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.

Currently baking out of Great Cookies by Carole Walter

After the four lemon curd cakes I made a few weeks ago for a friend’s daughter’s graduation party, I had a bunch of egg whites to use up. Browsing through Great Cookies, I had a choice of these cookies or vanilla French macroons. Hmmm. Chocolate or no chocolate? Who was I kidding? Chocolate all the way.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with these cookies. There’s no flour, no butter and no oil in these cookies. There is, however, a lot of chocolate and egg whites. Eight egg whites get whipped up with a cup of sugar into a meringue. To that meringue, you add 12 ounces of melted bittersweet chocolate, cocoa powder, a bit of vanilla extract, corn syrup and hot water. Oh, and nuts. The recipe calls for two cups of coarsely chopped walnuts, which I didn’t have, but I did have almonds.

The batter came together pretty easily and was so chocolatey. This recipe is from the “Big Boys” chapter, so these cookies are meant to be big. I scooped half of the batter into large mounds, then did the rest slightly smaller. According to the instructions, you are supposed to flatten them out slightly. I tried, but the batter just stuck to the spoon I was using, so I left them mounded and they baked up just fine.

Once the cookies are baked, you are supposed to brush them with a chocolate glaze. I was feeling lazy, so I left off the glaze and didn’t miss it at all. These cookies are light, almost melting in the mouth, with a deep chocolate punch and a crunch from the nuts. They didn’t keep as well as I would have hoped. They softened quite a bit (the contrast between the slightly crunchy exterior and the soft interior was one of the things I really liked about these cookies) and tended to pick up off flavors.

Currently baking from Great Cookies by Carole Walter

Can one have too many cookie cookbooks? I’m still looking for that answer, mostly by buying more cookie cookbooks.

Great Cookies by Carole Walter is, as the title suggests, all about cookies. The gamut runs from the standard chocolate chip cookie (although Walter gives you seven or eight different variations of chocolate chip cookies) to the more unusual cookies, such as a basler brunsli, a Swiss cookie.

I’ve had this cookbook for a number of years, but have only made a handful of recipes out of it. This first cookie, Zach’s Chocolate Coconut Devils, was one of the first recipes I tried, and it quickly became a favorite of mine. It’s an easy recipe that delivers big fudgy chocolate flavor.

The recipe calls for three different kinds of chocolate (cocoa powder, bittersweet chocolate and unsweetened chocolate), a bit of flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and, of course, coconut. The recipe calls for processing the sweetened, shredded coconut in a food processor to chop it a bit. I usually skip this step and just use the coconut as is.

Warm out of the oven, these cookies are like super moist brownies. As they cool down and firm up, they become more fudgy and chewy. Either way, it is extremely easy to eat too many of these cookies in one setting.