If I told you I had a recipe for peanut butter cookies with three ingredients would you call me crazy? Oh, they're gluten free and taste awesome too. Just read on...

 

Three ingredients, no mixer necessary, and these peanut butter cookies are mighty tasty. Now, they might not have a chewy texture or a a perfectly sized crumb - in fact, they might not have any crumb at all - but they do have what is necessary and sufficient to receive the title of excellent peanut butter cookie:  peanut butteryness.

Because really, what does flour do to a peanut butter cookie? Flour makes the cookie taste less like peanut butter. Get rid of it!

 

So here you go. Mix these three ingredients together. Plop them onto a cookie sheet and don't over-bake. Serve them to your friends  and try to get someone to guess what the other two ingredients are. I have yet to find a taste tester who can tell these cookies are missing the flour - it's all delicious fun. This recipe is a great choice for individuals who cannot have wheat gluten.

 

Simply Peanut Butter Cookies

 

1 cup creamy peanut butter

1 cup granulated sugar, plus extra for rolling

1 egg

 

Thoroughly mix all three ingredients together. Roll into teaspoons of dough into small balls and roll into sugar; and flatten cookies onto a baking sheet by pressing fork tines into the top. Bake at 350 degrees for ~8-10 minutes. They'll seem underdone and way too soft, but they'll harden up as they cool.

 

You can also press a chunk of chocolate into the top before putting them in the oven, if desired.

Biscotti Biscotti

William-Sonoma, you tricked me. You, master of cookie cookbooks, king of classic cookie recipes... you, you failed me.

Sort of.

Actually, these biscotti are amazing and I think you should make them first thing tonight before you go to bed. I can't stop eating them. What I take issue with is that William Sonoma makes a whole big pointed fussy scene about how you should cream the butter and sugar until no grit can be felt between your fingers. Now, I've used this advice in other recipes and been very happy with it - properly creamed butter and sugar provide for moist, substantial cookie crumb. Whenever you've tasted homemade cookies with perfectly moist, even texture, they probably creamed the butter and sugar really, really well.

But I made these biscotti twice - once, in a rush, with fridge cold butter and just incorporated sugar, and a second time, with fridge cold butter that I creamed with the sugar for almost 15 minutes over a bowl of steaming water to help the butter along - and the verdict's in: biscotti do not benefit from properly creamed, room temperature butter, at least in this recipe. In fact, they're better off with gritty bits of butter and sugar that cut into the flour. The first batch came out crumbly and dry but not hard. They melted in my mouth. The second batch was more cake-like or cookie-like than biscotti-like. I didn't want cake-like or cookie-like, I wanted biscotti-like: crumbly, dry, melt in your mouth biscotti. Then I sent samples of both batches to my grandmother - queen of all things biscotti - and she declared her preference for the well-creamed-butter batch. So, take your pick.

My advice would be to cream your butter and sugar for about four to five minutes in a stand mixer. Oh, and make these: they're nutty, crumbly, buttery, not too hard, not too sweet, perfectly crisp, flecks of orange zest balanced by loads of cinnamon and toasted, fragrant hazelnuts...last for at least a week...so simple and delectable.

By the way, last Saturday morning, our alarm clock self-adjusted for daylight savings time one day too early. We scrambled out of bed because I was frantic to get to lab on time, and then I found myself with one extra hour before needing to go take care of my experiment. So I made biscotti. In scrolling down the past few entries of this cooking blog, I just realized that it is has been fairly heavy on the sweets and low on the savory. I figure I owe y'all an explanation. See, I've been working crazy hours for the past two weeks and we've been, <gasp>, surviving entirely on take-out. This schedule was all supposed to last for the entire month of April, until a fellow lab member kind of screwed me over in an aggressive battle for the surgical space that I needed and the remaining half of my experiment has pushed until the end of April. </rant>. Her rudeness = my inconvenience = better for our sustenance!

Hazlenut and Dried Cherry Biscotti

Recipe reworded from William-Sonoma Cookies. Note that you could substitute any toasted nut or dried fruit that you wish - I tried macadamia nuts too, but I prefer the hazlenuts by far.

Makes ~24 biscotti

1/2 cup unsalted butter

3/4 cup granulated sugar

1 tbsp grated orange zest

2 large eggs

2 tsp vanilla extract

1 3/4 (280g) unbleached all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup hazlenuts, toasted and skinned, coarsely chopped

1/2 cup dry cherries, coarsely chopped, optional

Preheat the oven to 350. Line a baking sheet with parchment*.

Cream the butter and sugar with the zest. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well on low speed after each addition. Beat in the vanilla on low speed until blended.

Sift the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt together onto a sheet of parchment paper. Add the flour mixture in two or three additions to the egg mixture, stirring just until incorporated. Stir in the hazlenuts and cherries until evenly distributed. The batter should be very soft.

