beat dry ingredients and milk mixture alternately into batter. (Start and end with the flour mixture) Beat for 1 minute. Remove batter to a bowl.

Beat the cream cheese in the standing mixer bowl until it’s smooth. Add the egg and vanilla, stirring just until combined.

Pour half the batter into the tube pan. Use a teaspoon to spoon the cream cheese filling evenly around the center of the cake batter. Carefully spoon remaining cake batter over filling, covering completely.

Bake for 45-50 minutes or until top is brown and springs back lightly when touched. Remove from oven and cool in pan for 10 minutes before inverting onto cake plate.

For the icing, combine the powdered sugar with enough milk until it forms a smooth but still somewhat thick icing. Use a fork to drizzle over the cake. Allow to sit for about 30 minutes, until hardened.

Linking up to Fiesta Friday #247, co-hosted this week by Antonia @ Zoale.com and Laurena @ Life Diet Health.

Honey Cardamom Cut Out Cookies

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I’ve been making a lot of cookies lately. The reasons are varied, but as that’s just where things have been at in the kitchen, y’all can expect a few of the next posts in the coming weeks to be cookie-themed. Personally I think it’s impossible for there to be too many cookie-anything, but that’s just my opinion. And while you’re here, I might as well give another one:

Cut out cookies are the best kind.

What ARE cut outs?

Cut out cookies are cookies that are baked with the intention of holding a particular shape. Mostly, they tend to fall on the sugar cookie flavored spectrum. This is different than say, a drop cookie (like chocolate chip cookies), where the dough is dropped from an ice cream scoop or teaspoon. Most cut out cookie doughs are sturdy and durable in order to be able to withhold being rolled out by a rolling pin and pressed out by cookie cutters.Drop cookies are undoubtedly less laborious than cut outs, as you don’t have to bother with cutting out the shapes. Because sugar cookies tend to be my favorite, I still prefer cut outs. Provided you have a tasty flavored dough, I feel that they are worth the extra effort.

I’ve said it dozens of times before and I’ll keep saying it for anyone who may be reading this post and thinking that cut outs are too hard to attempt: it really does come down to how you treat the dough. Cut out cookie dough (heck, MOST cookie dough) requires very specific treatment in order to get the pretty, magazine quality aesthetics that you want. I’ve baked hundreds (maybe even thousands at this point) of cookies at this point in my baking adventures and I’ve been truly mortified to find that too many of the recipes out there omit what I believe is the most important step in cookie baking:

Chilling the dough.

I just don’t understand it. SO many cut out cookie recipes I’ve seen instruct you to bake the cookies just minutes after putting the dough together.

This is just…not good advice.

In the first place, the fat (butter) in the dough should be thoroughly creamed and softened by the time that you’re finished mixing it. This is what makes the dough sticky. Room temp, sticky cookie dough WILL produce cookies that spread, and spread a lot. This completely defeats the purpose of cut out cookies–the more that they spread, the more that the shapes you spent all that time cutting out will be warped by the heat of the oven. Even drop cookie dough that is baked when too warm will produce cookies that are flat as pancakes instead of puffy, craggy cookies that at least resemble domes. Ask me how I know.

Cookie dough should be VERY cold when it hits the oven. Not warm and sticky. Not cool. COLD. The colder it is, the easier it will be to cut out, and the better your shapes will hold up.Therefore, In almost every single one of the cookie recipes I share, I will tell you to refrigerate the finished cookie dough for at least one hour (but preferably overnight) in order to give the butter in the dough plenty of time to firm up. Additionally, whenever I make cut outs, I take it a step further and chill the cookies for a few minutes after I’ve cut them out. Excessive? Maybe. But I’d prefer to let the results speak for themselves.

I made these primarily because they were a departure from the usual vanilla sugar cut out cookie that I make and I was curious as to how they would turn out. They’re sweetened with both white sugar and honey, and spiced with cardamom and ground ginger. After cutting them out, I also sprinkled the tops with cinnamon sugar to give them a bit of texture. You don’t necessarily need to cut out the middles if you don’t have a tiny cutter, or if you just don’t want to. Just please give your dough the proper amount of chilling time in the fridge so that the shapes you cut them in will hold up.

