Chocolate Spritz Cookies: or, Not the best recipe in the Bible

Today, for the first time, we are getting spritz cookies from somewhere besides cookie press manuals!

Chocolate Spritz Cookies 3 ounces semisweet chocolate, melted 1 cup (½ pound) butter ¼ tsp salt ½ tsp vanilla 3 egg yolks 2½ cups sifted flour Heat oven to 400°. Have ungreased cookie sheets, a thin metal spatula, and cooling racks ready. Cream the butter, salt, vanilla, and sugar. Add the egg yolks and beat well. Then add the chocolate and beat very well. When the mixture is light and airy, gradually add the flour, gently beating only to mix. Put the dough into a cookie press and press it onto the ungreased cookie sheets. Bake 8-10 minutes, or until darkened at the edges. Immediately upon removing them from the oven, use the metal spatula to get them off the pan and onto the rack. If you don't have a cookie press, you can shape the dough any way you like. I particularly like rolling it into balls, rolling these in sugar, placing them on the pan and pressing my index finger across them. Source: Maida Heatter's Book of Great Chocolate Desserts, 1974

Maida Heatter's Book of Great Chocolate Desserts, 1974

Yes, instead of getting recipes from manufacturer instruction sheets, we are consulting our dearly beloved copy of Maida Heatter's Book of Great Chocolate Desserts. Some readers may recall that I asked a friend of mine to make a duct tape jacket for it that says THE HOLY BIBLE. 

Every time I follow the instructions in this text, I always find happiness. Today's joyous experience begins with creamed butter and sugar with melted chocolate on top.

I had a few misgivings as we mixed the first round of ingredients together. The batter was more "chocolate-tinted" than chocolate.

The batter tasted a lot milder than I hoped. But to Maida Heatter's credit, the dough handled really easily. It wasn't too gloppy, nor was it too stiff.

In preparation for when my cheap cookie press finally snaps, I decided to try some other ways of getting pretty designs onto the cookies. I took this random bowl with designs molded into the glass, and pressed it on top of dough balls. I first rolled the dough in sugar so the bowl wouldn't stick.

The resulting cookies had a cute design stamped on top, but it didn't look as nice as I hoped. Up close, they looked pretty. Otherwise, the cookies just had a random bump in the middle.

These cookies were super easy to press out. In fact, I didn't need to remove a single misshapen dud from the pan. This is a relatively new experience for me, but I wasn't surprised. Maida Heatter's recipes always work. I only hand-shaped some of the cookies are hand-shaped so I could see what non-cookie-press options work well with this particular recipe. I hate when lack of specific gadgets gets in the way of chocolate.

These cookies taste a lot more... polite than I expected. They're very good with tea, but they're not as rich as I hoped. I think they'd be a nice light finish after a really heavy dinner. But these cookies are not my favorite recipe from The Holy Bible. They're not bad, but I doubt I will put a lot of splatters onto this page. 

Honey Nutmeg Pizzelles

It's always a good time to make pizzelles! (Well, almost.)

Honey-Nutmeg Pizzelles 3 eggs 1½ cups flour* ½ cup sugar ½ cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled ¼ cup honey 1 tsp. baking powder dash dried ground nutmeg Combine eggs, sugar, butter and honey together. Whisk well. Sift dry ingredients together and mix into the wet mixture. Mixture should be thick enough to drop from a spoon. Add more flour if it isn't. Bake on pizzelle iron. *I ended up using two cups of flour. Source: Fante's Kitchen via the Wayback Machine

Today, we are returning to Fante's pizzelle page. They seem to have taken it down after a website renovation, but fortunately the Internet Archive has preserved all their recipes and helpful advice. Above this one, they wrote "The aroma from these cookies as they bake will have your mouth watering!" I've never made honey-nutmeg flavored anything, and was really excited.

I was a little suspicious that this recipe didn't demand an electric mixer. Every other pizzelle recipe I have made has started with whipping the eggs until they turn into a bowl of foam. Of course, I've only made five recipes. And the people who run a kitchen supply store in the Italian Market of Philadelphia know a lot more about pizzelles than I do.

