Last week I was part of Team Tea this week as a group of friends put on a tea party for 36. Part of what I volunteered to do was to bake some cookies, so I baked a bar cookie, a cookie press cookie, and a rolled-out cookie that I turned into a sandwich cookie. These are listed by difficulty, too. The easiest is the bar cookie, Butterscotch-Chocolate Chip Cookies, a delicious, somewhat dense cookie that you mix up in a pot. It uses melted butter, so there is no need to bring butter to room temperature before starting to make them. This means that you can have cookies much faster than you think! They also have a mild butterscotch flavor and lots of chocolate chips. I like mine with walnuts, but you can use your favorite nut...or skip nuts. In the photo below, the tan bar cookies are the Butterscotch-Chocolate Chip Cookies.
The next most difficult is the cookie press cookie, Spritz Cookies (the pink ones in the photo at the top and the pink ones and flower shaped ones with yellow centers in the photo above). Usually this is an easy cookie, but this might have been difficult for me because my cookie press is ancient and might not be working as well as it might. I had no trouble pressing the dough out of the cylinder, through the decorative plate, but some of the cookies didn't break off onto the baking sheet, so I had to cut them away from the press. When they worked, they made really pretty cookies! I tried them as the recipe was written, but then added some flour to the dough and that seemed to work better. Chilling the dough seemed to work even better. By then it felt like PlayDoh but I still had some trouble with making the cookies. The good news is that these are tender butter cookies, flavored with both vanilla and almond extracts, so it you stick with it you will have delicious cookies that also like decorative. You can color the dough, too, to make them even more decorative, and don't forget that if you used colored sugar or jimmies that they are even more colorful.
The final cookie was the rolled out one, Fancy Tea Cookies (the fluted ones in the photo at the top). I ended up rolling them out on waxed paper because they stuck when I rolled them out on a floured board. These are delicate cookies that become crisp on the edges. They are flavored with nutmeg and make good sandwich cookies, but are also fine as singles. Chill the dough, work with smallish quantities of dough at a time and flour your cookie cutters.
I made round and heart shaped sandwich cookies, so cut out two pieces of dough for each sandwich cookie. One of those pieces stayed whole and the other had a hole punched out before baking...I used a large icing piping tube...and after they were baked and cooled I used marmalade as a filling and sandwiched a cut out one over a whole one, bottoms together. For decoration I sifted powdered sugar over them. I skipped any buttercream (which is did use the first time I made these), but that tastes wonderful, too.
The Butterscotch cookies makes the most as far as quantity, but the other two are so delicious and pretty that as many as you get will be very appreciated by your family and friends. The Spritz count depends on what disc you use to press the cookies and for the Fancy Tea Cookies the count varies according to the size and shape of the cutter you use.
Since I ran out of time to make more than a dozen or so of the Fancy Tea Cookies, I had left over cookie dough. I decided a couple of days later to make a two person sized dessert for myself and Sweetie. I took about a 1/4 cup of the dough and made a base in a 6-inch diameter springform pan. I made sure to bring the cookie dough up the sides by at least a 1/2 inch, then baked the cookie at 350 degrees F for about 10 minutes. The dough puffed up, but once I removed it from the oven, I flattened the center with a fork and only left the sides puffed up.
For the filling I beat one egg until most of the white had combined with the yolk, added a tablespoon of granulated sugar, a few drops of almond extract, 1/4 cup of soy creamer (or you could use half and half), and a good sized peach which I had peeled, pitted, and cut into 1/2-inch chunks. I mixed all of these together and poured them into the greased springform pan. The mixture came up to just below the top of the pan. I placed the pan on a small sheet pan and baked it for 25 minutes, checked it and continued to bake a bit more until the center was cooked but still a tiny bit jiggly. The filling was just beginning to brown around the edges.
After letting the dessert cool to room temperature, I ran a knife around the sides of the pan, then released the sides. Once cut in half and plated, I added a whoosh of whipped cream and served it. I really enjoyed the combination of cookie crust with it's strong nutmeg element and sweet, juicy peach custard filling. If I did it again, I would probably bake the crust longer so that it was crisper, but otherwise wouldn't change a thing
No comments :
Post a Comment