Category: TABLE OF CONTENTS CATEGORIES

The categories used in the TOC of Heritage Cookies of the Old and New World

SPECULAAS (a/k/a SPECULOOS) MASTER CLASS – An authentic recipe from a Dutch master

A thin, crispy, addictive, and not-too-sweet spice cookie that everyone will adore.

This will be a long post, so please take our standard suggestion seriously:

As always, skip to the bottom if you are only here for the recipe. The discussion of our stumbles and revelations along the way is going to take some time.

INTRODUCTION

I began this research with a simple enough goal. Heritage Cookies of the Old and New World has a recipe for Nut Dough Speculaas, but doesn’t have one for the light, thin, crispy version. This was because I couldn’t get them right enough to meet our somewhat extreme standards.

That has now been remedied thanks to the Specifically Spectacular Speculaas Facebook Group. What follows is my tale of working through all the details in the 100% authentic recipe shared by one of that group’s guiding stars: a fantastic Dutch baker named Luc Longin.

Luc’s recipe features some hard to find ingredients which actually matter (see below), and has methodologies for both the dough and the shaping that were new to my experience. Still, it was a recipe that’s worked for hundreds of people over dozens, if not hundreds of years. All I had to do was work it through, keeping some careful notes. Right? Yeah. Sure.

This article ends with a slightly adapted version of Luc’s recipe (we had to cut the leavening by a hair), but getting there turned out to be quite the adventure. I had to tweak our much-loved Speculaas spice mix. I had to bone up on my chemistry to understand how Belgian Brown Sugar differed from its peers, and why it acted differently in a cookie. Then came a comparison of Luc’s recipe to those in our book, the America’s Test Kitchen files, the Seriouseats.com formula, and an English version from Yotam Ottolenghi. After that came the study of Luc’s technical tricks. And then developing half a dozen different ways to make Gevulde (Filled) Speculaas; a Dutch (but not Belgian) holiday treat that will get its own article. All while compiling a list of sources for key ingredients and other materials.

Why can’t anything be simple? [Sigh]

That’s the “fair warning” part. The advertisement is this: all of that was absolutely fascinating, a joy to learn, and has made us better bakers. And, of course, produced some decidedly awesome (specifically spectacular?) recipes. So as that other [ahem] hefty man used to say, And awaaay we go!

HOW DO YOU DEFINE “SPECULAAS” IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Speculaas a/k/a Speculoos have a range that centers on Belgium and the Netherlands, and spreads out into the greater Rhineland, parts of northern France, and specialty shops across the continent. The feature a cinnamon-heavy spice mix that can be used in multiple ways, with several commercial versions and even more that are made at home. All those versions differ in their details, but share a common root; they are “friendly,” “accessible,” “easy to like,” and “familiar.” This spice mix explains why Speculaas are the place to start if you want to hook someone on the basic idea of a spice cookie. They are the cookie that doesn’t bite you back.

Standard Speculaas (those that don’t require an adjective in the name) are also thin, light, and crispy. Most will be formed in a wooden mold before baking (the name comes from the latin word “speculum,” meaning “mirror”). And those molds are shallower than Springerle molds, tend to be less detailed, and are also relatively large.

Have you ever seen those photos of a child clutching a person-shaped “cookie” almost as big as they are? That will be a Speculaa. Even the normal ones are relatively big. Our pussycat mold (see below) makes a cookie just short of 5″across. You know those “monster sized” chocolate chip cookies that mall stores used to tout? 3″ diameter, or 4″ at the most. OTOH, the actual volume isn’t that high because Speculaas are so thin.

Finally, the dough cannot be overly sweet, and must have some caramel notes. In sum, the purest definition would describe a thin, crisp, only-sweet-enough, child-friendly spice cookie formed in a shallow wooden mold. The tree branches out from there.

Our three molds: the pussycat, the windmill, and the rooster

One easy and common path avoids the molds in favor of a large, thin, roll-and-cut cookie. Try decorating the top with some almond slices held on by egg wash just to fancy them up. Another limb leads off into filled Speculaas, which can be a bar cookie, a sliced roll similar to Fig Bars, something that can be done as a Molded Gingerbread Cookie, or almost any other type of filled cookie. Almond paste does not spread as it bakes, which opens up a vast range of possibilities.

A third branch will shrug and either accept or embrace a soft texture, like the Heritage Cookies recipe that uses regular brown sugar with some nut flour. There are probably fourth and fifth branches too, though I can’t think of them off the top of my head.

The further you get from that light, thin, and crispy molded cookie, the more a purist could complain that you are “wrong.” But we are bakers, not professors! Kate and I will argue that nothing is out of bounds so long as you know where the trunk of the tree lies, and add a description to the name. Chewy Speculaas, Filled Speculaas, Nut Dough Speculaas, and maybe even Cinnamon Spice Speculaas are all legitimate since they give fair warning that you’ve headed out into the suburbs.

LUC LONGIN’S RECIPE

NOTE: This recipe originates with Mssr. Luc Longin of Belgium, and I hope you will join me in a nod of grateful thanks for his generosity. This goes to examples of Luc’s work, including both cookies and specialty molds. Video #1 (multiple small figures) and video #2 (one huge figure) demonstrate the molding tricks I will try to describe in words down below. Luc’s American counterpart, Andrea Hampton, also provided invaluable assistance as both an inspiration and a bouncing board. She owns the Sweet Impressions Bakery in upstate New York, between Rochester and Syracuse to the north of the Finger Lakes. You won’t find anyone on this continent who’s better, and I’m honestly not sure about anyone, anywhere.

You may also want to know that the two of them collect, refurbish, and sell high end, often historic molds. There are plenty of cheap ones out there (like our old tourist pieces), and also some modern knockoffs, but Luc and Andrea are the place to go for potential heirlooms if this article gets you hooked.

Okay, so here is the original Luc Longin recipe that set me off on this deep dive into the ocean of authenticity:

Speculaas-Luc-Longin-recipeDownload

Read that through and you’ll see a number of ingredients that aren’t exactly common in a U.S. supermarket.

UNDERSTANDING THE INGREDIENTS, AND HOW THEY MATTER

  • “Type 00” flour.

“Type 00” refers to a super-fine grind, not to a protein content. We tested a few different products and found that “Type 00 pizza flour” worked better than “pasta flour”. King Arthur Flour sells a good product that is easy to find online. We bought ours down at Penn Mac in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, which supplies a lot of our Italian community.

All purpose flour will also work until you get to that last 5%. The difference only becomes apparent when you employ a traditional cookie mold. The finer “Type 00” yields slightly sharper features. Just be aware that “Type 00” weighs a little bit less than AP! Substitute by weight, not volume.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Speculaas fan Carolyn Koss Kasten adds: “Pizza flour is more successful in speculaas than pasta flour due to the use of soft wheat in most commercially available pizza flour blends. Soft wheat has a lot of extensibility without the enhanced elasticity of modern hard wheats. This results in much better impression retention and very little deformation of the cookies as they bake. If you search my name in the [Specifically Spectacular Speculaas] group, you can see some extensive flour testing and discussion about that.

  • Belgian Dark Brown Candi Sugar

This is the elephant in the pantry.

Belgian brown sugar is not the same thing as U.S. brown sugar. The American version is made by adding molasses back into white cane sugar (pure sucrose) at a ratio of 1 tbsp. per cup for light brown sugar, and 2 tbsp. per cup for dark. Belgian brown sugar, a byproduct of the candy making industry, differs in several aspects:

  1. It is made from “invert sugar,” meaning sucrose that has been treated with an acid to break a portion of it down into glucose and fructose. Those two component sugars, added together, end up being a little less sweet than pure sucrose. Reason #1 why Speculaas seem less sugary.
  2. The invert sugar (sucrose, glucose, and fructose) is then caramelized to a medium or dark brown color as desired. The darker the caramel, the deeper the flavor and the lower the level of sweetness. Reason #2. FWIW, Luc recommends the darker brown, least sweet version.
  3. Belgian brown sugar also starts from beet sugar instead of cane, but that becomes an imperceptibly subtle distinction after going through the inversion and caramelization steps.

This link goes to the hard-to-find Couplet brand that Mssr. Longin recommends, while this link goes to the competing Brun Fonce brand that is readily available in U.S. homebrewing stores. True fanatics can also make their own as outlined in this phenomenal article meant for large scale home brewers. (Brewers love Belgian Brown Sugar because it doesn’t make the yeast go nuts, and also leaves residual components to add both flavor and mouthfeel).

‘But Scott, what if I only want to get close enough to the real thing without going to all the effort of finding this kind of specialty ingredient?’

Fair point. We have found three alternatives, in descending order of preference:

  1. The inestimable Stella Parks of Seriouseats.com, a self avowed Speculaas fanatic, likes to make a “toasted sugar” facsimile of Belgian Brown Sugar. Spread your desired weight out on a tray, and roast it at 300°F (150°C) for 4-5 hours, stirring occasionally, until you get the color you want. Grind the result in a food processor to break up the clumps, and proceed. Toasted sugar differs from the real thing because it is caramalized sucrose rather than caramelized invert sugar, but it is the closest alternative we know of.
  2. America’s Test Kitchen suggests ground turbinado sugar as an easier alternative. Chemically, turbinado is the same thing as American light brown sugar with half as much molasses; i.e., 1 tbsp. for two cups of sugar instead of 1:1. It’s also made with vastly larger crystals, a feature that alters the way it behaves in baked goods. The fine folks at ATK found that finely ground turbinado gave the required hit of caramel flavor without making their cookies too soft. We haven’t tried it, but that is a very reliable group of test cooks and I’m willing to take their word for it.
  3. Plain, old brown sugar from the supermarket is the least desirable substitute. Make no mistake: it will make you a truly delicious cookie! There are just two issues. First, it is noticeably sweeter, and this is a cookie that should be only sweet enough. And second, the hygroscopic powers of the molasses will quickly soften the cookies as you store them. In other words, they’ll be crisp when they come out of the oven, but will soften by the next morning. We use brown sugar for Gevulde (Filled) Speculaas and our Nut Dough Speculaas, but cannot recommend it for making the thin and crispy version that requires no disclaimer in the name.

Hartshorn, a/k/a Baker’s Ammonia, a/k/a ammonium chloride, a/k/a smelling salts is an old frenemy we discussed at length in Heritage Cookies Volume 1, our study of the ultra-leavened Hungarian Kvircedli, and most recently in a page on this website devoted to the whats, whens, hows, and whys of chemical leavening agents in general. It makes sense to use it here because hartshorn yields a finer, more even aeration than other chemical leavening agents. Combining it with baking soda yields the exact crumb you want for truly authentic Speculaas.

Baking soda alone will work, but the cookies will lose some definition. Not a problem unless you use a mold, since cookies without Hartshorn will rarely have good, sharp features. Certainly not reliably sharp.