This one looks as simple as making muffins: mix dry ingredients, mix wet ingredients, then stir it all together. The recipe specifies that the eggs must be beaten before adding them. I usually skip that step (mixing everything seems to beat the eggs well enough). But today, I followed Fante's directions and beat the egg first. We do not contradict the people who told us how to use the pizzelle iron in the first place.

The batter looked slightly gelatinous in a way that I haven't seen in my previous pizzelles, but five recipes are hardly a vast breadth of experience to draw from.

And so, only four minutes after measuring everything, we were ready to heat up the iron! This is the first time I've wished I had turned on the stove before mixing the batter. With all our other recipes, I would have been wasting heat while whipping eggs.

As an amusing side note, some readers may remember when conservative pundits had a short flareup of squawking over gas stoves. At the time, I was talking about it to a part-Italian friend of mine who is a climatologist. I said that it seemed like no one who was turning gas stoves into a crusade actually did any cooking at home. He paused awkwardly, and then said "I cook for myself all the time, and I don't like gas stoves." Then he started to pick up speed. "As a scientist, I think that---"

"But how would I make pizzelles?" I cut him off.

Over the phone, I could hear the scientist and the Italian fighting inside his head. Eventually, he managed to say "Uh, that's a good point."

Back to the recipe, today's pizzelles turned a lovely golden brown, and they did so a lot faster than all our previous ones. I think it's the honey, which apparently caramelizes a lot faster than sugar does. 

The fast browning was really nice when impatience struck, but it also meant we didn't have much time between perfectly cooked and completely burnt. We also made a lot of pizzelles that were perfectly golden on one side and very pale on the other. But when they came out right, they looked so, so pretty.

That really dark one in the back cooked only 5 seconds longer than the other ones.

As delicious as these are, they didn't really taste like honey. I shouldn't be surprised-- they only contain a quarter cup of the stuff. But even if the title ingredients were barely detectable, these were so good. Since the honey made them turn brown faster, the pizzelles could reach that perfect color without all the spices cooking out.

 

I would definitely recommend this recipe. They have that exquisite taste that tells you they're definitely homemade. If you want to pretend you got a pizzelle recipe from your cousin's coworker's former college roommate from Italy, this one will make people believe you. Of course, we at A Book of Cookrye make no promises of whether that would work on any actual Italians.

Chocolate Wafers: or, It's a good day

Sometimes I revisit a recipe and think "Whyever did I stop making these?"

Chocolate Wafers     Oven temperature: 400° ¼ cup (½ stick) butter ½ cup sugar ¾ tsp baking powder ¼ tsp baking soda Pinch of salt† 2 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted* 1 tsp vanilla 1½ tsp light cream or milk 1 large egg 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sifted flour Cream the butter, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add the melted chocolate, and mix well. Then add the vanilla, cream or milk, and the egg. Beat well. Add the flour and beat only until it is mixed. Pat the dough onto the edges of the bowl so cold air can circulate through it better, then refrigerate for about 30 minutes, or until it is firm enough to work with, but not hard enough to crack. When ready to bake, heat oven to 400°. Have baking sheets lined with parchment paper or greased foil. Place the dough onto a well-floured surface, and sprinkle more flour on top. Roll the dough out about ⅛ thin (it will handle better than you think). Cut it out with the cookie cutter(s) of your choice, and place them about a half-inch apart on the pans. You may want to use a spatula to lift the cookies off the countertop and onto the pans. Bake 7-8 minutes, or until they feel almost firm to the touch. If you want to speed this up, you can forget all this business with a refrigerator and a rolling pin. Instead, roll the dough into small balls in your hand (don't bother chilling it first). Then roll them in sugar. Place them on a greased or lined cookie sheet 2 or 3 inches apart. Then flatten them by pressing with your finger or the random drinking glass (or whatever) of your choice. These cookies are very rich, so you should make them small. Bake until barely darkened at the edges. *If desired, you can substitute 6 tablespoons of cocoa powder. Add an extra 2 tablespoons of butter to the amount already in the recipe. If you want to get a better chocolate flavor out of the cocoa powder, melt the all of butter in the recipe and get it quite hot. Then whisk in the cocoa powder, and leave it to sit until it re-solidifies. (If any water separates out of the butter, just put it into the mixing bowl with everything else and forget about it.)   †Omit if butter is salted. Source: Maida Heatter's Book of Great Chocolate Desserts, 1974

Maida Heatter's Book of Great Chocolate Desserts, 1974

 

I used to make these cookies all the time. After all, why take up exercise if you're still going to sacrifice chocolate?