These aren’t overly sweet, and the spices do most of the work flavor-wise. I also found that they also improve in flavor the longer that they have to sit, so they may taste even better on the second or third day after you make them then they do on the first. Just place a slice of bread in the container you store them in, and they’ll be sure to stay soft (that’s a tip from my bag of tricks that works for any baked cookie, actually).

Sharing at Fiesta Friday #222, co-hosted this week by Antonia @ Zoale.com.

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Honey Cardamom Cut Out Cookies

Recipe Adapted from Bake from Scratch

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Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup butter (1 stick), softened
  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 1 large egg yolk
  • 2 tablespoons honey
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoons ground cardamom
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
  • Cinnamon sugar, for sprinkling

Directions

In a medium bowl combine the  flour with the cardamom, ginger, salt and baking soda with a fork. Set aside.

In the bowl of a standing mixer with the paddle attachment (or using a handheld one) cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Add the egg yolk, honey and vanilla and combine until just combined. Add the flour mixture in batches, mixing until just combined.

Scrape the dough out and onto a piece of plastic wrap. Shape into a disc, wrap tightly and refrigerate overnight.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line two sheet pans with parchment paper. Divide the dough into quarters, keeping the other 3 in the fridge while you roll out the one.

Sprinkle a clean work surface (like a pastry mat, wax paper or a cutting board) with powdered sugar or flour. Roll out the quarter of dough to your desired thickness (I wouldn’t go thinner than 1/4 inch) Cut into whatever desired shapes you like. I used a 2- to 2 ½-inch round cookie cutter, cut the dough into rounds and placed on parchment-lined baking sheets, spacing them 1 inch apart. I then used a ¾- to 1-inch round cookie cutter, and cut out the centers from half of the cookies. Reroll and cut the scraps as necessary. Also don’t throw away the centers, as they make delicious mini cookie bites.

Place the sheet pans in the freezer for around 10 minutes. Sprinkle the tops with the cinnamon sugar, and bake for 8-10 minutes.  Let cool on pans for 3 minutes. Remove from pans, and let cool completely on wire racks.

Teddy Bear Cinnamon Crisps

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I’m running a little short on time, so this post (like this recipe) is going to be short, simple and sweet.

I really like Teddy Grahams. They’re small little graham flavored crackers made by Nabisco and they’re really quite scrumptious. When I was growing up, they came in a few different flavors: Chocolate, Chocolatey Chip, Honey and Cinnamon. (From what I understand, there are more now, but I’m not too interested in them.) My favorite were the Cinnamon and the Chocolatey Chip. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that the Chocolatey Chip ones are immensely popular and as such, can be found just about anywhere.

The bad news is that, for whatever reason, the Cinnamon ones are not. At least not in this area. I can’t find them anywhere. I happen to like the Cinnamon ones a tad bit better than I do the Chocolatey Chip, so this is…inconvenient.

But y’know, whatever. It’s a temporary setback and I do like myself a good baking challenge.

If you’ve been following the blog over the past year, then you’ll know that I’ve been experimenting with making my own crackers at home with pretty good results. I love the simple process of it almost as much as I love all the different flavor options there are available. On the way home from the grocery store on yet another recent failed attempt to find Cinnamon Teddy Grahams, I thought that maybe I should just stop looking elsewhere for them and start looking in my own kitchen.

This recipe really couldn’t be easier to put together. There’s a trio of spices of cinnamon, mace and cloves that gives it plenty of warm, toasty flavor. Brown sugar rather than white gives the crackers a richer taste. It all comes together within minutes, but does require a rest in the fridge to give the dough a chance to rest, which you definitely want because cracker dough needs to be rolled out VERY thing in order to ensure that the finished product has the right crispness. They were originally plain on the tops, but I decided to give them another layer of texture by sprinkling cinnamon sugar on them just before baking.

In the first place, they smell like warm, sugary spice & everything nice. I wish I could get the scent captured in a candle or something–it’s much better than the vanilla candles you see in stores that are so cloying and overpowering that they just end up triggering your gag reflex. They bake up a nice golden brown with a pleasant, crispy snap while the spices also give them a flavor that does remind me of the Cinnamon Teddy Grahams.

I said I was in a hurry and I am. You guys remember why? Yep yep yep. Black Panther is now released in theaters in the U.S. and I’m on my way to see it now. I’m so excited I can hardly stand it, but my wait is offically over, so it’s ttfn.

