Currently baking out of Great Cookies by Carole Walter

Rugelach, where have you been all my life? How could I have missed your crunchy flaky layers? Your walnut and chocolatey filling?

Urgh. I might have eaten too many of you all at once.

This is the last recipe out of Great Cookies, and what a way to go. These were just about perfect, not too sweet, full of crunchy goodness and just the perfect two-bite size. They were a bit of a pain to make, but worth every minute.

These cookies start off with a butter/cream cheese dough; rolled out and covered with cinnamon sugar, chopped walnuts and chocolate chips, and baked until golden brown. The hardest part is letting the dough rest, once after making it and once after rolling out the cookies.

There are lots of fillings for rugelach, preserves and raisins seeming to be among the most popular. Walter gives other suggestions for fillings, such as poppy seed, cherry raisin or prune. I prefer chocolate.

There were a lot of promising recipes I didn’t get to in Great Cookies. I could spend six months baking out of this cookbook and still not be finished. Most of the recipes I did try were solid recipes, ones that I’d make again. This is good, basic cookie cookbook to keep on your shelf.

Currently baking out of Great Cookies by Carole Walter

Jan… what?

Yeah, that’s what I said. Apparently Janhagel is Dutch for really good cookies made with butter, almonds and cinnamon.

These are deceptively simple. Just a few ingredients produce a cookie that is both crisp and chewy, sort of like a cross between shortbread and sugar cookies. The base of the cookie is a shortbread-like mixture of flour, butter, sugar, vanilla extract and almond extract. One single, lonely egg yolk is the liquid that binds these cookies together.

The dough is pressed into the bottom of a cookie sheet and brushed with an egg white. Sliced almonds are sprinkled over the dough, followed by a cinnamon-sugar mixture. The cookies are then baked until the top is golden brown. The cookies are sliced into bars, rectangles, diamonds, etc., while still warm, then left to cool completely.

With so few, plain ingredients, I wasn’t sure what to expect with these. Boy was I surprised. They are very buttery with a pronounced almond flavor. The edges got quite crispy, but towards the middle of the pan, the cookies became more chewy. And the cinnamon! I hadn’t realized how well almond and cinnamon flavors went together. Before I knew it, I had eaten three or four squares, for testing purposes, of course.

Currently baking out of Great Cookies by Carole Walter

The thing about shortbread is that when it’s done well, it can be a thing of beauty. Done badly, though, one ends up with a mouthful of sand. Fortunately, these chocolate shortbread cookies are firmly in the good category, and they got better as they aged. They are the perfect little finger cookie.

Made primarily out of flour, butter, sugar and cocoa powder, these cookies are quick and easy to make. They deliver a deep chocolate punch, and a little piece goes a long way. The recipe recommends dipping the ends of the shortbread in melted chocolate. I was feeling lazy the day I made these and decided to skip that step. I’m glad I did. I don’t think these cookies needed any more chocolate. The only change I would make next time is to add some instant espresso powder to the dough to give the cookies a little more depth of flavor.

Currently baking out of Great Cookies by Carole Walter

It’s become a bit of a chore to bake, lately. It seems that as the temperature rises, I get sluggish and tired, and all I want to eat is cantaloupe. And milkshakes. Why couldn’t I have picked an ice cream book to work out of?

And as for picking a cookie recipe? Forget it. Nothing sounds good. However, I did manage to produce these cookies, mostly because I was intrigued by the recipe. They’ve got yeast in them, like bread! But unlike bread, no rising. Also, I had some apricot preserves that I needed to use.

This is a pretty simple recipe. Yeast is dissolved in milk, butter is cut into flour (using a food processor), then the yeasty milk, an egg and vanilla are stirred into the flour, and the dough is kneaded briefly, then set aside to chill. Once chilled, the dough is rolled out and cut into squares. A dollop of apricot preserves is placed in the middle of the dough square and two opposite corners are folded over the middle. The cookies are baked right away, then sprinkled with powdered sugar before serving.

My cookies puffed up in the oven, and most of the corners refused to stay folded over. Those three cookies up there are the only ones that really looked like Walter’s, and even then, they look puffier than the picture in the book. I can only assume that I didn’t roll my dough out thin enough. Walter never says how thin the dough should be.

Looks aside, the cookies tasted pretty good. They had a definite yeasty flavor to them, along with a slightly bready texture. These aren’t sweet cookies, and without the apricot filling, they’d be quite bland.

Currently baking out of Great Cookies by Carole Walter

I’m a nut snob. No lowly little peanuts for me! Give me almonds or cashews. So why did I pick this recipe? A peanut butter cookie that is filled with a peanut butter filling and rolled in chopped peanuts? One little hyphenated word.