Just as I so fondly remembered, the cookie dough was a beautiful rich dark brown. Before adding the flour, it looked tantalizingly like brownie batter.

Maida Heatter directs us to roll out the dough one-eighth of an inch (that's 3-ish millimeters) and then use a cookie cutter. This, naturally, will produce the chocolate wafers promised in the recipe title. But back when I semi-routinely made this recipe, I never had the patience for a rolling pin and cookie cutter. (Chocolate is too hard to wait for.) Instead, I used to roll the dough into small balls, roll each one in sugar, and press my finger across them like so:

Today, I decided to also play with my new cookie squirt gun. It may be cheaply made, but it has held up through multiple batches of cookies so far. Most of the stencil shapes come out exactly how they look like they would. Others were a surprise. Who would expect this peculiar shape to produce perfect hearts?

Well, I say "perfect," but we had a lot of misshapen cookies that I plopped back into the mixing bowl. Also, I cannot recommend making chocolate wreaths because they look like... um.... Well, see for yourself.

For the sake of thoroughness, I decided to make thin wafers like Maida Heatter told us to. I've made this recipe a million times, so I figured that I ought to follow the second half of the directions at least once. When I saw how thin the dough is supposed to get, I feared the it would be like wet toilet paper (the cheap kind). But it handled surprisingly well. In fact, I think it would be easier to make a pie crust out of it than the graham cracker dough.

My only (self-inflicted) problem was that I was parsimonious with the flour that I scattered onto the countertop. This led to my cookies sticking to the surface. Had I not made such an avoidable mistake, these cookies would have been a cinch to work with. Also, I have to note that you get a lot of cookies when you make them this thin. I got two panfuls out of a tiny lump of dough.

As the cookies baked, the ones I rolled into balls puffed up and took on a very cute crackly look. As I said, this isn't the official way to shape these cookies, but it's my favorite.

You can tell why Maida Heatter decided to make wafer-thin cookies out of this dough when you eat one. These cookies are really rich, and you get sated quick. So unless you need a lot of therapeutic chocolate, you might make them a little smaller than I did. With that said, they're really good, really easy, and definitely worth making.

Also, for those who still mourn the loss of Famous Wafers, this recipe is exactly what you need.

Sour Cream Spritz Cookies: or, More fun with extrusions!

Usually, you need to buy a sewing box to get cookies like this.

Sour Cream Spritz Cookies 1 cup shortening 1 cup sugar ½ tsp salt 2 egg yolks ½ cup thick sour cream 1 tsp vanilla 4 cups sifted flour Heat oven to 400°. Have ungreased cookie sheets, a thin metal spatula, and a cooling rack ready. Cream the shortening, sugar, and salt. Beat in the yolks. When mixed, add the sour cream and vanilla. Beat until light. Lastly, mix in the flour. Put through a cookie press onto ungreased baking sheets. Bake 10-12 minutes. (Mine were done in 6.) Immediately upon removing from the oven, use a metal spatula to remove the hot cookies to the cooling rack. Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet

Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet

I'm not making an official project of going through every single recipe on the Mirro cookie press instruction sheet, but I seem to be drifting that way. Like all the Mirro recipes we have made so far, today's cookies start with sugar and shortening. (Perhaps butter has never been reliable enough).

I was surprised at how well the nutmeg toned down the almost glow-in-the-dark whiteness of the first ingredients, especially given how it failed to do exactly that when we made the sandies. You could really see the color difference after plopping the stark-white sour cream on top.

You can tell how good the mixture tasted by the big finger-swoop I lifted out for taste-testing.

As is surprisingly often the case, the flour added the most coloring to the cookies, changing them from a barely-tinted white to a creamy shade of yellow. Also, we had to add a lot more flour than the ingredient list tells us to. Maybe it's the humidity.

Here I must pause and note that I partially made this recipe to test whether this handmixer that turned up in a thrift store could live up to its instruction manual's optimistic claims. To my surprise, it barrelled through the cookie dough without making any sad whining noises. Instead of giving up, it kept trying to kick the bowl over.