(Linking this up to Fiesta Friday #211, co-hosted this week by Lily @ Little Sweet Baker and Alisa @ Livin’ Well.

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Teddy Bear Cinnamon Crisps

Recipe Adapted from Serious Eats

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Ingredients

For Cookies

  • 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground mace
  • 1-2 dashes ground cloves
  • 1 cup (2 sticks, 8 ounces) unsalted butter, softened
  • 1/2 cup light or dark brown sugar
  • 3/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

For Topping

  • 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
  • 1/4 cup white granulated sugar

 

 

Directions

In a small bowl combine the flour with the salt and spices with a fork.

In a large bowl or the bowl of a standing mixer, cream together the butter and both sugars until light and fluffy. Add the egg and the vanilla, using a rubber spatula to scrape down the sides of the bowl to ensure even mixing.

Sift in the flour mixture to the butter mixture (not all at once, in about 3 batches) until just combined.

Shape the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least one hour or overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Place a sheet of parchment paper on a sheet pan and lightly spray with cooking spray.

 In a small bowl combine the ingredients for the topping and set aside. Sprinkle a work surface like a wooden cutting board, a pastry mat or wax paper with flour. Cut the dough into quarters. Keep the quarters you’re not using in the fridge while you work. Use a floured rolling pin to roll out each piece of dough very thin (about 1/8th inch). Use a cookie cutter of your choice (I used a teddy bear one) or a pizza wheel, bench scraper or knife to cut dough into shapes. Arrange the cookies on the baking sheet (you will probably need more than one). When you’ve finished, refrigerate the cookies on the sheet pan for about 15 minutes.

Lightly spray the cookies with cooking spray, then sprinkle the cinnamon sugar on top. Bake in the oven until golden brown, about 10-12 minutes. Allow to cool on baking sheet for about 1 minute before removing to wire racks to cool completely.

(Note: no one oven is the same, & different baking sheets bake cookies differently. Keeping this in mind, I will ALWAYS test bake one cookie before baking entire sheets of the whole batch, just to get a good idea of how long they should be in the oven and if I need to adjust the way I’ve cut, rolled them out, etc. I highly recommend that you do the same.)

Red Velvet Marble Bundt Cake

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I am so very, very, very excited. I’m practically bursting at the seams. As I’m writing this post right now, I’m beaming from ear to ear.

Go ahead and ask me what’s put me in such a good mood. Go on. Ask. I will answer your question with a question:

Do y’all know what is coming next week? Do you KNOW?

It’s probably the best thing to happen all year. I know it’s a just single day, but oh what a day it is going to be. It’s not even here yet, but I still know there will be much joy and excitement to spread all around. It’s also a day where a ton of money is going to be spent and made.

Any guesses yet? Yep. You’re absolutely right.

Marvel’s “Black Panther” movie is being released in the United States on February 16th. Let me say that again. Marvel’s “Black Panther” movie is being released in the United States on February 16th.

Y’all. Excited isn’t even the word.  Ever since news dropped that this movie was being made over a year ago, I’ve been so ready to see it. The cast alone is a winner: Forest Whittaker (who is my favorite actor, by the way. I’d watch him perform on an empty stage in a paper bag, riveted), Angela Bassett, Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong’o, Michael B Jordan. I’ve waited patiently (and sometimes not so patiently), keeping up with the updates, watching the trailers repeatedly, ogling over the posters–and now, we’re finally here right before I get to see it.

We pre-bought our tickets, so I will be right there at the theater next Friday afternoon, front and center. I know it’s going to be fantastic. Any of y’all here in the States going to see it on Friday or later that weekend? You as pumped to see it as I am? So far as I’m concerned, it’s the most important thing that’s going to be happening next week.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Valentine’s Day is next week too. And since I did go to the trouble to make this cake, I guess we can talk about it for a few minutes.

I’ve made it a habit to bake something Red-velvet flavored for Valentine’s Day on the blog for a few years now and I figured that I may as well keep with the tradition this year. In a way I was kinda excited about making the cake because it would let me test out a new ingredient I’d recently bought and been itching to try out: the LorAnn Red Velvet Bakery Emulsion. LorAnn Oils is a company that has a pretty big collection of baking flavorings and extracts. I’ve heard nothing but good things about them and my first purchase was the Red Velvet emulsion, which is supposed to mimic red velvet flavor.