In fact, the only change we recommend to Luc’s recipe is to lower the amount of baking soda by ¼ tsp. It may be altitude (our home sits at around 1,150 feet above sea level), or it may be some other subtlety, but we found that we lost some resolution when using the recommended 1¾ tsp. of baking soda along with 2 tsp. of hartshorn. Cutting back to 1½ tsp. of baking soda fixed that. I would experiment with even lower amounts if we used molds with finer features.

  • Good Butter

Both Andrea and Luc started their advice with a warning that I really, really needed to replace American supermarket butter with a high end European product like Ireland’s Kerrygold brand. Nor were they the only ones! The online community of cookie nerds unanimously echoed the point: Use The Best Butter That Money Can Buy! Still, that is a pretty major expense and so I decided to test it. Would the the luxury product really make a difference? How big a difference?

The experiment went like this. First, I made a single batch of dough containing everything but the butter. I used a scale to divide that dough into three equal parts, all of which were too dry to stick together, and then mixed in different butters to each portion in order to complete the dough. For the first I put in Kerrygold; the second got Land O’Lakes; and the third got Land O’Lakes enhanced by the ¼ tsp. of ghee required to give it exactly the same butterfat content as Kerrygold (¾ tsp. would have been needed for a full recipe).

I baked each batch with a secret, only-known-to-me appearance change, and then asked no less than fifteen (15) taste testers to give me their opinion. Skill levels ranged from expert bakers to cookie consumers who don’t know one end of a baking pan from the other.

The result? Everyone loved the cookie. Speculaas are a huge crowd pleaser! A clear majority also commented on the lack of sweetness, saying it was a relief compared to “normal” cookies. But the butter? No one – not a single person! – could tell any difference. Two people preferred the Kerrygold; two preferred the Land O’Lakes; one preferred the enhanced Land O’Lakes; and ten of the fifteen thought I was playing some kind of trick by giving them identical products. Which may say something about how people view me… but never mind.

Take from that what you will. Experts in the field say that luxury butter makes a very noticeable improvement. Experiments in the field said the opposite. Me? I just want another cookie.

THE TECHNIQUE WAS A REVELATION

Admission time: I tried several things to “improve” on Mssr. Longin’s seemingly blunt instructions. Every single change I made hurt the final product. And I mean those words literally. Every change made an actual difference, and that difference made the cookie a little bit worse in some way or another.

  • How To Make The Dough

Go back and read the recipe. Luc mixes together the butter, egg, and water, and then kneads in the sugar and the dry ingredients. That’s it. Period.

I figured things might work better if I creamed the butter and sugar together before adding in the other ingredients. That’s standard Cookie Making 101, right? Wrong. The cookies came out almost fluffy, with next to no definition, and a distinct lack of the all-important crunch. The experiment earned me nothing but egg on my face rather than egg in the bowl.

On the left, made with creamed butter. On the right, simply mixed.
Same thing. Too much leavening or creamed butter, vs. simply mixed
And a third time. Don’t cream the butter, and don’t add too much leavener!

Do as I say, not as I did. Just get it all combined and proceed from there. Don’t cream the butter first. And don’t even think about cutting in cold butter in some sort of abortive effort to enhance things with crispy layers. Go simple.

I got saved from blunder #2 because I had the smarts to talk about blunder #1 with the experts, Andrea and Luc. When they got done e-snickering, e-chiding, and e-eye rolling at my expense, they dropped a pearl that saved me from another wasted batch. Letting the dough sit in the fridge for 1-3 days is not a matter of convenience, nor of relaxing the gluten. This dough is carefully calibrated to have just enough moisture to hold together with very little more, and it has a lot of flour. That long wait allows the spice flavors to meld, while giving the flour particles a chance to hydrate evenly.

  • How To Use A Speculaas Plank

Blunder #3 came from trying to do a shortcut in the molding process. Luc’s videos start with a wide bowl or tray of rice flour. He uses that to fill the mold all the way up, dumps that powder back into the bowl, and then knocks on the back of the mold to remove the excess. The result? A perfectly dusted mold every time, without any need for buttering or oiling.

It occurred to me that I had extra, powder-fine, “Type 00” flour on hand, and might as well use it up. Efficiency matters, right? [Sigh] Yes, it worked well enough. The figures released with a single whack. Two at the most. But they were just a little… unfocused, even before baking. Their trip through the oven only enhanced that, leaving me with shapes rather than figures.

The next time through I pulled rice flour from the pantry and used that. Presto changeo! The figures came out even more easily, and were that much sharper. I haven’t tested it, but we are convinced that corn starch, tapioca starch, and similar powders should work equally well.

These are Gevulde (Filled) Speculaas, but make the point. The one on the left was done in a flour-dusted mold with extra leavening. The one on the right was dusted with rice starch and the reduced amount of baking soda.

Blunder #4 happened because I am a knife geek. Luc fills each powdered mold with softened dough, rolls it to fill in all the nooks and crannies, and then cuts off the excess to leave the cookie backs exposed. The videos clearly use a serrated slicing knife to cut off the extra dough. Clearly and obviously.

Did you know that every knife is actually a serrated knife? When you get down to the microscopic level, even the keenest blade is actually made of tiny teeth that saw through their target. This is why you use a slicing motion when using a kitchen knife instead of pressing straight down. That motion amounts to pushing and drawing the “saw.”

I keep my knives very, very sharp. The dullest one is the bread knife, because large serrations are that much harder to hone. A nice, thin, extra sharp blade would obviously work even better than the bread knife. Right? It’s nothing but physics in action! Right?

The answer is, “no.” Our thinnest, sharpest blades caught on the dough no matter what, and kept pulling pieces out of the mold. Our serrated bread knife worked far better, especially when used in very small back-and-forth sawing motions.

Some people never learn.

OTHER NOTES

None. Well, almost none. We developed an excellent Speculaas Spice Mix while working on recipes for Heritage Cookies Of the Old And New World. I use it all the time as my “starter mix” when making a spiced cookie for children and other tender palates. With all this testing, however, Kate began to find the mix a little cloying and simplistic. I solved this by doubling the amount of pepper from ½ tsp. up to a generous 1 tsp., and using white pepper instead of black. That gave it just enough bite to satisfy a grownup palate too.

The recipe below includes the higher amount. Feel free to cut it back if you’re targeting younger appetites.

CONCLUSION

This has been an exceptionally long journey for what’s actually a simple cookie. Yes, a lot of that came from experiments to confirm or belie the importance of European ingredients that can be hard to find here in the U.S., and more came from testing out different substitutions. But some of the wasted time came from me trying to gild the lily. Don’t waste time doing anything more than mixing the ingredients together, and don’t look for false economies like using extra fine flour instead of starch when you’re dusting the molds.

Do follow the very simple instructions, including the extended wait time between making the dough and using it.

What you’ll get is a really special cookie that is light, crisp, delicately spiced, and only as sweet as they need to be. Sort of like a big old grin from your favorite Uncle as you pop in for a holiday. You just can’t help but smile back, and that is the magic of genuine, ultra-authentic Speculaas.

A 100% guaranteed crowd pleaser

PART II GEVULDE (FILLED) SPECULAAS

That link will take you to the follow-up article, which includes a recipe for dough made with standard U.S. ingredients, a customized recipe for almond paste filling, and looooong instructions on a full dozen different ways to shape the filled Speculaas to maximum effect. As in…

An array of different Gevulde (Filled) Speculaas

CHOCOLATE COVERED MARSHMALLOW TREATS – Part 1, An Overview

Part 1 of a 5-part series about those chocolate coated treats you adored as a child. This is the overview.

This is by far the most challenging recipe we’ve undertaken even though the basic instructions for all of the 73,000 variations could not be simpler:

  1. Make a simple, basic cookie base.
  2. Make a marshmallow filling and pipe it on top of the base.
  3. Cover with a thin coat of snappy chocolate.

Easy, right?

Well, maybe the cookie part… until you account for the infinite variations and my obsessive need to test each and every one. But that’s just volume of work, not difficulty, and I can sum it up quickly. (A) any plain cookie of the proper size will work, and we took great delight in playing around. It’s almost shocking at how big a difference you can create by shifting to a cardamom, cinnamon, or gingerbread flavored base in lieu of the classic Vanilla or Graham Wafer. (2) Straightforward shortbreads like your favorite butter cookie will also work. But (3) It is vital to keep the intensity under control, so the base to be a partner in the enterprise, and not a dominator. If you’re starting from a standard spice cookie (a/k/a “snap”), cut the amount of featured flavor in half.

The marshmallow fillings posed a bigger problem. We are bakers, not candy makers, which created a learning curve issue before we could start narrowing down toward the perfect version. I discovered there are two basic approaches to making a homemade marshmallow: the U.S. gelatin-only version, and the European Italian-meringue version. Both recipes work… if you want to make a marshmallow to eat out of hand. They emphatically do not work when you’re after an ultra-light, not too sweet marshmallow filling!

The solution came down to food chemistry in action, as discussed in this online grade school experiment. All marshmallows have a certain proportion of corn syrup (glucose) in addition to regular sugar (sucrose). They must, because at these concentrations you need to combine the two sweeteners in order to prevent crystallization. If you do the experiment, you’ll learn that a higher percentage of corn syrup yields a fluffier but less sweet product. Ding ding! That was exactly what I wanted! The two marshmallow fillings have different proportions, but raising the level of glucose pretty much solved the problem. More than solved. Taste testers actually stopped to ask, “how did you get this texture?”

Then came the third kind of marshmallow… but that’s the tale of Part 5.

The chocolate coatings drove poor Kate nigh unto madness. [NOTE FROM KATE: Ahem! “To a level of high frustration.” Husbands.] Here’s the problem in a nutshell: you’re trying to duplicate cheap, commercial, pseudo-chocolate shells using quality products in a homemade environment. So how the devil could you create that thin, snappy shell at room temperature without all the apparatus of industry?

Back to the food chemistry research I went, where I discovered that the answer lies in the kind of fat you use to thin out the chocolate. Think of it this way. You’re really trying to create a version of the “magic shell” liquid used to coat ice cream. That is nothing more than melted chocolate thinned with coconut oil. It works because the cold ice cream hardens the oil to create a shell. Leave your finger on that shell, and the spot you’re touching will turn soft and gooey because the heat of your body is higher than the melting point of coconut oil.

What we needed for Chocolate Marshmallow treats was a fat that would harden/soften at body temperature rather than room temperature. Industry uses palm oil, which does just that and is also cheap. But palm oil is evil. The combination of slave labor and environmental havoc behind that industry means that we won’t have anything to do with it. Palm oil was out. Cocoa butter was in.

For what it’s worth, our taste runs toward a classic dark chocolate coating, but white and milk versions will also work, and sprinkles, sparkles, or stripes, ground nuts, espresso powder, & etc. could be used to guild the lily. Oh yes! You can also flavor the chocolate with a touch of coffee or liqueur.

Permutations Multiplied By Possibilities; And Again; and Again; and Again.