I initially wanted to put a lot of stencils into the press, but this clover was so cute that I pushed out a whole pan of them. A few of the cookies came out malformed, which seems to always happen. Instead of reloading the dough into the press, I decided this was the perfect chance to try other ways of shaping them. That way, I can be ready for the day when this spritzer breaks. (It's fun to use while it lasts, but I suspect it won't last long.)

The little round cookies I shaped by hand looked really cute until you compared them to the four-leaf clovers right next to them. If we zoom in on one, you can see why you don't need to grease the pan for these. They left lard footprints wherever they landed. Check out the shiny spots peeping out from under the edge of the cookie.

Our cookies baked in half the time given in the recipe. Purely for scientific purposes, I may have to splurge on a Mirro cookie press like the one our instruction sheet came with. It may produce bigger cookies that need a longer baking time. In fact, one may already be in the mail as I write this. (Sometimes my willpower needs a rest.) If the Mirro press works as well as the Mirro recipes, it can't arrive too soon!

These cookies were softer than the other spritz recipes we have made so far (aside from the peanut butter ones). They tasted a lot like the sugar cookies we clipped out of a 1933 newspaper. More than any of the other spritz cookies we have made so far, they taste like a recipe that was lovingly handed down to you. They're somehow both crisp and melt-in-your-mouth soft. In full disclosure, the molasses cookies remain my favorites (so far). But these are now my favorite plain ones.

Slow Cooker Caramelized Onions: or, Replacing kitchen tedium with naps

As we have learned, caramelizing onions is a long, slow process. Every recipe that starts with "Cook onions until golden, about 5 minutes" is lying. There is simply no way to speed it up. If you try to cook onions faster, they will burn. 

Granted, you really only need to carefully tend the frying pan when the onions are nearly done. But although you don't need to stay in the kitchen the whole time, you can't leave the house. Also, stopping whatever you were doing to stir the pan every now and then gets subtly irritating. With that in mind, I recently read that you can caramelize onions in a slow cooker.

Slow Cooker Caramelized Onions Place frozen chopped onions into a slow cooker, as many as you like. (You don't need to defrost them.) You can buy fresh onions and chop them yourself, but you won't tell the difference after they're cooked. You can also add peeled garlic cloves. Pour on enough cooking oil or melted butter to lightly coat the onions, and stir to mix. Cook on low heat for 6-17 hours, or until they are a rich dark brown. The time will vary depending on how dark you want them, how many you're cooking, and how hot your cooker gets. If the onions look like they're browning unevenly, you can stir them. Keep in the coldest part of the refrigerator. Mine have lasted up to two weeks. These keep well in the freezer. You can divide them into about half-cup portions (which is about what you'd get from a single onion), and then drop them into whatever you're making. For things like soups and sauces, I don't even bother defrosting them first. Note 1: These will shrink a lot as they cook, so you may as well completely fill the slow cooker instead of just doing a small amount of onions. Note 2: This will produce a powerful smell as it cooks. If you have a yard, patio, or apartment balcony, set the slow cooker outside.

I had a few reservations about trying this, mostly because the cooker's big ceramic insert is too bulky and heavy for the dishwasher. You may as well try and perch a medium-sized flowerpot on the rack. And so, I asked my relatives who love going to thrift shops to keep an eye out for one of those miniature slow cookers that you're supposed to use for cheese dip. Eventually, this little thing turned up for $4. 

Apparently this mini pot is meant for keeping dips and sauces warm, not for cooking anything. So, I didn't know if it would get hot enough for today's endeavor. But I figured that if I got nothing but a small pot of hot raw onions, I had only wasted the price of a truck stop sandwich in a moment of thrift store frivolity.

The method seemed self-evident: load the cooker with onions and leave it. To make things even easier, I purchased frozen chopped onions.

I plugged the little cooker outside because of the impending smell. After the onions had been in the pot for a while, I decided that perhaps I should look up directions. Putting onions in a slow cooker is new to me, but other people have been doing it for a long time. Therefore, I figured that if I was missing any crucial steps, a lot of other people had figured them out before me. Every guide said you should mix the onions with olive oil or butter (or something like that). Since my onions hadn't even thawed yet, my mistake was easy to fix. 