I was curious as to what specifically a ‘red velvet’ flavor emulsion would taste like. My guess was that it would just be a rich chocolate, but the flavor of it is more complex than that. There’s definitely chocolate in the first taste you get, but in the aftertaste you could almost swear there’s a tang in there that could pass for cream cheese. I have no idea how the LorAnn food scientists who cooked this stuff up managed to do that, but my hat’s off to em. I put the emulsion to good use in this cake by flavoring about a third of the vanilla batter with it, then layering it in the pan. There was no need to use a knife to marble/swirl the batters–the swirl design took care of itself while baking. I then went ahead and topped it with a plain white icing paired with an icing I flavored with more of the red velvet emulsion. Turned out pretty, didn’t it?

Happy weekend/Fiesta Friday#210, (co-hosted by Laurena @ Life Diet Health and Jhuls @ The Not So Creative Cook)/Valentine’s Day y’all. More importantly, just one more week til Black Panther!

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Red Velvet Marble Bundt Cake

Recipe Adapted from MyRecipes.com

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Ingredients

For Cake

  • 1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks), softened
  • 1/2 cup butter flavored shortening
  • 2 1/2 cups white sugar
  • 6 large eggs
  • 3 cups all purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3/4 cup milk
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
  • 1 tablespoon LorAnn Red Velvet Bakery Emulsion (or red food coloring)

For Icing

  • 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar, divided
  • Milk
  • Light corn syrup
  • LorAnn Red Velvet Bakery Emulsion (or red food coloring)

Directions

Preheat oven to 325°F. Grease and flour a 16 cup bundt pan. (You can also grease/flour two loaf pans but it will shorten your baking time).

In the bowl of a standing mixer (or using a handheld mixer) cream the butter and shortening together until light and fluffy. Gradually add in the sugar. Beat in the eggs one at a time.

In a separate medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. In a glass measuring bowl combine the milk with the vanilla extract.

Add the flour mixture and the milk mixture alternatively to the batter, starting and ending with the flour mixture. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with the spatula to ensure even mixing.

Remove 2 1/2 cups of batter to a small bowl. Add the cocoa powder and the red velvet emulsion to the 2 1/2 ups of batter, stirring with a fork until smooth.

Drop two cups of the batter into the pan, using a spatula to spread out. Use a tablespoon measure to dollop 2-3 scoops of the red velvet batter on top. Repeat around entire pan, covering bottom completely. Continue layering batters in pan as directed until all batter is used.  (You don’t need to swirl it with a knife, it will marble on its own as it bakes).

Lift the pan up and allow it to tap down on the counter (this will help prevent air bubbles.) Place the cake pan on a sheet pan, then bake on the middle rack of the oven for 65-70 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean and inner cake temp reaches 195-200°F. Allow to cool inside the pan for about 30 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and allow to cool completely.

Pour 3/4 cup of powdered sugar into one small bowl, and 3/4 of powdered sugar into another. Drizzle in light corn syrup and milk into one bowl, and corn syrup and the red velvet emulsion in the other, little by little (about 1 tablespoon at a time) until you have two thick icings. Alternate between drizzling the two icings on top of the cake. Allow to sit for about 30-40 minutes to harden before serving.

Melting Moments Cookies

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Melting Moments1

Do any of y’all who follow this blog own a cookie press? How do you like it? If you do, what is the brand and where did you get it?

(As an aside for non-bakers, cookie presses are a device where cookie dough is inserted into a tube and manually pressed through a metal stencil plate. The stencils vary, but mostly cookie presses are used to make crisp butter cookies at Christmas time.) You can find them in places like Marshall’s, Home Goods, Bed Bath & Beyond, Williams Sonoma and (of course) online, and most are pretty inexpensive…which brings me to another point.

Here’s the thing about me and cookie presses….we don’t work together.

You know what? No. Let me rephrase that; I’M not the one with the problem. The presses are. THEY’RE the ones who don’t work. It’s THEM, I swear. You know why? Because I’ve bought two different cookie presses, and ended up discarding them both when neither one produced the goods. They either wouldn’t press out the dough completely in the shape of the design, or wouldn’t press it out at all. And believe me, I fiddled around with both and everything else I could think of to try and get them to work: the dough consistency, different plates, different sheet pans, chilling the sheet pans first. All useless.