Look at the options we had at this point in time. Start with cookie bases limited only by your imagination; multiply by two marshmallow fillings that can be piped in any shape; multiply again by literally any extract buried away in your spice cabinet; multiply a fourth time all the different forms of chocolate; multiply a final time for the ways you can flavor that chocolate; and then consider all the ways you could decorate those final products.

You could fill an entire bakery with that many variations, and still have ones you left out. Macarons 2.0, done and ready to publish. Right? Not exactly. It turns out there is a third kind of marshmallow, which will blow your mind unless you grew up in Eastern Europe.

Zefir, named after the gentle southern wind,is a marshmallow that starts from a base of concentrated fruit. But that doesn’t do it justice. They don’t taste of “fruit” so much as FRUIT!!!! The level of pure flavor is almost hard to believe, especially when you factor in the distinctly sour tang that no extract could even begin to imitate. It’s like nothing else we’ve ever come across.

Zefir are usually sold on their own, with neither a cookie base nor a chocolate coating. But both variations exist on store shelves in every country from Poland and the Czech Republic eastward into Central Asia, and no study centered on marshmallow fillings would be complete without at least mentioning Zefir as a potential variation.

Alas, but Zefir are also a maddening puzzle we still haven’t cracked! The basic method could be the simplest one of all, and it has worked spectacularly for both sour apple and raspberry versions. But it’s also failed completely with some other fruits, and we’ve yet to understand why. So part five of this series is a work in progress. We can promise results for the apple and raspberry versions, but things get inconsistent after that.

CONCLUSION

Macarons are a very elegant, grownup treat. Chocolate Marshmallow Treats make your inner child jump up and down like a vibrating six year old. But the two cookies share something in common: they can be made in endless, high-end variations that deserve to be tucked into elegant little boxes for a nifty markup. If you’re a bakery owner, take me at my word and do a few “Why not?” experiments of your own. It could be the start a whole new trend, and it’s as simple as 1, 2, 3:

  1. Cookie Base, flavored with anything you want;
  2. Marshmallow Filling, flavored with anything you want; and
  3. Chocolate coating, flavored with anything you want, and decorated as you desire.

It took us forever to get each of those pieces capital-R Right, but none of them is hard on its own once you have the recipe. So don’t be daunted! People across the world will bow at your feet once you master the simple tricks that let you make these for gifts, parties, and sales. Wait a sec… Let me lodge the protest on your behalf:

“Across the world?” Come on Scott. Why the exaggeration? We all know this treat from childhood. It’s hardly the sort of thing that would make people all over the world go wild!

Think not? Let me leave you with this:

A LIST OF INTERNATIONAL VERSIONS, VARIATIONS, AND NAMES (drawn from perhaps the best Wikipedia article ever)

THE CHOCOLATE MARSHMALLOW TREATS SERIES

Part 1, The Chocolate Marshmallow Treat Overview

Part 2, The Cookie Base Options

Part 3, The Marshmallow Filling Options

Part 4, The Chocolate Coating and Finishing Options

Part 5, Experiments With Fruit-Based Zefir Marshmallows

CHOCOLATE COVERED MARSHMALLOW TREATS – Part 2, The Cookie Base Options

Part 2 of a 5-part series about those chocolate coated treats you adored as a child. This examines the cookie base.

This should be a short post because it has a relatively simple, if far-reaching, message. Most of us grew up with a single version of Chocolate Marshmallow Treats. That’s the one that will feel “right,” while everything else is an experiment. But that version is not “right” to the rest of the world. There are almost infinite ways to customize these cookies, and a great many of those variations have been popular in some part of the world even if they were unknown in yours. So when you look at the different options for the cookie base, start by considering the options and possibilities.

As always, skip to the bottom if you are only here for the recipe

Chocolate Marshmallow Treats can build on almost any kind of cookie base, and shifting that part up will completely change the effect for the loved ones who are privileged to share your bounty. We really did test this, and the distinctions aren’t exactly subtle. Indeed, the best advice we can give is this: keep the amount of flavor in your cookie base down to a hint rather than a dominant feature. You want the cookie part to mesh with the marshmallow and the chocolate, not fight them for dominance.

The recipes we tested include:

  • Commercial Vanilla “Wafers” – on the smaller side, but absolutely delicious as a plain, almost invisible foundation. The marshmallow filling will soften them in the beginning, but time will help them to crisp back up a little.
Homemade Vanilla Snaps
  • Homemade Vanilla Snaps – Step up your game from “plain” to “elegant” with a homemade version.
  • Graham Cracker Snaps – I grew up with MallomarsTM as my personal norm. Those come with a graham cracker base that evokes a S’more. See below for an elegant homemade version that’s worth eating out of hand as well as inside a cookie.
  • Spice Snaps – See the master recipe below, or use your personal favorite with about half as much spice as you’d use for a free standing cookie. Full-flavored snaps aren’t partners so much as pushy, wannabe overlords.
Cocoa Spice Snaps with marshmallow only, white chocolate, and dark chocolate
  • Shortbread Wafers (Commercial or Homemade) – You just can’t lose when buttery goodness comes to town.
  • Miniature Cake Rounds (No Recipe Provided) – This is as common as can be among the commercial versions, but you won’t see a recipe here. We do cookies, thank you very much, not cake. (I might also be just about done with experimenting by now…)
  • No Cookie Base – Omit the base and you get a candy rather than a cookie. Same issue as the cake base. Besides, I have zero doubt that anyone who reads this will be able to figure this one out on their own.
Want to play? Lemon curd dots to go inside the marshmallow!

CONCLUSION

That covers it folks. Expand out from here. But please pause for a moment and look at how we’re already multiplying out! So many choices for just the cookie part. And believe me, there are just as many options when it comes to the marshmallow filling.

THE CHOCOLATE MARSHMALLOW TREATS SERIES

Part 1, The Chocolate Marshmallow Treat Overview

Part 2, The Cookie Base Options

Part 3, The Marshmallow Filling Options

Part 4, The Chocolate Coating and Finishing Options

Part 5, The Strange New World of Fruit-Based Zefir Marshmallows

NOTE: You can also use the Vanilla Snap/Wafer recipe as your base. Cut the vanilla in half and then add in the Spice Option.

CHOCOLATE COVERED MARSHMALLOW TREATS – Part 4, The Sticky Problem of Chocolate Dip

Today you get a big, fat note from Kate, because I’ve somehow become the family chocolate dipper.

Oh, we’ve all tried it, and we all have our tricks. I’m the one who gets to share the final results with you, though, because I strongly believe in the Power of Chocolate. It is, after all, its own separate food group!

[NOTE FROM SCOTT: It also has magic powers. I know this from long experience with both a wife and two daughters. “Just stand back and throw some chocolate at her” isn’t a joke, it’s a survival mechanism. The masculine life expectancy in America soared in the late 1890’s and early 1900’s. Hershey’s went into business in 1894. Coincidence? You lay your bets, and I’ll lay mine.]

As always, you can skip to the bottom if you’re only here for the recipe

We’ve been dipping various cookies in chocolate for years, as evidenced by the recipes in Volume I of the Heritage Cookies Cookbook. A careful observer may notice that the quality of our chocolate dip in some of those photos isn’t nearly as smooth and shiny as commercially made products. There is a reason for that. First, we are home bakers, not chocolatiers.

Sure, I could invest into (a few more) additional pieces of equipment. Then, because tempering chocolate is best done at volumes larger than we usually use, I could sink an inordinate amount of money into ingredients only to learn how to temper chocolate properly. But… really?

Friends, chocolate ain’t cheap. Never was. And neither is time. Therefore, I am forever grateful for every little trick, as well as for those immense bricks of good-enough, affordable chocolate from Trader Joe’s. They do a pretty good job for most our applications. For fussier cookies we’ll buy Callebaut or Valrhona, and for convenience, Scott is willing to use those commercially available chocolate melts. But that doesn’t get us into the main point of this article.

Why is high-quality, commercially produced chocolate so pretty and shiny, and how can one do that at home? I’m not a chocolate expert so I’ll give you the shorthand as I understand it.

Cocoa butter, the off-white fat that forms the bulk of the chocolate we eat, crystallizes into several different forms. Of those, the beta-crystals are the ones that produce a smooth and shiny surface. If you melt your chocolate under exacting, well-controlled conditions, working the softened product under controlled humidity, concentration, temperatures, and timing, you will end up with tempered chocolate. Such conditions can be achieved for the home baker, but they require low air humidity, a large marble or granite board, and a certain minimum volume.

Plus, of course, practice.

But there is a shortcut! Properly tempered chocolate is chock-full of beta-crystals. It snaps upon breaking, and the break is smooth instead of crumbly. The chocolate’s surface shines with that undeniable gleam of quality and good taste.

Commercial chocolate makers, who process tons of material, have their processes tightly in check. The less-expensive brands also stretch their batches with extra fillers (powdered milk and lots of extra sugar), flavorings, emulsifiers, and various fats to act as melt conditioners. You will notice that cheap chocolate has a list of ingredients as long as Twinkies, whereas high-quality chocolate will have fewer than you can count on your fingers.

Technically speaking, the final product requires only cocoa butter, cocoa, and sugar. But there is an inexpensive, readily available product that works even better if you are willing to turn a blind eye toward certain other factors.

To Palm Oil Or Not To Palm Oil, That Is The Question

Palm oil is entirely edible, tasteless, inert, and has a combination of high molecular weight and melting characteristics that allow you to easily thin chocolate enough to produce a hard, thin layer at room temperature. These properties, its low cost, and its ability to substitute the more expensive cocoa butter, makes it ideal for a whole slew of commercial applications.

NOTE FROM SCOTT: Wilton, the maker of Candy Melts™ sells a product called “EZ Thin Dipping Aid.” That is the product to use if you’re willing to go the palm oil route. It works like a charm and is the perfect solution used across the board by the baking industry. So why do we go to all this effort to avoid it? Well…

Coatings, fillings, cakes – even tortillas! Palm is an incredibly useful product for a host of culinary purposes; so useful that human greed has gotten involved to change the calculus. Entire tropical rain forests were cut down to make space for palm plantations, where brutal working conditions approaching slavery are routinely employed. And there is absolutely no way to source palm oil from only the “good actors.”

Understand: palm oil is no worse than anything else from the chemistry and biology points of view. It is a fat, with all the pluses and minuses that entails, and a particularly desirable one because of its unique characteristics. But our family will not willingly contribute toward either environmental devastation nor human degradation, and so palm oil has now become a product that we actively avoid whenever possible. You will not find it in any of our recipes until we’ve been convinced that the problems were solved.

If Palm Oil Is Out, What Then?

So what do you do when you’ve ruled out the cheap, convenient, and chemically ideal ingredient as your melting aid? We ended up resorting to the more expensive, natural and equally ideal cocoa butter. You know, the stuff that actually belongs in chocolate!

A quick online search revealed that cocoa butter is available in convenient melt discs. A purchase under $20 lasted us through great many chocolate projects, so a little goes a long way. Make sure to get the food-grade, as many less-expensive brands are intended for cosmetic use only.

What did we try before cocoa butter?