About five hours later, I checked on the onions. Would this work, or was I about to try to resell this dip warmer to get my $4 back? To my delight, the onions were slowly turning brown! But I should have stirred them once or twice. We had hot spots and cold spots, like when you put last night's lasagna in the microwave. After mixing the onions, I let them continue cooking while I made dinner. Based on the color, I probably could have let them cook even longer. 

When I tasted the first onions to come out of our miniature cooker, I thought I would never part with it. I was so happy, I didn't even mind that you can't take out the ceramic liner for cleaning. Even at this slightly premature stage, the onions had a beautiful deep golden color. And they tasted amazing. I froze some of them, and dumped the rest into supper. I probably added a lot more onions than good taste permits, but I didn't care.

For those who are wondering, the rest of the recipe is pretty simple. Make a white sauce, or purchase it by the pint from the nearest purveyor of fried food. Then stir in frozen spinach, mixing until it's thawed and hot. Add seasonings and shredded cheese, stir until all is melted. Then pour it onto pasta.

As much as I liked the result of slowly caramelizing onions, I was annoyed at the shrinkage. Before cooking, the onions nearly pushed the lid off the cooker. But after they were done, they barely covered the bottom of it. I was initially annoyed that I would have to do a new batch of onions every time I wanted to use more than a tablespoon of them. Then I realized that no one required me to make these one small batch at a time. If I wanted to, I could use the big pot.

You are looking at three 12-ounce packages of frozen chopped onions crammed into one pot. I had to mash the lid down a bit to close it. (For those who prefer metric alliums, we are cooking a generous kilo of them.) I could have defrosted the onions in the microwave to let them cook faster, but I decided I would rather use the slow cooker's time instead of my own. This timesaving strategy didn't quite work because I kept going outside to see if the onions were dark enough yet. 

After about 17 hours, the onions had taken on the rich brown color of an exquisite creation from a woodworker's shop. If you wanted to be extremely picky, you might have noted that the onions in the very center were slightly lighter than the rest. I could have prevented this by stirring this at least twice a day, but I didn't want to put in the effort. What's the point of a slow cooker if you can't plug it in and ignore it?

When we got to the bottom of the pot, we found a lot of onion juice that never quite boiled away. Figuring that it would have been at the bottom of the pan and then mixed into the rest of the food anyway, I dumped it into the (not-so-)little storage container along with the onions.

If you have the mental space to plan ahead, this is a wonderful way to get perfectly caramelized onions in your sleep. It's almost impossible to burn the onions unless you go away for the weekend and forget you left the pot plugged in.

And while caramelizing three pounds of onions at once may seem excessive, it speeds up a lot of future cooking. Whenever a recipe begins with "Cook the onion until golden," you can take a scoopful of caramelized onions out of the refrigerator and skip to step 2 of the directions. It almost feels like cheating to get the delicious flavor of caramelized onions without patiently tending a frying pan on the stove. Now I just have to get a spoonful of them out of the refrigerator.

Slow-cooking massive batches of onions also liberates me from everyone else's complaints when I add them to something. Granted, I still have to endure a few minor flareups of squawking when the fumes from the backyard seep through the door. But now I can add a big beautiful spoonful of caramelized onions to my own portion without ruining dinner for everything else. Truly, it is a beautiful pungent thing.

Peanut Butter Spritz Cookies: or, More excuses to play with our toys

Well, after recent unfortunate events, anyone want a cookie?

Peanut Butter Spritz Cookies ½ cup shortening ½ cup white sugar ½ cup brown sugar ½ tsp baking soda ¼ tsp salt 1 egg 1 tbsp water 1 generous teaspoon vanilla ½ cup peanut butter 1¼ cups flour (approximate) Heat oven to 400°. Have ungreased baking sheets, a thin metal spatula, and a cooling rack ready. Cream the shortening, sugars, baking soda and salt. Beat until light. Then add the egg, water, vanilla, and peanut butter. Beat until fluffy. Sift in the flour and mix. Put the dough through a cookie press onto the ungreased baking sheet. Bake 10-12 minutes, or until golden on the edges. (Mine were actually done in 5.) When they come out of the oven, immediately transfer to the cooling rack using the metal spatula. Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet

Mirro cookie press instruction sheet via Ebay

Everyone in the house has gotten excited about extruded cookies. I've never seen a modified caulking gun get such a happy reaction. But of course, I don't want to simply make the same recipe over and over again. And so, with everyone in the household within an earshot, I read the recipes from the instruction sheet I lovingly "borrowed" from someone selling a cookie press. I then asked which I should make next. I can't lie, I was glad everyone wanted peanut butter cookies because I wanted them too.