I just could not get those presses to work.

So if any of you have a cookie press that you ARE able to use with no problems, do tell me which one you have. I’d also really appreciate any tips or advice in how you specifically get the most out of it. The thought of there being a kitchen gadget out there that I couldn’t get to work irks the daylights out of me. I’ve got to figure it out. So tell me what works for y’all and I might consider buying one more and hoping that the third time will be the charm for me and cookie presses.

In the meanwhile, there’s this post–which happens to be relevant to this conversation as it stemmed from my hit and miss history with the gadget.

Amazon sends me notifications when huge discounts are given for things on my wishlist. For a while I’d had a Wilton decorating tip set saved on my list, as I wanted to step my decorating game up for things like layer cakes and cupcakes. One day Amazon sent me a notification that they were having a flash sale and that for the next hour or so, it would be more than 50% off.

You can guess what happened.

So, Aside from having more decorating tips than this novice baker knows what to do with, I’ve also now got an alternative to the cookie press for churning out pretty cookies. And y’all: aren’t these pretty?

Despite their frilly appearance, these are butter cookies and as such, the ingredients themselves are extremely simple. There isn’t much more to these than butter, sugar, vanilla and cornstarch. The milk is there in order to make the dough loose enough to be piped through the dessert tip, as I found that on it’s own it was a bit too stiff to be piped. I opted for a coil shape as #1, I found it visually appealing when combined with a fluted tip and #2, It was the easiest shape I could manage. (I’m going to work on my cookie piping skills though, promise).

These honestly remind me of the blue tin butter cookies. They’re light, crisp and full of vanilla, buttery flavor. And yes: the confectioner’s sugar and cornstarch does make them practically melt in your mouth. I honestly wouldn’t change a thing about them.

Sharing these cookies at this week’s Fiesta Friday #208.

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Melting Moments Cookies

Recipe Courtesy of The Recipe Encyclopedia: The Complete Illustrated Guide to Cooking

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Ingredients

  • 3/4 cup unsalted butter
  • 1/2 cup powdered/confectioner’s sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
  • 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup cornstarch
  • 2-3 tablespoons milk, optional

 

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a large bowl or the bowl of a standing mixer, cream together the butter and the sugar until light and fluffy.

In a small bowl combine the flour with the cornstarch with a fork.

Add the vanilla to the butter mixture. Sift in the flour mixture to the butter mixture (not all at once, in about 3 batches) until just combined.

Line a sheet pan with parchment paper and lightly spray with cooking spray.

Spoon the dough into a pastry bag or cookie press and pipe it into desired shapes that are about 1/2-1 inches in diameter. Once finished, refrigerate the sheet pan for about 30 minutes.

Bake in the oven on the middle rack until just golden brown, about 10-12 minutes.

(Note: no one oven is the same, & different baking sheets bake cookies differently. Keeping this in mind, I will ALWAYS test bake one cookie before baking entire sheets of the whole batch, just to get a good idea of how long they should be in the oven and if I need to adjust the way I’ve cut, rolled them out, etc. I highly recommend that you do the same.)

Pillowcase Cookies

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Happy New Year everyone. I hope 2018 is off to a good start for all of you, and that you’re feeling at least a little optimistic for the year.

Okay, so…I try to stick to a pattern in my posting schedule so that I’m not posting more sweet than savory or vice versa–variety being the spice of life and all. The 12 Days of Christmas series is usually enough of a sugar rush/overload for me where I need a break from making & eating sweets and for a while stick to savory and relatively healthy recipes on the blog.

Having said that, you all should know that I did intend to hold off on posting any sweets or baked goods for at least a few weeks, but well…here we are. Thing is, I’ve had this post sitting in my Drafts folder since August and I just couldn’t put off sharing it any longer.

You guys need to see (and make) these. You REALLY do.

If you know anything about my food preferences, you know that sugar cookies are in my Top 3 of favorite desserts. A good sugar cookie–one that is so good it doesn’t even need any embellishments from icing or glaze– just can’t be beat.