“Everything.”

It feels like it, anyway. Butter, cream, and various oils all got a whirl in our kitchen. Our younger daughter is a great fan of coconut oil as the magic ingredient for the “magic shell” used to coat ice cream. That texture is exactly what you want for Chocolate Marshmallow Treats too, but it just doesn’t work at room temperature. The coating stays solid when it’s down at ice cream temperatures, but it turns tacky on cookies and becomes downright runny if your room turns warm.

Butter and cream will also lower viscosity (i.e., the chocolate melt is thinner) but they won’t give you that shiny surface and can also remain sticky. Vegetable oil works to thin the result and it helps the melting process, but the chocolate remains even runnier because the melting point is that much lower.

We found that cocoa butter was the only alternative that really worked. It has the right combination of both melting point and melt properties to help soften the chocolate thin it for a good dip – but also gets hard enough to avoid being sticky at room temperature. Think of every other chocolate! They melt in the mouth, not on the plate.

But What About The Pretty, Shiny Part?

Aha! You want to grow beta-crystals.

Think back to that sugar crystallization experiment from elementary school. You coated a wet string in sugar crystals, put it into the saturated liquid, and then watched the crystals grow over the next few days. Those initial crystals were key to giving a platform for the crystals to form. You had to seed the string.

In exactly the same way, you can seed your microwave-melted chocolate with beta-crystals by adding solid grating of an expensive, shiny, properly tempered chocolate you bought at the store. If you fail to do that, the chocolate won’t look shiny after it sets. A day or five later, depending on how humid it is, you’ll notice the chocolate’s surface breaking into light and dark structures. The chocolate is blooming with the growth of unwanted, non-beta crystals.

Compare the two enrobed treats in the photo below:

So here you have it. You will find that white chocolate melts differently from all other chocolates, because it has a slew of various other ingredients. I had to add more cocoa butter to help it melt and got a thin coating as a result. Milk chocolate is the best-behaved and least likely to seize. Which brings us to a sticky situation:

What If Your Chocolate Seizes?

Seizing refers to a phenomenon where you are melting chocolate, stirring it, and it suddenly thickens into a grainy, thick, clay-like mass. Seizing occurs when a droplet of water accidentally splashes into your melt. A steamy kitchen has been reported as a culprit in cookbooks. The cocoa butter crystallizes into the “wrong” crystals, locking its structure into something you can’t easily use.

Overheating your chocolate will make it more prone to seizing. The darker the chocolate, the easier it is for it to seize, too.

But there is a fix: Add boiling water one tablespoon at a time, stirring vigorously. The water will dissolve the structure of the crystals, and give you a chance to melt-and-seed as described above.

This being said, I have not tried to make chocolate coverture with a melt that has seized and been rescued. I don’t know how the final product would set, and whether it would bloom or not. However, this chocolate can be used for any other melted chocolate application. If you make ganache, you can save it for a cake filling, brownies, or truffles you’ll probably be making down the line.

I hope this helps. Keep playing with it and expect to have a ruined batch every so often. Since no chocolate is wasted unless you burn it, this experimentation is a low-stakes learning curve. Let us know how this worked for you, and please share tips of your own!

NOTE FROM SCOTT: As you might expect, we made a lot of coated treats in the process of recipe development over the past several months. A lot of them looked perfect when made, and perfect the next day, but mysteriously bloomed after a few days out on the table by the window (we being too lazy to store them properly). Poor Kate was beside herself, figuring that all her careful work had gone wrong. (NOTE FROM KATE: Not “beside myself.” I am entirely too cool a cat for that. More like, pissed off and frustrated. This might have something to do with the fact that I dejunked our excess storage containers 😉

Then, one late morning, en route to a work-break bit of snitching, I noticed that the cookies were positively glowing in the sunlight; and made my fingers sticky in an extremely tattle-tale way. Aha! The penny dropped. The chocolate coating was heating past the critical stage and then re-hardening in a random way without the benefit of beta crystals to guide the process! The result? A coating that bloomed with big white splotches after it rehardened.

It tasted just as good before and after. I assure you; I tested that feature thoroughly, and with great attention to detail. But it is a lesson to remember. Leave your chocolate out in the sun, and it will lose its temper, have a tantrum, and go all white in the face.

To Mold Or To Pour?

The neatest solution is to spend a few bucks on a silicone chocolate mold. Paint the inside of that with your chocolate coating, set it aside to harden, and then fill it with your marshmallow. Top that with your cookie, or some complementary jam and then your cookie. Chill a little more, and then unmold.

Perfect every time unless your coating somehow sticks to the silicone.

THE CHOCOLATE MARSHMALLOW TREATS SERIES

Part 1, The Chocolate Marshmallow Treat Overview

Part 2, The Cookie Base Options

Part 3, The Marshmallow Filling Options

Part 4, The Chocolate Coating and Finishing Options

Part 5, The Strange New World of Fruit-Based Zefir Marshmallows

CHOCOLATE COVERED MARSHMALLOW TREATS – Part 3, The Marshmallow Filling Options

Part 3 of a 5-part series about those chocolate coated treats you adored as a child. This examines the marshmallow fillings.

Part 1 of this series provided an overview of this massive project, with some notes about the problems we ran into.

Part 2 listed several recipes we developed for different cookie bases: Vanilla, Spice, Graham Cracker, and Shortbread. You can also use a thin cake round, but we left that one out because this is, after all, a project devoted to heritage cookies.

This Part 3 examines the two main approaches to creating a marshmallow filling. There is a third approach too, for fruit-based Zefir marshmallows, but I’ve moved that discussion over to its own Part 5.

Piped with a round tip onto commercial wafers
Piped with a star tip onto commercial wafers
Rose, Vanilla, and Banana on homemade Vanilla Snaps. Color coded with a few drops of food dye.

As always, skip to the bottom if you only want the recipes. The rest of this article digs into the process behind those final results.

The Internet offers a metric ton of recipes for homemade marshmallows, most of which work pretty well. They’re the world’s easiest candy. Basically:

  1. Start with a thick and sticky substrate (made from the marshmallow plant in antiquity);
  2. Heat a sugar syrup to the soft ball stage (235‑240 °F a/k/a 112-115 °C), using a combination of table sugar (sucrose) and corn syrup (glucose) syrup to prevent crystallization; and then
  3. Whip the sugar syrup into the substrate until it balloons up to create fluffy marshmallows. These can be piped while warm, or else cooled in a pan to make cut-out eating marshmallows.

The American version uses a lot of gelatin to make that sticky substrate. The European version uses whipped egg whites with less gelatin; i.e., is a gelatin-strengthened Italian Meringue. NOTE: French meringue is egg white whipped with sugar; Italian meringue is egg white whipped with hot sugar syrup; and Swiss meringue is egg white heated to around 170-175 °F (76-79 °C) before being whipped. Swiss is stiffer and more stable than Italian, which is stiffer and more stable than French.

Problem #1: The filling was denser and sweeter than we wanted.

Think of a classic marshmallow you eat out of hand. They have a distinct chew to them, right? It’s part of the appeal. Now think of that chocolate covered marshmallow treat you grew up with. Much less chewy! And a bit less sweet, because flavor also comes from the cookie base and the chocolate topping. The The cookie would not be perfect until we got a handle on the problem.

Fair enough, but how do you change a marshmallow recipe to achieve those targets? It can obviously be done – the commercial products prove that – but we had to figure out how. And that was a major pain in the whosis, because our expertise on the baking side did not extend into this kind of candy making and sugar work.

The first and most obvious solution (cutting cut back on the amount of gelatin) proved to be impossible. Cut back too far and the structure dissolves rather than getting lighter, and I could not fidget my way into a perfect balance because kitchen scales only have so much precision. Plus the marshmallows were far too sweet for this use, and cutting back on the sugar too created other textural issues. I fought this problem for months, and ended up with a pair of solutions that work hand in hand.

Kate gets 100% of the credit for the first. She noticed that our trusty stand mixer began to really strain as the marshmallow mix cooled down. Part of this came from how the filling thickened as it cooled, but the overflowing bowl factored in too. Her solution? Shrink the recipe by a third. Huge difference. The lower volume resulted in a fluffier marshmallow because the machine wasn’t slowing down, and also because the bowl had extra room to accommodate it.

I claim credit for the second solution. I posted the question on some Internet groups/boards, and no one seemed able to help. All I got were suggestions for vegan substitutes that could be used instead of gelatin. That wasn’t the issue! Vegan shmegan; I just wanted to know what was going on in the chemistry, and how to adjust it. One long-suffering volunteer finally burst out with, “maybe you should take a food science class or two.”

Ding ding! For some reason I’d done all my Internet searches using the words “chemistry,” “physics,” and descriptions like “fluffier” and “denser.” I’d never done one using the term “food science.” Why not try? I did, and up popped this lovely article on a project for grade school science teachers: “Sweet Science – Making Marshmallows.” I urge you to read it, but here’s a quick summary in case you want to save some time. Loosely translated, the project reads as follows:

“Have your students make marshmallows with different proportions of sugar to corn syrup, and then measure the characteristics. They’ll find out that more sugar equals a denser and sweeter product, while a higher ratio of corn syrup reverses that. Then you can let the kids eat their experiment, and send the sugared-up darlings off to some class with a colleague you don’t like.”

Okay, I added that last last sentence on my own. But look at what it says! Lighter, and less sweet. Exactly what I wanted. We did the experiment; it worked just as predicted; and the results now appear in the recipes below.

Plus there’s this: Now you have the power too! By way of reference, American eating marshmallows have a sugar:syrup ratio of 6:1 by volume. That’s now at 3:2 for the cookie filling, which coincidentally works out to just about 1:1 by weight. This is just about perfect for us, but you can fuss with it to your heart’s content to find the proportion that’s perfect for you. Tastes differ. Though it must be said that we achieved a texture so “right” that our testers actually singled it out for special compliments! Yes, you really can tell.

Problem #2: Piping the Marshmallow was a P.I.T.A.

There’s no easy way to say this. I suck at piping. And that is a problem because this is a recipe where you need to work quickly. Cooled marshmallow filling stiffens, is harder to pipe, and tends to mound up unevenly instead of covering the whole cookie in a pretty layer. Nor does it help that our biggest piping bags are “mediums” on anyone else’s scale. Even the reduced recipe required us to refill the bag two or three times, which led to the filling cooling off that much faster, and becoming that much… You get the idea.

Marshmallow gets stiffer as it cools, and won’t pipe out cleanly.

In the end I found three solutions that worked pretty well.

  • Scott’s Solution. Rope in Kate or a daughter to cover for my sorry efforts. This works perfectly, and I recommend it highly.
  • The Doh! Solution. Buy a bigger bag. Maybe next time. They aren’t as easy to find as you’d think.
  • Solution #3. Prepare two or three of the medium-sized bags before you start to pipe the cookies out. This saves a few critical minutes, and also lets you use more than one tip.