No-bake.

That’s right, this is a no-bake cookie. With summer’s heat beating at the windows, any excuse to make cookies without turning on the oven is welcome.

These little guys start out with a filling of peanut butter, powdered sugar, graham crackers and butter. The filling is formed into balls, dipped in melted semisweet chocolate and rolled in chopped peanuts. They are as easy as it sounds. Unfortunately, they didn’t taste as good as they sounded.

Although I halved the recipe (who needs 50 of these just sitting around the house, begging to be eaten?), I ended up using the full amount of peanut butter to get them to taste like peanut butter. I thought there was way too much sugar in the filling and will cut it down dramatically next time. Also, the filling was kind of dry. In the end, I thought these were just okay.

Currently baking out of Great Cookies by Carole Walter

I’m a latecomer to biscotti. I used to turn up my nose at it, because I thought it was only edible if you dunked it. And I’m not a dunker. Of anything. So when I tried my first biscotti, and it was very edible without any dunking, I started looking around at biscotti recipes.

Turns out that not only are biscotti good on their own, they are very, very easy to make. Like this lemon-pine nut version from Great Cookies. And if you don’t like your biscotti dry and crunchy, you simply don’t need to bake it as long during the second baking period!

This recipe starts out by having you toast pine nuts. And Oh. My. God. are pine nuts expensive. I bought just over a cup and it cost me nearly $20. These just might be the most expensive cookies I’ve ever made. Next time, I think the pine nuts will become a garnish.

Anyway, after toasting pine nuts, you beat lemon zest, sugar and butter together, then add vanilla, an egg, an egg yolk and the dry ingredients, which include flour, baking powder, cardamom and salt. At the end, most of the cooled pine nuts are stirred into the dough which is patted out into a log on a cookie sheet. The log of dough is brushed with an egg white, and the rest of the pine nuts are sprinkled on top.

The dough gets baked for 18 to 20 minutes, then sliced and baked again until the cookies are toasted and crunchy. To finish off the biscotti, a glaze of powdered sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest and corn syrup is drizzled over the top of the warm cookies.

I really liked these biscotti. As I was slicing them for the second baking, I kept nibbling on the ends. I didn’t think they could get any better, but after glazing them, I couldn’t keep my hands off them. They are very lemony, especially with the glaze, but that sharpness goes so well with the mellow pine nuts. I think this dough would make a wonderful scooped cookie if you didn’t want to bother with a double baking.

And that cardamom! I’ve had a jar of powdered cardamom in my cupboard for some time. It smelled like musty sawdust, so I decided to buy a new jar for this recipe. Wow, my old jar must have been ancient, because I never knew how fragrant cardamom was. In this recipe, the cardamom adds a mysterious floral taste. It is hard to identify, but it definitely kicks up the flavor.

Now, if I could just find a source of cheap pine nuts . . .

Currently baking out of Great Cookies by Carole Walter

I fell for black pepper back in ninth-grade home ec class when Trisha Campbell put black pepper on my chocolate chip cookie dough as a joke. I use black pepper like most people use salt, and I’ve been obsessed about making a black pepper ice cream for years. So when I saw that these cookies called for freshly ground black pepper, I jumped all over them.

Unfortunately, the cookies fell far short of what I was expecting. Despite the teaspoon of black pepper in the dough, I thought they were a little bland. I couldn’t taste the pepper, and the chocolate flavor wasn’t very pronounced. The cookies worked well in ice cream sandwiches, however.

This is a pretty easy recipe to make. Butter and bittersweet chocolate are melted together and mixed with a bit of espresso powder. To that mixture, sugar, eggs and some vanilla are added. Flour, cocoa powder, black pepper, baking soda and salt are sifted and stirred into the wet ingredients making a very soft dough. The dough gets rolled into logs and refrigerated for several hours until firm. When you are ready to bake the cookies, you slice the dough into rounds and bake.

Currently baking out of Great Cookies by Carole Walter

Who doesn’t love thumbprint cookies? Make the cookie out of poppy seed shortbread and you’ve elevated the standard thumbprint cookie to a whole new level.

I was looking for a recipe that was simple and delivered a cookie to my mouth in the shortest possible time. This hit the spot. I had the dough made in less than 10 minutes and was eating warm cookies about 20 minutes later.

My only snag was that I overestimated the amount of jam I had in the fridge. I ended up filling about half of the cookies with raspberry jam. The other half got filled with nutella and some chocolate ganache I had in the fridge. By far, the raspberry jam was the best. With two sticks of butter, these cookies are quite rich, so the tartness of the jam was very refreshing.