Some people like their sugar cookies crisp. Some like them chewy. Some like a combination of the two. Some like them to have a vanilla flavor. Others prefer almond.

I make my stance on this highly contested, divisive issue, loud and clear: I love and must have my sugar cookies thick and soft. I don’t mind almond extract in the dough, but the vanilla needs to be the star flavor for me.

The sugar cookies that I’ve posted on the blog thus far have met all of the above criteria. The first (and also, the most popular post on the blog to date) were these cut-outs. I’ve also shared two vanilla sugar cookies that are good for cookie stamps and molds, here and here.

As delicious as all of these recipes are, they do fall short in one area.

Although they’re all thick and soft, they’re still missing what I think of as the ‘cloud’ factor; where the texture of the cookie is SO light and soft that when you’re biting into it, you feel like you’re biting into a fluffy cloud of pure heaven. I’ve tried a lot of sugar cookie recipes that claim they deliver these goods, only to be disappointed because they just didn’t.

Guys. This recipe de-LIVERS.

I had my doubts before I made these just because the method is unlike any method I’ve ever done when putting together cookie dough. Rather than being creamed or melted, the butter actually gets cut into the dry ingredients just like it is when making biscuits and scones.  The eggs get beaten together with the vanilla and a little milk, then folded into the butter-flour mixture. I have no idea why this is. I have no idea how it works together with the rest of the ingredients. All I know is that it works. It works so well.

As a Southern recipe, this one supposedly gets its name from when the cookies would be given out to journeymen to store in their pillowcases by their families as they traveled around doing work. I’d certainly be a happy camper (or journeyman) if I had a pillowcase full of these to eat.

My favorite thing about the cookies is their texture. It’s just perfect. They rise with a perfect dome and have that thick, soft, fluffy center that practically melts in your mouth. And, no: they absolutely don’t need any help from icing or glaze. These are delicious enough to eat all on their own. This is THE sugar cookie of my dreams, the one I’ve been searching for–which is why I just had to share it with all of you now.

Linking this up to Fiesta Friday #205, co-hosted this week by Mollie @ The Frugal Hausfrau and Petra @ Food Eat Love.

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Pillowcase Cookies

Recipe Adapted from LouisianaCookin.com

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Ingredients

  • 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  • 1 cup white sugar, plus more for sprinkling
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons baking power
  • 1/2 cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter
  • 1 large egg plus 1 egg yolk
  • 2 tablespoons milk, plus more as needed
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

 

Directions

In a large bowl, combine the flour, 1 cup of sugar and baking powder and stir together with a fork.

Use the large holes on a box grater to grate the butter directly into the dry ingredients. (If you don’t have a box grater that’s okay. Just cut the butter into small cubes and stir them evenly into the dry ingredients with a fork.)

Stir the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Use a rubber spatula to make a well in the center of the bowl. In a small bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk and vanilla extract with a fork, then pour into the well you made in the dry ingredients. Flour the rubber spatula and mix together, stirring until the liquid has been absorbed and it forms a slightly sticky dough. (You may need to add additional milk, 1 tablespoon at a time to make it all stick together; that’s fine.)

Generously sprinkle a clean work surface (like a pastry mat, a cutting board or wax paper you tape to your countertop) with flour. Dump the dough out onto the surface and knead together with your hands just until it forms a large ball. It will get messy, but that’s okay; just keep sprinkling with either flour or powdered sugar until it’s relatively easy to pick up in one mass.)

Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at LEAST one hour.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line two sheet pans with parchment paper or aluminum foil and spray with cooking spray, set aside. Using a floured rolling pin, roll the dough cookie dough out to about 1/4 inch thick, then use a 3 inch cookie cutter to cut out circles. Place the cut cookies on the sheet pans. Either refrigerate for about 45 minutes, or freeze for about 20 minutes.

Sprinkle the tops of the cookies with sugar, then bake in the oven for 12 minutes until golden brown on the bottom & slightly puffy on the tops. Allow to cool on the sheet pan for 1 minute, then remove to wire racks to allow to cool completely.

(Note: no one oven is the same, & different baking sheets bake cookies differently. Keeping this in mind, I will ALWAYS test bake one cookie before baking entire sheets of the whole batch, just to get a good idea of how long they should be in the oven and if I need to adjust the way I’ve cut, rolled them out, etc. I highly recommend that you do the same.)