Yes, I am overselling the difficulty a bit. Anyone with the right tools and some basic skills won’t find it as challenging as I did. The multiple-bags approach also solves a lot of the problem, and the cookies taste just as good even if the marshmallow cools enough to come out lopsided. Still, forewarned is forearmed. Be ready to pipe as quickly and efficiently as you can; and/or to laugh at your funky shapes.

Problem #3: The Infinite Variations

Continuing the theme from Parts 1 and 2, the marshmallow filling can also be varied in as many ways as your imagination permits. And it’s super simple to do!

So-called “plain” marshmallows are flavored with vanilla extract. An even teaspoon works perfectly at these amounts. “Flavored” marshmallows replace the vanilla with with any extract and/or food color that’s buried in your spice cabinet, and that same 1 tsp. will do the job just as well. Lemon, rose, rum, banana, coffee, mint, almond… there is some place in the world where that flavor of marshmallow is a beloved favorite sold in stores. I recommend some color coding to avoid frowns of confusion, but it really is that easy.

Spices work too but we found that spiced cookie bases were easier to control. Marshmallows have a ton of air, and adding enough spice to provide solid flavor can make them a little gritty.

Fruit flavors are a little different. The extracts work fine for a properly artificial flavor reminiscent of commercial products, but you can also get The Real Thing by making Zefir instead of a classic marshmallow. Talk about intense essence of fruit…! But that’s getting ahead of myself. I moved that discussion to Part 5 for very good reason, and you’ll simply have to wait.

CONCLUSION

It took some serious work and research to nail down the filling part of this cookie, but that really came down to exploring things at the food science level. [It had nothing to do with me being obsessive, no matter what my piping assistants may say!] If you follow the recipe below – either one – you will find it quick, easy, and effective. You’ve got your wheel, and there’s no need to recreate it.

So where are we at?

  1. Make a simple cookie base, flavored in any way you can imagine.
  2. Pick your choice of marshmallow approach, and flavor it with any extract or liqueur in your cabinet by substituting 1:1 for the designated vanilla, and color coding with a touch of food dye.
  3. Pipe your marshmallow creation onto your choice of cookie, using your choice of piping tip.

Bing, bang, boom. You’ve got these Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Treats 70% done. All that remains is coating them in everyone’s favorite darkest-brown food of the gods.

THE CHOCOLATE MARSHMALLOW TREATS SERIES

Part 1, The Chocolate Marshmallow Treat Overview

Part 2, The Cookie Base Options

Part 3, The Marshmallow Filling Options

Part 4, The Chocolate Coating and Finishing Options

Part 5, The Strange New World of Fruit-Based Zefir Marshmallows

CAT TONGUES (“Langues de Chat”) – crème brûlée’s best friend ever

Did you know? This world famous cookie with the evocative name is actually part of a pair

This is one of those classic recipes I’ve been meaning to try for ages because it has the world’s most evocative name, but kept putting off because it looked too easy. I have seen many dozens of recipes, maybe hundreds of recipes, and they are basically all the same. What could I possibly have to add? Yes, the formalities had to be observed. We really do bake every recipe we publish, over and over until we have it right, so I knew that sooner or later I’d have to go through the motions. But I will admit that Cat Tongues fell into that rare group where my inner Scrooge kept insisting, “Why bother?”

Was he ever wrong! It took me several different batches to penetrate the subtleties behind this cookie, and then an explanation from our extremely French friend before I finally got the underlying point: Cat Tongues aren’t a standalone cookie at all, but rather something new that I’ve never played around with before.

So there was a lot of reason to bother. I only regret that I waited this long.

As always, skip to the bottom if you only want the recipe. What follows is a discussion of the tips, tricks, and stumbles along the way.

How Often Do You See A Mathematically Perfect Recipe?

The French are a very orderly people, at least on the cooking side, and few things show that more than the traditional recipe for Langues de Chat:

  • Equal weight of butter;
  • Equal weight of powdered sugar;
  • Equal weight of egg white;
  • Equal weight of flour; and
  • A hint of salt with a touch of some aromatic “extra” such as citrus zest, spice, or vanilla.

That’s it. A kitchen scale should let you multiply the recipe up or down with no effort at all.

Note To [Shall Not Be Named]: Yes, I really do mean “no effort at all.” Start with the bowl for your mixer. Put that on your scale, tare to zero, and then add the butter. Make a note of the weight, which should be 115 grams for a single stick, give or take. Set the mixing bowl aside, and put a new, smaller bowl on the scale. Tare to zero, and crack in your egg whites, saving the yolks for the custard you’re making alongside. Get to that same weight or below, and then set this aside too (as discussed below, there is no issue if the egg whites come in underweight). Repeat with a bowl for the powdered sugar, and then again for the flour. A,B,C and alakazam: you are ready to go.

Problem #1: The Egg Whites Did Not Cooperate

For our testing I chose to normalize around the weight of a standard U.S. stick of butter, which is 4 oz = 115 g. The conversion tables may say that equates to around three (3) egg whites, but that is only true if they’re Jumbos. The regular Size Large whites from our local supermarkets averaged out to more like 32-33 grams apiece, meaning that three was too little (about 95-100 g), but four was too many (≈ 125-130 g).

I solved this by using four and spooning off the excess, but there’s no need to be that compulsively precise. I’ve since learned (see below) that professional bakers often like to control the amount of spreading by cutting back on the egg whites. Et voilà! Don’t be like me. Be like the pros. Use three whites per stick of butter, and tell anyone who asks that you departed from mathematical perfection on purpose.

Problem #2: The Order Of Addition

Here’s another case where I outsmarted myself by trying to be too precise. The typical “creaming method” approach says to (1) beat the butter until it is fluffy and white, (2) beat in the sugar and flavoring until smooth, (3) beat in the eggs one at a time until fully combined, and then (4) beat in the flour until just combined. The order matters for chemistry reasons. Several of the Cat Tongue recipes reverse #3 and #4, which got me all angsty. Was it a hidden trick? Or a typo?

After testing both I can tell you that it makes no difference. If you add the flour first (i.e., at step 3), you need to take extra care to avoid an eruption from the mixing bowl, but the advance warning should be enough. There is no real buildup of gluten to worry about. If you add the egg whites first, you never get them fully incorporated into the butter because there are just too many, but it will still come together nicely when the flour comes in later on, and you won’t need to deal with “are you sure this order is right?” question marks as you bake.

It’s a batter, my friends, not a dough. Very forgiving. Laugh at me so you won’t have to laugh at yourself, and then do whatever feels best. [But do remember to laugh. These are cookies, after all. They’re supposed to be fun.]

Problem #3: What “Extra” Flavors Work Best?

The answer turns out to be just as simple as those for the first two so-called problems: “Whatever suits your fancy of the moment so long as it’s only a hint.” That said, I should probably describe what happened during the testing in order to give you some context.

My first batch followed an online formula suggesting ¼ tsp. of vanilla for each egg white. Uhm, no. Or rather, NOOOOOO! That was at least triple the required amount, and it also hit us squarely in the [yawn] button. Plain and buttery, sure. Character free? No thank you.

The next experiments involved cinnamon and cardamom, two favorites, and those worked fine so long as I stuck to sharply limited amounts. You want only enough for tasters to know the “extra” flavor is there. You do not want to make extra-flavor Cat Tongues.

Hmm. That might be a little vague. Let me try this a different way. When our daughter tasted the final batch, she reacted by saying this:

“Darn it, these remind me of something but I just can’t think of what it is. Wait a sec… I know! They taste like the toasted pancake bits off at the side of the griddle. You know, those little spots and strings that happen when batter drips off your ladle by accident? Don’t tell anyone, but I love those.”

She nailed it, and I hereby promise to keep the admission in confidence. From now on, at least. I need to share it here because it explains one of the two main reasons why you want such a light hand with the flavorings. The primary Cat Tongue flavor needs to come from that crispy, toasted, butter-infused browning at the edges and the bottoms of each piece. Adding too much “extra” flavor hides that, and thereby subtracts more than it adds.

What’s the second reason? Read on.

The Inside Story Brought It All Together

Both Kate and I had grown a little frustrated by the time I got a few batches in. The cookies tasted nice enough, but they just didn’t deserve all the treasured memories we read about online. Sure, everyone loves toasted buttery goodness, but these weren’t all of that. I can make something even better with a standard butter or spritz cookie that won’t require fussing around with a piping bag. Same thing for the texture. Yes, they were delightfully crispy when fresh out of the oven, but they quickly toughened up and no amount of dunking could change it. If anything, we thought the cookies were downright dunk-resistant because all those egg whites seem to provide some insulation. Given a tray with an array of Cat Tongues alongside any of the butter cookie variations from Volume 1, the Cat Tongues would soon be lonely orphans.

I had to be missing something, so I took the most recent (cinnamon) batch out in search of a native tester. Where was I going wrong?

NOTE FROM KATE: I was really happy with this particular series of photos, until I noticed that the custard was frowning!
NOTE FROM KATE: But once I flipped the offending sliver of orange peel, the entire composition brightened the cheerful glow I knew was hiding there somewhere! (That’s what you get when you anthropomorphize custard…)

Fortunately enough, we have an old friend who is not only a native of France but also a professional baker of extraordinary skill. Jean-Marc does not share America’s obsession with cinnamon, but even he approved the light hint contained in the batch I brought over. Then he ventured a polite suggestion:

“It works, but I still miss the orange. We always made our Langues de Chat with orange zest so it would pair with the crème brûlée.”

I’m sorry, what? That off-hand comment led to a conversation that finally flipped on that proverbial, cartoon light bulb in my head. It comes down to a simple, basic realization:

Cat Tongues do not compete with butter cookies, because they are not a standalone cookie to begin with. They are designed and intended to be served as an accompaniment to custard desserts like Jean-Marc’s crème brûlée, crème caramel, ice cream, etc. The cookies use up extra egg whites; the custards use up extra yolks; and both sides get enhanced when they reunite with the cookie being used in place of a spoon.

Aha! Gotcha! My expectations needed a sideways shift. Cat Tongues wouldn’t be lonely orphans on that tray, because they wouldn’t be there alone. They’d be sticking up out of a crème brûlée like the ultimate edible spoon, and that, my friends, would not be the last survivor. Langues de Chat are a co-star, not a lead; an elegant and efficient way for fine dining establishments to transform another dessert from delicious treat into memorable experience; and thus they stand in a category all their own.

That makes sense. It explains the hype, the romantic memories, and even the dunk-resistant texture. It also explains why keeping isn’t an issue, especially since they are easy to refresh with a quick pop in the oven prior to serving. And it made me much more excited than I’d been before. These are truly a Heritage Cookie.

But wait, there’s more. Jean-Marc had another casual bombshell to drop. “If the spreading gets too bad you can always cut back on the egg whites.”

I’m sorry, what? “But I thought the whole thing starts from that 1:1:1:1 ratio.”

“It does,” he said. “But it’s still just the start. The recipe still works if you’re a little short on the whites, and sometimes we did it on purpose when they were coming out too thin.”