Unusually, the recipe writers have us adding the peanut butter after creaming the shortening and sugar. Most peanut butter cookie recipes tell you to cream all your fats together at once. But who am I to argue with a small army of home economists?

I altered the recipe in two tiny ways. First, I did not use hot water. As we have learned from watching a lot of Ann Reardon videos, dumping hot water into cookie dough (or cake batter) melts your butter. This means you lose all those air bubbles you whipped into it. We used room-temperature water instead.

Second, I tasted the batter and thought "this desperately needs vanilla". It was bland without it. I'm still new to using one of these dough squirters, so I don't know what recipe changes will lead to limp cookie dough that refuses to stay spritzed. But I figured I could safely risk an uncalled-for spoonful of vanilla extract. Everything seemed to go well, but we soon had a lot more dough than I planned. 

I thought that by now, I have gotten pretty good at reading an ingredient list and estimating how many cookies (spritz or otherwise) any given recipe will yield. But as our ingredients merrily spun in the mixer, I began to think I should have used a bigger bowl. Our beaters were unnervingly submerged, and I began to fear burning out the motor. 

Really, I brought this excess of cookies on myself. If I had read all the way to the bottom of the recipe, I would have seen that they clearly printed "yield 6 dozen."

In short order, it was time to start extruding! 

Those who saw our molasses spritz cookies will recall that one particular stencil, which was merely a collection of round dots rather than an interesting shape, produced what easily-amused onlookers described as "a cosmic horror of boobs." In case you missed it, the cookies looked like this:

I'm only a bottle of food coloring and a tiny paintbrush away from getting banned from the church social.

With the above cookies in mind, every cookie press I've seen online has a Christmas tree among its stencils. (Apparently normal people let their cookie squirt guns rest in the cabinets until December?) Anyway, the Christmas tree that came with this one is a cluster of dots.

I had to find out how the Christmas trees would look, and the cookie caulker did not disappoint. Arranging your, um, small pointed domes in a triangle does not make the obscenity charges go away.

This was easily the greasiest cookie dough I have ever made. It left a clear film of lard all over my hands and everything it touched. The cookie gun soon had little clear fat-drips trickling down its sides. The cookies left slick footprints on the pan. I had to wipe the pans between batches in order to keep them ungreased as specified in the recipe.

You can see the cookie-shaped fat slicks on the pan.

Our previous spritz cookie recipes kept their shape as they baked, but these spread out a lot. While this gave the flowers extra-rounded petals and made them look really cute, other shapes did not fare as well. The Christmas trees turned into halfhearted arrowheads. And the wreaths looked like they would only be at home at a future proctologist's medical school graduation party. 

I didn't intend to make six dozen cookies. But on the bright side, they were a very easy six dozen cookies to make. This squirt gun is even faster than dropping cookies from a spoon. If (unlike me) you don't feel the need to constantly stop and change the stencil, you can easily push out an entire pan of cookies in like 45 seconds.

As the mountain of cookies slowly grew on the plate, I kept muttering "These had better be good." The ease of pressing out six dozen cookies did not make me feel better about my failure to halve the recipe. I did not want to run the oven and crowd up the dishwasher for crappy cookies.

To the Mirro people's credit, this recipe works as written. And it produces pretty decent cookies. But they weren't the best I've had either. They had a good flavor (if you added vanilla) and were surprisingly crisp. I think they're the perfect hostess balancing act: good enough that no one will insult your desserts behind your back, but not so good that everyone will quickly eat them all and leave you to suffer the social shame of empty platters. 

But I should note that although this isn't the best peanut butter cookie recipe I've ever made, the quickly dwindling cookie population on the plate told me that a lot of people came back for more. Only this many remained after one night:

If you want peanut butter cookies and insist on making them in cute shapes, this recipe will give you what you need. However, I suggest making chatters instead.