Honey Spice Madeleines

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Filed under Desserts

The madeleine is a tiny French sponge cake. It gets its shape from special cooking pans with ridged indentations. Often it’s flavored with butter and vanilla, but as with many traditional recipes, there are many ways to put a twist on it with different flavors and additions. I’ve also seen them be lightly iced before. They’re what I would think is a perfect ‘tea time’ style treat.

I’ve know about madeleines for a while, but it wasn’t until a few months ago when I knew that they were called madeleines. I’d seen the sea oblong shell thingys in pictures and I remember one of my niece’s playmates shared one with her once, I just didn’t know what they were specifically.

I’ve already talked about how Amazon is one of my minor addictions and sources of temptation. I have a wishlist that just seems to grow week by week (and sometimes day by day). For several months, I had a madeleine pan sitting in it. I kept eyeing it and weighing the pros and cons of whether or not it would be ‘worthwhile’ to buy one.

On one hand, it wasn’t like I could have multiple ‘uses’ for it–it’s a madeleine pan and to my knowledge there’s not much else it can be used for except to make madeleines. That would definitely make it a splurge buy.

On the other hand…I didn’t have a madeleine pan, I really wanted to try to make madeleines, and it wasn’t that pricey. And I cooooould rationalize it by just resolving to make madeleines on a regular basis, right?

Well right or wrong, that’s what I ended up telling myself, because I totally got that pan.

I knew that when I bought the pan I was going to make madeleines and that if I liked how they turned out, I would share them for this years 12 Days of Christmas series. Since it was a Christmas themed series, I wanted to try and make the madeleines a break little bit out of the traditional flavor profile and make them taste…’Christmast-y’. This recipe does just that. The batter is flavored with cinnamon, ginger, cloves and a touch of pepper for added spice. There’s also some orange zest in there as well. The batter does need to rest overnight, as it improves the overall texture of the sponge.

From what I understand, the metal baking pans work better than the silicone or dark plated ones because it causes the madeleines to bake more evenly. I greased mine with cooking spray and when the cakes were done, they slid right out, no problem. I did decide to leave mine plain but if you like, you can dust yours with some powdered sugar. Like I said, these are a perfect for tea time: they taste so moist and delicate. Those spices really come through and would pair perfectly with coffee or tea.

If y’all are interested, here is the madeleine pan I bought. It gave me no trouble whatsoever and I was very happy with how it made my cakes turn out. Here’s for making madeleines a regular sight on the blog, both at Christmas time and year round, eh?

12 Days of Christmas Banner

Day 1: Winter Spice Toaster Tarts

Day 2: Smoky Chili Crackers

Day 3: Spicy Chocolate Gingerbread

Day 4: Cranberry Orange Quick Bread

Day 5: Honey Spice Madeleines

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Honey Spice Madeleines

Recipe Courtesy of Dorie Greenspan

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Ingredients

  • 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. ground ginger
  • 1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
  • 1/8 tsp. ground cloves (or a little less, if you prefer)
  • Pinch of salt
  • Pinch of freshly ground black pepper
  • 1/3 cup sugar
  • Grated zest of  1/2 orange
  • 2 large eggs, at room temp
  • 2 Tbs. honey
  • 1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
  • 6 Tbs. (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
  • Powdered sugar, optional

Special equipment: 12 cup madeleine pan

 

Directions

In a bowl, combine the flour, baking power, salt, spices & pepper and set aside.

In the bowl of a standing mixer or another bowl, pour in the sugar with the citrus zest. Rub it together with your fingers until the sugar is fragrant.

Add the eggs to the bowl and use the whisk attachment (or a handheld mixer) to beat the eggs and sugar together until the mixture is pale and thick, about 2-3 minutes.

Beat in the honey and vanilla extract. Use a spatula to GENTLY fold in the dry ingredients, and then the melted butter.

Cover the batter with a piece of plastic wrap pressed up against the batter. Refrigerate overnight,

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Butter and flour the madeleine pan molds and place the pan on a bigger sheet pan. Fill the batter into the molds about half-way (don’t overfill). Bake for 11-13 minutes until the tops spring back when touched. They should come out easily. You may have to bake in batches. Sprinkle the madeleines with powdered sugar and serve immediately.