Damn but that man is good. Consider me a swine who appreciates the pearls. So much for adding a fourth egg white and then spooning off the extra. Please don’t tell him that I was crazy enough to do such a thing. Jean-Marc shakes his head at our lack of sanity every time he sees those Christmas Snowflake Cookies. No need to reinforce the suspicion, right?

The Final Problem: Time And Temperature

Do the research and you’ll see two different approaches to the baking time for Langues de Chat. Either 375° for ≈ 10 minutes, with strict instructions to spin the tray halfway through, or else ≈ 15 minutes at 350°, with cautions to think about spinning the trays if your oven has hot spots.

I tested both, and found that it really comes down to elusive differences in the amount and depth of the browning around the edges. 375° gives faster and deeper browning with a slightly better array of colors, but the window between “brown” and “burnt” can grow kind of tight. That is why spinning the trays becomes vital, and why you also need to stand around for occasional checks as the cooking time comes to a close. 350° takes a little longer and produces more of a uniform brown than the intriguing range of dark-to-tan, but it also requires less in the way of babysitting. The choice is entirely up to you. The distinctions are subtle at best.

Just be aware that time and temperature aren’t the only factors. This is one of those recipes where the color of your cookie sheet can make a real difference.

Over the years we have amassed a collection of five different sheets, which now range from two that have gone black with years of use, one that is now blued steel, one that is gold-toned, and one that is still pure silver. The dark ones bake this cookie almost 3 minutes faster (at both temperatures) than the lightest one. That is a very significant difference! Account for that factor with your own baking sheets as you set forth on this journey.

Two Final Cautions – They Really Do Spread That Much, And Thus Your Piping Skills Will Matter

The photos in this post show cookies that may be as wide as 2″ across (5 cm) at their broadest spots. Every one of them started with an even ½” (125 mm) bead from the piping tip. Do the math… No. Don’t bother. Let me summarize.

Cat Tongues spread way more than you’d ever believe, they do it to all directions, and they are magnetically attracted to each other in a demon-powered effort to meet, marry, and merge into a single, good for nothing mega-cookie.

Plan accordingly. Keep them well and truly separated. If you can only fit nine or ten on a cookie sheet, so be it. You are the cookie chaperone! Keep those little, grasping, would-be elopers well and truly apart. There is no such thing as a chaste little kiss. The tongues will lock and entwine.

The only thing that really helps is good, even piping. Cookie gremlins view bumps or bulges as an open dare to see if there’s enough material to race off in some unexpected direction. My daughter Lee gets full credit for these clean-looking specimens because she possesses those skills. She got the piping bag because I do not possess those skills. The gremlins have my number. There’s nothing I can do beyond striking back at the evil, cookie destroying imps here, on paper. Vengeance is mine! Bwah-ha-ha-ha…

Extra Spice From Kate: These cookies really explode to their full potential when paired with custard, ice cream, or even a good yogurt with a bit of honey. For crème brûlée, follow your favorite recipe. After a bit of fussing, I found that an even mix of white and brown sugar, broiled for one minute, worked best. As for the chocolate, it’s a matter of taste. Scott says he would love the chocolate accent with the “right” custard, but I find I prefer the crisp cookie plain. I compared store-bought meltaways with our usual semisweet chocolate amended by a bit of cocoa butter, and in this application they performed comparably.)

…You have been warned. Jean Marc said the wicked things feed on extra egg whites, so the reduced amount may help, but I’m telling you: there’s something supernatural behind all this. You’ve got to be ready for their tricks!

CONCLUSION

Cat Tongues a/k/a Langues de Chat are a special purpose cookie designed and intended to be a sort of edible spoon for custards such as crème brûlée or a luscious homemade ice cream. Nothing on earth can match them for that targeted role. They’re also easy if you have some basic competence with a piping bag. Or a competent and draftable daughter.

Keep the flavors subtle, and by all means pair them up to match the accompanying dessert. And remember that the browned edges and bottoms are what you’re really after. If you keep that goal in mind, and follow those simple guidelines, you’ll be more than happy with the results. There really is something elevated and elegant about serving Langues de Chat alongside their companion treat.

Enjoy!

VANILLA SNAPS AND WAFERS – a classic cookie and ingredient

The classic, with versions for eating out of hand or for using in other recipes

Here’s another head smacker cookie really should have gone into Volume I but somehow escaped our notice. It came up now in a sideways fashion. We’ve finally gotten around to working on Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Treats. You know that cookie. Everyone does. It’s the one you loved as a child, with a simple cookie base that has marshmallow on top, and is then coated with a thin chocolate shell.

That cookie has scores and scores of different version around the world, but the most common uses some equivalent to a Nilla Wafer® base. So that meant I should start by making… Doh! I’ve never actually worked up a homemade version of Vanilla Wafers. [Sigh]

The result was all we could have hoped for and more. In fact, we discovered that it isn’t a single cookie. It’s actually three.

  1. Use the full amount of flavor and you’ll get a very pleasant cookie to eat out of hand, that adults will enjoy as much as children.
  2. Use a moderate amount of vanilla, and you’ll make something very close to the commercial product. Just better in every way. Real butter and real love make a real difference. Kate says that toddlers in Prague were fed a similar cookie whenever treats were earned.
  3. Reduce the amount of flavor all the way, and you will get the plain, invisible cookie that’s perfect for all the “other” uses these get purchased for. Banana Pudding; El Cheapo Tiramisu; Chocolate Marshmallow Treats; etc., etc., on and on, and suchforth and suchlike.

As always, skip to the bottom if you only want the recipe

This is a simple cookie, and it’s meant to be a simple cookie, so I’m going to try to keep the discussion brief. There weren’t many issues that needed to be addressed. It was really a matter of focusing on what we wanted the cookie to be.

First the Eggs

I wanted this to be a light, crispy cookie with a fair amount of air, that would taste a little buttery without coming off as rich. Most recipes in our books and online resources called for one whole egg to go with each stick of butter. I tested that, along with one egg white, and one egg yolk.

The whole egg won handily, both for ease and flavor. Yes, you can make a good cookie with both egg white and egg yolk, but the whole egg is simpler and, for this use, better.

Wait; Haven’t We Made This Before?

For crying out loud! Butter cookies. Sugar cookies. Shortbread. Alfajories. Spritz Cookies. Snaps. They’re all pretty much the same, right? Just butter, sugar, flour, starch, and egg in slightly different proportions, plus a hit of flavor. Was this one really different, or just a variation on one of our existing and already-tested recipes?

Well… no. I went back and crunched the numbers. These are in the same family but the proportions are distinct enough to earn their own name. Same for the classic French cookies we plan to work up someday, such as Langue du Chat (“Cat’s Tongues” a/k/a Homemade Milanos®), and Tuiles. Those use several egg whites to create a different species within the same genus.

What’s In A Name?

All that recipe comparison work did clarify one thing that was bugging me. These are not a “wafer”!

I am a lawyer in my real life, and have been for 30 years. So I can speak for my profession when I tell you that virtually every non-criminal problem I see comes down to a variation on the theme of frustrated expectations. Person X thought s/he deserved or would get an “A,” ended up with a “B”, and grew angry at that result. So Person X goes back to Person Y to complain, “where is my A?”, and the situation then grows worse because Person Y insists that s/he meant “B” all along. And most of the time both interpretations fit the actual words.

The solution? Define your bloody terms so you can at least know where you really disagree! Try it the next time someone wants to argue about politics. “Exactly what do you mean when you use that word?” You’ll be shocked at how much of your fight disappears, or at least settles down to the amicable question of how words ought to be used.

In any case, I have spent a lot of years getting frustrated over that stupidity, in both my profession and in politics, so I get a little [ahem] picky about calling things by their proper names. A “wafer” is an extremely thin, usually broad cookie like our different Snowflake variations, Tuilles, or Lace Cookies. You can get to that result in many different ways, but that’s the definition.

This cookie does not meet that definition, and thus it isn’t a “wafer.” This cookie is a “Snap”. Harrumph.

We define Snaps as any plain, simple, round cookie that features a clear and focused flavor. Cardamom, Anise, and Black Pepper Snaps feature a single spice. Ginger snaps feature a spice mix with a touch of molasses. But that is the family group, and that is where this cookie belongs. Harrumph I say again! And harrumph for good measure. Harrumph. Harrumph. Harrumph!

Alas, but the outside world does foolish things on occasion. Sometimes it will even [gasp!] ignore it when some large company mislabels what ought to be a Snap as a Wafer. And a wise man has to know his limits. So let us agree on a simple formula, okay?

First, I am in the right. Harrumph. And that means the world is wrong. And thus equity, justice, and fair play are unanimously on my side.

Next, I am not being petty no matter what certain females in my household may choose to imply. Nor childish. Not, not, not!

And no, this isn’t a fight I’m going to win. So how about a compromise?

Let’s agree to call the eating version of this cookie a Vanilla Snap. That’s the tasty one with a full tablespoon of vanilla, which is going to make people sit up and say, “I never thought I’d say it, but these things are capital-G Good.” The weaker versions, which are intended for use in other recipes anyway, can be called by that other name for the sake of allowing the rest of the world to save some face.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Confirmed Again: “Other” Starches Work Better Than Corn Starch

Is the cookie better with a bit of gluten-free starch to supplement the flour? Yes, it is. Cake flour might work too, but we didn’t test it.

Would corn starch work? Yes… but it isn’t as reliable as rice flour, tapioca flour, arrowroot, etc., because you’ll occasionally get a less-done piece that leaves a gummy sensation in your mouth. It’s an effect we wrote about in our book Heritage Cookies of the Old and New World. Corn starch breaks down at a higher temperature than those others, and thus cookies made with corn starch are more likely to have leftover “uncooked starch” in the final product. That’s the underlying problem; it was confirmed again in these experiments; and there’s simply no reason to fight the science. Vanilla Snaps cook until the bottoms brown, which gives a margin of error, but why make use of that margin if you don’t have to?

We usually bake with tapioca starch because it is cheap and readily available in large quantities at our local oriental market. We have tested rice flour and arrowroot too, and found them to be identical. We have read that potato starch fits in too. Corn starch is the only one that requires a higher baking temperature.

Would A Drop Cookie Work?

We always prefer to write up drop cookie recipes when possible, just because they’re so much easier for new people. Refrigerator slice-and-bakes come in second, followed by roll-and-cut cookies, and then by ones you pipe out. What was the best way to go for this one?

The answer depended on what we wanted to do with them. Drop cookies worked fine from the baking perspective, but I simply couldn’t get them to come out even enough to use as a consistent base for the other project. So here is my verdict:

  • If you’re after the eat-out-of-hand Vanilla Snap version, make a simple drop cookie and be done with it. You don’t need to do it that way, but you can. Kate swears that they also came out a little lighter and crispier than the rolled-and-cut version, though I couldn’t tell the difference.
  • If you’re after a cookie to use in some other role (like the base of a Chocolate Marshmallow Treat), roll them out and use a cookie cutter. These are dead consistent and thus better as an ingredient. The dough is a little on the sticky side, but works fine if you simply dust with flour as needed.
  • If you’re trying to jazz things up, add a bit of milk to thin the dough out to a batter, and then pipe out something fancy. You could even sprinkle it with a bit of sanding sugar. It ought to work with a spritz gun as well.

