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cookie weekend

This was a cookie-filled weekend for me, not because I felt some kind of holiday obligation, but because I had a couple recipes I wanted to try.

The first was a recipe for almond crescent cookies I found on the wonderful Simply Recipes blog. I love almonds, and I had some almond flour left over from my earlier attempt at amaretti cookies, so I made time on Saturday to give it a try. The process was a bit work-intensive — mainly with regard to forming the crumbly dough into crescent shapes — but the result was pretty tasty.

I think that these came out a bit better than my attempt at the amaretti cookies, perhaps in part because I was able to mix everything up better using my hand mixer. (I used a blender, per the instructions, to mix the amaretti cookies, but my blender is a bit too small to blend the full recipe’s worth of ingredients all that well.)

• 1 cup of butter, room temperature
• 2/3 cup of sugar
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon of almond extract
• 2 1/2 cups of flour
• 1 cup of almond flour (can substitute ground almonds*)
• 1/4 cup of powdered sugar for sprinkling

*You can use slivered, blanched almonds and grind them up, but you will have a very crumbly, hard to work with dough. It’ll still taste good though.

1) Cream the butter and the sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the extracts and mix.

2) Add the flour and almond flour. Mix thoroughly.

3) Take generous tablespoons of the dough (it will be slightly crumbly) and roll it into a small ball, about an inch in diameter, and then shape into a crescent shape. Place onto parchment paper and bake at 350 degrees F for 15-20 minutes or until a light golden brown.

4) Dust with powdered sugar.

Makes 2 1/2 dozen cookies.

(Source: Simply Recipes)

To go a step beyond, the recipe suggests dipping one end of the finished cookie in melted chocolate. I didn’t try that, but it sounds like a wonderful idea. (And something I may yet try, as I have chocolate chips left over from the recipe below.)

For my next trick, I wanted to use some of the (frozen) cranberries I had left over from my earlier cranberry surplus. When Rob and I were in Portland in May 2006, we stopped at a little eatery and I got this fantastic oatmeal cranberry (or was it cherry?) chocolate chip cookie. Part of me hoped to replicate that.

Sadly, that was not to be. While I’m not unhappy with how the resulting cookies taste, I’m a bit disappointed at how very flat they were. (Any tips on how to avoid that?) And I should have done a better job of distributing the cranberries across each cookie; in many cases, the cranberries seemed to drift to just one side of the cookie. Plus, aesthetically, the large berry halves just looked a little funny — Rob suggested that they looked almost like red jalapeños sprinkled across the cookies.

I’m going to try this again and hopefully make it better next time. In the meantime, here’s the recipe I used, based on the recipe on the Quaker Oats box top:

• ½ pound (2 sticks) margarine or butter, softened
• 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
• ½ cup granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon salt (optional)
• 3 cups Quaker Oats (quick or old fashioned, uncooked)
• About ½ cup chocolate chips
• About ½ cup chopped cranberries

1) Heat oven to 350 degrees F

2) Beat together the butter and sugars until creamy.

3) Add eggs and vanilla; beat well.

4) Add combined flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt; mix well.

5) Stir in oats, then chocolate chips, then cranberries. Mix well after each addition.

6) Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet.

7) Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown.

8) Cool 1 minute on cookie sheet; remove to wire rack.

Makes about 4 dozen.

Curiously, the recipe on the oatmeal box doesn’t match the recipe on the Quaker Web site.