Turn the batter out onto a floured surface and divide in half. Shape into a log about 12" long and 1.5" in diameter. Press lightly on the top to flatten the log into a biscotti shape. Shape the second log, leaving at least 4" between the two (they will spread as they bake).

Bake the logs until the edges are golden, 25-30 minutes. Let the logs cool for 10 minutes. Using a serrated knife, cut the logs on the diagonal to 1/2" slices. Turn the slice on their sides and return them to the oven. Bake them until the edges are golden, about 10 minutes longer. Cool completely and store in an airtight container.

*You can toast the hazlenuts at this point if needed. Just put them in the oven for ~10 minutes, then skin them between hands or a towel - don't let them burn.

Soft Ginger Cookie-Land

I searched for a long time to find a soft ginger cookie that would match this Lemon Gelato Recipe. The recipe I finally found has many enviable merits:

• Strong molasses /ginger flavor
• Incredibly soft. In fact, in the week that it took us to eat all 40 of them (with friends! other people helped!), the cookies became softer every day; the ginger flavor intensified, too. This is the perfect cookie to make if you need something that won't go stale quickly. These would be fantastic care-package cookies.
• You add boiling water to the dough. Why is this a merit? Because there's no "cutting of butter" or "mix just until incorporated" - these cookies couldn't turn out tough if you tried

With all these merits worth detailing, this cookie is not - a very unfortunate not - so great for you (not that cookies are healthy food, but I'd rather eat butter than hydrogenated oils any day). It calls for 1/2 cup of vegetable shortening which amounts to a very small amount of trans fat per serving (even if you get "Trans fat free" shortening, don't be fooled). Next time I make these, I'll substitute butter or oil and see if they still hold their texture.

Super Soft Ginger Cookies

Slight modification to Bon Appetit's Recipe

Makes ~40

I had the same difficulty that other bakers noted: these cookies are messy to make, since the dough is so soft. But do not despair! Rather than refrigerating for an hour, I would suggest several hours of chill time. I left mine in the fridge overnight and had little difficulty forming them out of damp hands. Lots of excess sugar helped create that mouth-watering crumbly top, and a push in the center helped keep the cookies thin and flat. I kept these cookies non-fussy by removing the extra spices.

• 4 cups unbleached flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 5teaspoons baking powder
• 3 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup molasses
• 1/2 cup pure vegetable shortening
• 1 large egg, beaten to blend
• 1/2 cup boiling water
  Additional sugar

Preparation

Add the flour, sugar and spices to a large bowl. Add molasses, shortening, and egg. Using electric mixer, beat until well blended. Beat in 1/2 cup boiling water. Chill dough 3-4 hour or overnight

Preheat oven to 400°F. Lightly moisten your hands and roll chilled dough by generous tablespoonfuls into balls. Roll in additional sugar to coat. Place dough balls 2 inches apart on ungreased baking sheets. Bake until cookies are puffed and cracked on top and tester inserted into center comes out with some moist crumbs attached, about 12 minutes (do not overbake). Transfer cookies to racks and cool.

Pieces of Peace

This cookie recipe mocks me, I think. For I am a cookie-person: above anything else, I know and love cookies. Whether it's peanut butter, oatmeal, sugar or chocolate I am craving, I will make it happen with a little butter and a stand mixer. Just yesterday, a friend asked me if there was anything in that exact moment that would make me a happier person, and I said, "if I had a chocolate chip cookie, fresh baked out of the oven, in my hand, I would be happier." Not, "if my research was doing better", or "if I didn't worry about my family", or "if my husband and I could stop arguing about hanging shirts on the back of the bathroom door", or better yet, "if there was world peace" - no, all I wanted was a cookie.

Seriously. This is serious stuff. Especially because I knew that two days hence (tonight) cookies would be required for the cookie exchange that I had organized.

Tonight's loot

So this cookie, this cookie that I chose to make for my cookie exchange, for my craving of happiness, it mocks me. It will not slice right. It will not bake right. It will not keep its shape. It will foil my multiple attempts to make it. It will crumble into tiny pebbles of chocolatey goodness.

They're called "World Peace Cookies" because if everyone had one of these we might just all stop fighting. I'm renaming them World Piece Cookies, because they fall to so many pieces that everybody could have a bite if we just learned to share - and the making of these cookies surely didn't put me at peace. I don't have a solution to the crumble problem - which not everyone encountered (according to the others who made the recipe) - except to say that if the dough looks too dry, it probably is. Either bake it, and enjoy the flavor completely, or do what I plan to do next time, and reduce the flour by two tablespoons and stir in an extra two teaspoons of whole milk or heavy cream until things look "about right".

As for the problem of world peace? Well, I don't have a solution for that either, except to say happy holidays, and remember, for the people reading this blog at least, that small everyday joy is always within our reach - especially when you keep a supply of cocoa powder in your pantry door.

Recipe for World Piece Cookies

Original Source