Bake Until The Bottoms Are Good And Tan

Part of the flavor in this cookie comes from actual browning on the bottom. Most cookies want to come out of the oven when they’re still pale, and the edges feel barely set. Leave these in for the full 12 minutes, or until you can see browning around the edges.

CONCLUSION

That’s about it. One forgets that plain old vanilla isn’t that plain at all. It’s a really delicious spice, and it fully deserves to be just as celebrated in a Snap Cookie of its very own. They are as “heritage” as you can get, and well worth making.

CENTRAL EUROPEAN OŘECHY (Filled, Molded faux-Nut Cookies)

A traditional Central European Christmas treat. They require some patience because the special molds need to be filled one by one, but they are unbelievably rich, unbelievably good, and unbelievably charming.

Two things happened right after I published our recipe for Oreshki, the Eastern European faux-nut cookie made with a light, crispy shortbread crust and a luscious dulce de leche filling. First, all our Ukrainian, Russian, and other Eastern European friends descended like a pack of starving hyenas on a fat old antelope with a limp. Don’t worry, we got out of the way in time to avoid injury. The show was magnificent!

Second, our Czech, Polish, and other Central European friends said, “Those are really cool, but it’s not the ‘Molded Nut’ cookies I grew up with. You should work on those too!”

Oh? Kate had only a vague memory of Ořechy from her childhood. Grandma Kandler had the molds, but never made the cookies. “Too much hassle.” So I set to researching and uncovered four – only four! – fairly consistent recipes. It took some tweaking to get them right, but Oh…My…Heavens! We will not have a Christmas tray again that does not feature these ridiculously rich, tender, and flavor filled nutty-mocha treats. They are a hassle, yes. But they are also unique, and unbelievably good.

As always, skip to the bottom if you only want the recipe. But this might not be the best article to do that with. It contains some extremely useful tricks.

First, Know Your Target

NOTE ABOUT THE NAME: The Eastern and Central European faux-nut cookies have the same name, languages and spelling aside. It’s pronounced “OH-RZHE-ch-ee”, more or less, with a rolling “r” and the “zh” combined into a single sound that English doesn’t possess, and the “ch” being that guttural, back of the throat sound like the Yiddish name Chaim. English doesn’t have that sound either. The “ee” sound at the end denotes a plural, like putting an “s” at the end of an English word. It technically translates as plain old “nuts”, but in context it’s understood to mean “walnuts;” and that is the shape of the mold. You’ll get it wrong if you try to pronounce it properly, especially since there are small variations between the different Slavic tongues. But who cares? You’ll get credit for trying, and everyone will know what you mean.

The name is the same; but the two cookies could not be more different. The Eastern European one is plain, crunchy, and child friendly. It rings the same chimes as Alfajores in South America, Millionaire’s Shortbread in England, and Stroopwafels in the Low Countries.

The Central European cookie (this one) is a sophisticated flavor bomb aimed at knocking adults on the seat of their pants in rapture. The shell is a walnut cookie so tender you have no choice but to eat them in one big bite. They’ll crumble under your teeth if you try to stretch it to two. The filling is less “buttercream” than a “whipped, flavored butter” redolent with coffee and rum. It’s so rich that we include an instruction to use it sparingly!

The final flavor becomes mocha because the cocoa in one part and the coffee in the other combine into a single unit in your mouth. It doesn’t matter which part (shell or filling) gets the cocoa powder, and which one gets the coffee, so long as each side is only half the final flavor. The recipe below goes with cocoa in the shell and coffee in the filling, but both ways work great.

The Dough Is Easy; The Molding Takes Patience

The dough is simple to make; a straightforward creaming method approach. Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, beat in an egg with an optional touch of extract and/or spice, and then mix in the dry ingredients. The only complication is that one of those ingredients is a large amount of grated walnuts. We’ve yet to see walnut meal in a market, but it’s easy enough to make. Toast whole walnuts for 8-10 minutes in a 350° F (175° C) oven until they’re fragrant. Remove, cool, and then grate down to meal.

NOTE: A rotary hand grater is by far the best tool for this task. Food processors get dicey because walnuts go from “chopped” to “nut butter” in a heartbeat, much faster than almonds or even peanuts. On the plus side, it doesn’t need to be flour-fine. Grating them is plenty good enough.

Then comes the filling of the molds, which is indeed a fidgety chore. Where the Eastern European version is baked in a unique stovetop mold, Central European Ořechy get formed in thin, individual metal molds that go in the oven so the cookies will keep their shape. It isn’t hard, just time consuming because you need to go one by one.

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This is the Central European mold. Notice those crumbs? Don’t clean them off until you are done! That residue from earlier bakes saves you from needing to butter and flour the molds every time you fill them.

First you coat the inside with a bit of butter, then you dust it with flour, and then you press the dough in with your thumbs until it coats the entire inside of the mold with a layer that’s maybe 1/8″ thick. [NOTE: You only need to butter-and-flour on the first batch. The remaining crumbs from that batch will be enough to prevent sticking on the second, the second for the third, and so on.] Then you scrape off the excess with a flat tool like a metal spatula or bench scraper, and then move onto the next one.

The dough will soften significantly as you work it. That makes the molding easier, and causes no issues. Incredibly tender doughs will do that. The process isn’t hard, just time consuming.

But you aren’t ready to bake just yet!

Trick #1. Freeze or dock the dough baking. We learned the hard way that Ořechy will puff up to be almost level if you put them right into the oven after shaping. It leaves you with a dent more than a cavity.

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Our first batch came out of the oven with no room for the filling!

You can prevent this by (A) poking in holes in the dough with a fork (“docking”) as you would with a pie crust; or (B) freezing the dough in the molds before baking. Both work, and both leave plenty of room in the final product for your incredibly rich filling.

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Docked and frozen before baking = generous cavities for filling. Too much room if you use the traditional whipped-butter filling.
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Version 1 versus Version 2. Either too little room, or too much!

Trick #2. Freeze or dock, but don’t do both. Docking combined with freezing will give you full sized cavities inside your “nuts,” suitable for a normal buttercream, frosting, caramel product, or any other typical filling. Bit the traditional filling for this cookie? A half-teaspoon or so is all you want. As one baker friend said, “a knob the size and shape of an almond.” That’s just about the amount of room that’s left over if you freeze the shells before baking and so nothing else. Docking creates a little bit of extra room. The combination creates too much.

Extra room won’t kill you, of course, The cookies taste just fine with a cavity that’s got some empty space.

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Fresh out of the oven. These were frozen but not docked. A nice, noticeable cavity that has just the right amount of room for a super-rich filling. [P.S. I feel your pain if you’re groaning at that poor sheet pan! It was recently used for roasting bones, and then vegetables right after. A few more trips through the elbow grease sink with Barkeeper’s Friend ought to help.]

Trick #3. Ignore both #1 and #2, and then press a hole in to the flat cookies when they are warm from the oven. So you have molded cookies that puffed up in the oven. You pull them out and say, “Oh no! They have no room for filling!”

Not a disaster. Simply press the warm and still-soft center with your asbestos thumb, and you’ll have a dent you can work with. Yes, it is hot, and yes, you can get a minor burn if you have human skin instead of baker’s asbestos. But beauty can be expensive. Even when it’s only beautiful cookies.

On To the Whipped Butter Filling. This couldn’t be any simpler. Whisk the butter until it’s soft and fluffy, and then whisk in the other ingredients: powdered sugar, more grated walnuts, instant espresso/coffee powder, and a good hit of dark rum. That’s it. What you get is a flavor bomb that carries the essence of Prague. If America is the land of cinnamon and sugar, and Scandinavia of cardamom, Prague’s heart belongs to a mix of mocha, nuts, and rum. Utterly scrumptious. Just use it with care because we aren’t kidding about how rich it really is!

Place an almond-sized piece of whipped butter filling between two shells. Close carefully so you don’t shatter the tender pieces. Dust with powdered sugar to complete the illusion, and enjoy. They will improve overnight, hit their peak on Day 3, and be good for another two days after that.

Be prepared for “Wow!”

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CONCLUSION

Ořechy require some patience because the special molds need to be filled one by one, and they only last for a week or so after they get filled. That makes them a special occasion treat. But you know what? They are also spectacular enough to be a star entry on famous dessert trays in any top coffee house of Prague, Warsaw, Vienna, Budapest, or any of the other great cities of central Europe. They’re the sort of food that tourists taste, gape at, and then go home to tell stories about.

We won’t be making them on any kind of a regular basis. Not even for guests. But you’d better believe we’ll be making them for the holiday tray! They’re just too cute and too fantastically delicious to pass by. The whole family would pine at the loss now that they know what we’d be missing.

Yes, they are that good. And cute, too. Wouldn’t you agree?

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PITTSBURGH (KAUFMANN’S) THUMBPRINTS

Pittsburgh’s famous Thumbprint Cookies, originally from Kaufmann’s Arcade Bakery

We’ve documented a lot of different cookies tied to particular European cities, and have more on tap. But that happens in the U.S. too. This one is a specialty of our native city: Pittsburgh, PA. It is a thumbprint cookie with an odd, very tender, but almost chewy texture that is topped with a great pile of dense frosting. The cookie part always has sprinkles (known locally as “jimmies”), which are color coded to match the frosting. Chocolate and vanilla are the most common flavors, but it’s actually traditional to create something unique.

As always, skip to the bottom if you want the recipe without the background

The story in this case begins in the 1890’s when Kaufmann’s Department Store opened it’s showcase location “Dahntahn.” New York had Macy’s and Gimbel’s; Pittsburgh had branches of both stores, but Kaufmann’s reigned supreme. People took the trolley into the Golden Triangle just for the privilege of wandering its twelve enormous floors of retail glory.

The Arcade Bakery was located in a single, small room tucked into a nook off the entrance on 5th Avenue. I remember it well. They sold baked goods of all kinds, but these Thumbprints were the specialty of the house from the 1980’s on. Nowadays you find some version or another in every supermarket and bakery that tries to catch the essence of the city.

What Makes These So Distinct?

In a word, this is the cookie designed for people who home in on the corner pieces of a square cake because they have a touch more frosting per bit. The cookies themselves are plain, pleasant, and maybe a little bland. They’re topped with as much as two inches (2″!) of sweet American frosting.

That’s it in a nutshell.

The Cookie Part

This dough is a joy. The resulting cookie is a nice, simple shortbread with that unique texture, and is handy for many different uses. Just form the dough into a ball, roll it in something showy like chopped nuts or sprinkles, and then press in the thumbprint. Bake in a medium (350 F) oven for 15 minutes. One recipe makes two dozen (24) 3-bite cookies.

The frosting gets added on once they cool, obviously. But I meant what I said about this being a really handy recipe to keep in the files! Jam thumbprints work with this dough too. Put your jam in a microwave-safe bowl and zap it until it foams up with large bubbles. Let it cool, and then spread that on the top before baking. (The pre-cooking prevents it from bubbling over onto your tray).

Or you can combine things, like a jam heart under a frosting or meringue cap. Or you could use a ganache. Or bake the cookies with no filling, add a jam/filling on top, and then choose whether to coat the result.

On and on it goes, with no real stopping point. The master recipe for this shortbread is one of the best and most generally useful that you’re ever likely to find.

The Frosting Is U.S.-Level Sweet

Consider this a warning to our European friends and relatives. The U.S. sweet tooth goes way beyond anything that’s found overseas, or even in other parts of the western hemisphere. You’ve probably heard the stereotype. Maybe even a few jokes to go along with it. I, a native born son, am here to tell you that it’s neither a joke nor untrue. We Americans don’t oversweeten everything we eat; it’s just that we can – and we will when that suits the particular treat. Like this one.

Let me put it another way. I am a notorious chili head. I eat and enjoy peppers so spicy that more than one person will leave the room when I decide to make a real sinus clearer just for myself. I don’t do it for show, nor to prove my manhood. I just like that feeling of sweat breaking out on the forehead, and several decades of pushing that line have created a tolerance that few others possess. As some people from Thailand once told me, “They wouldn’t think you were strange in Bangkok, they’d just say that you like your food really hot.”

The U.S. tolerance and taste for sugar is like the Thai, Indian, Mexican, or my view on spicy peppers. If you have that tolerance and taste, you enjoy foods that push that line just as much as you appreciate normal, human-level foods that do not. If you don’t have that tolerance, you gape in some combination of awe and horror at what others are willing to consume.

The frostings in the recipe below are what Americans will call “good and sweet.” That means (A) they are exactly on point with what you’d buy in a Pittsburgh bakery, and (B) far too sweet for non-natives. We strongly recommend that those in the “B” category should cut the amount of sugar back by a solid 20-40% for the vanilla, and 50% for the chocolate. It will not have any significant effect on the overall volumes.

Part Of The Heritage Is Creating Your Own Versions

All accounts say that Kaufmann’s eventually sold as many as 70 different versions of this cookie. Bakers who’d ‘made their bones’ were encouraged to practice their creative chops on this recipe before branching out into something more artsy. The shop put them all out, and then quietly dropped the ones that didn’t sell.

Strawberry, caramel, cinnamon, spice… the list is endless. And that means that you should play around to create your own version if the basic recipe appeals to you! Want an example? The Kaufmann family seat was the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece called Fallingwater, which is now a sort of architectural museum. The Fallingwater chef created this unique Peanut Butter Thumbprint as his homage to the cookie (which can also be made with a dab of grape jelly in the middle). It may be unique, but it’s also entirely traditional, because one-of-a-kind experiments are part of this cookie’s tradition.

CONCLUSION

If you are a native Pittsburgher, or especially a former Pittsburgher, this is a recipe to save and treasure. It’s a smell and taste of home.

Other American natives will enjoy it too. It’s a damned fine cookie with its festive sprinkles (“Jimmies” in Pittsburghese); one that’s absolutely perfect for bake sales; and one that can and should be varied to your individual taste.

If you hail from some other nation, you’ll enjoy the cookie too… if and only if you take some care to adapt the frosting to your own taste and tolerance for sugar. Your target is something that children will love, but many of their parents will roll their eyes about. That is the experience of the Kaufmann’s Thumbprint Cookie, even if the recipe will need some tweaking for your particular group of raucous, waiting-to-be-sugared-up school kids.

ORESHKI (FAUX WALNUTS) – Eastern Europe’s Cookie Of Childhood

Confession: I love crossword puzzles, and I’ve done enough to learn certain words that writers can’t seem to do without. Here are some examples of recent clues I’ve seen:

  • Clue: “Treat that is often twisted”
  • Clue: “Crispy, pull apart snack”
  • Clue: “Cookie eaten from the inside out”

Oreos! Duh. Everyone knows that, right? Yes… if you’re from the U.S.A. People who grew up in Ukraine, Russia, Poland, or other countries of central and eastern Europe might well stare at a clue like that with nothing but bewilderment that “Oreshki” doesn’t fit in the grid. What else could the writer possibly be thinking about?

As always, skip to the bottom if you only want to read the recipe. And what the heck. This link will take you to the Dulce de Leche recipe in the middle.

Oreshki are a classic treat that are known and loved from Russia to the east, through Poland and the Czech Republic to the west, all the way down to the Crimean Sea. The formula is easy to describe: start with a very basic cookie dough, shape it into hollow nuts, and then fill the nuts with something gooey that children will love. Subtle? Bah. Sophisticated? Hah! Adult with a capital “A” like spice cookies or ginger snaps? Not in the slightest.

Nice, sweet, and simple. That’s your ticket. This is the cookie of childhood.

Working On The Cookie

If you’re here doing research, let me give you a tip as someone who’s actually read through and pondered several dozen online recipes. Don’t overthink it!

Your problem is easy to state: natives adore their Oreshki to the point that innumerable Eastern European families have now shared their “secret” methods to get them just, exactly right. There’s a lot to go through. The wonders of online translators, combined with a wife who can translate what those will not, allowed me to put together a humongous file of different trips, tips, options, and formulae. It was a true brain buster! But do you know what I found when I averaged things out, and then compared the results to other cookies?

Your target crust is a plain, light, crispy wafer that won’t fight with the filling. Period. Keep that in sight and you won’t have any problems.

Yes, you will be a little confused by how some of the common ingredients get used. I certainly was. But there is a pattern to the strangeness: those “touches” all add up to (i) a hint of acid, and (ii) a bit of “other” fat to supplement the butter. I don’t know why they do it. The amounts are so small that it’s hard to see how these additions could change the result. Nevertheless, it is a clear pattern, our work is about “heritage” just as much as “right,” and so I made a point of testing the variations.

The most common version marries a touch (½-1 tsp.) of vinegar with a tablespoon of mayonnaise, and then uses baking soda instead of powder. I ended up going with 1 tbsp. of sour cream paired with baking powder. Feel free to pursue either route as you wish. The differences will be subtle at best because you aren’t really supposed to notice the crust in the first place. It’s the filling that make Oreshki special.

These crusts get cooked in a special stovetop mold (electric versions being available in some countries). Here is ours, which is made from aluminum and available for a very low price from various sources:

You’ll need to fidget a bit to get the timing right. We ended up at 65-70 seconds per side on our average-sized burner with the gas set to a “2” out of “9.” Don’t expect that to match up with your burner! We also noted that molds filled with fewer cookies toasted faster than ones which were completely full.

Make an effort to keep the inside cookie-tan, like a shortbread, rather than nut brown. That was the one critique we got from our taste testers, and when I went back to do the final batch with that correction all of us noted that the new and lighter-colored cookies were also a bit airier and crisper when eaten.

Finally, you’ll need to trim the shells when they come out of the mold. It’s impossible to get the sizes right every time! A sharp paring knife is the perfect tool. Just don’t throw those trimmings in the trash! Most people simply add them into the filling for a bit of texture. We prefer to recycle them into crumbs for a leftovers-cookie or pie crust (think of how many recipes you know that begin with the instruction, “Grind up some vanilla wafers and then use the crumbs for…”). Do as you will, but please don’t waste what ought to be used.

These shells are too dark. Don’t throw them out, of course. They’ll work well enough. It’s just that lighter colored shells will be crisper, airier, and that much better.
These are what you want. The outsides are darker, the insides are “light tan shortbread”. BTW, do you see that one untrimmed shell on the top right? That’s the norm, and where your extra crumbs come from.

Nailing Down The Filling

The all time classic Oreshki filing is a peculiarly addictive caramel made from dulce de leche. More on that below. But honestly, anything that’s sweet, sticky, and a little bit runny will do. Nutella® works like a charm. So does lemon curd. It’s hard to go wrong, and none of my native taste testers had anything bad to say about those variations. Playing with your filling is fair game. But there’s that ‘heritage’ thing again, so we really ought to discuss the original version that left so many millions of 8 year old addicts in its wake.

Let’s start with an overview. You’ve seen this flavor profile before! When push comes to shove, this is just another plain shortbread being paired with rich, gooey caramel. In South America that takes the form of Alfajores. In the U.S. it’s a Twix® bar. In the U.K. it’s Millionaire’s Shortbread. Western Europe has it’s Stroopwafel. Got it? There’s nothing complicated about it. We’re only going to tweak things a little to match the Eastern European palate.

You can start from a true caramel if you wish, but native recipes follow the South American approach by starting with tins of sweetened condensed milk, and then boiling them for a few hours.

After that it’s easy. Soften this up with a bit of butter, add some cream cheese for a mild sour tang, and you’re done. Most recipes suggest the addition of crumbs from the crust-trimmings, and some will also add ground nuts, but those are both optional steps. It really comes down to whether you’re after pure, luscious smoothness on the inside, or luscious smoothness offset by a little bit of crunch.

How To Fill Your Oreshki

It took a few tries, but I’ve now got the system down pat.

  1. Take one shell. Top it off completely with your filling. Use a second shell to scrape that level. Set aside for the moment.
  2. Add filling to the second shell, and scrape that level with a third shell.
  3. Put shell half #1 on top of shell half #2, and then repeat the process until all your shells are done.
  4. NOTE 1: It’s not a bad idea to overfill a bit, and then squeeze the halves together so the excess filling will squish out the sides. Wipe it off with a finger, and then set aside your perfectly filled nuts for further decoration as desired. [What do you do with your filling-dirtied finger? Come on. Really? Being the baker has its upside!]
  5. NOTE 2: Oreshki with a runnier filling may want to go in the fridge to set up.

The only question left is, “to seal or not to seal.” These shortbread-and-caramel treats often come with a chocolate coating. Think of the aforementioned Twix® bars and Millionaire’s Shortbread. Heck, it’s common to coat Alfajores too in recipes that don’t add coconut. So it makes perfect sense to seal those two halves together with a bit of chocolate, right?

The answer is both yes and no. We liked the caramel ones better with a chocolate seal. No doubt about it. And every one of our native tasters expressed the same preference. “That’s a great touch!”

But then they’d add something like this: “My grandmother never did that. Of course, she didn’t have much access to chocolate back when I was a little girl.”

Again, it’s entirely up to you. A simple dusting with powdered sugar works just as well for chocolate-free versions, and better for those with an alternative filling.

With the ends sealed in chocolate. Very tasty, but not entirely traditional because chocolate was hard to obtain back in the day.

Conclusion

This is a really fun cookie so long as you don’t try to fight its basic core. Oreshki are designed for children, and adults who loved them as children. Sharing them with those children, old and young, is why American bakers will want to make them.

That said, you really, really do want to make them. I can pretty much guarantee a downright special reaction from the actual children in your life, and an even stronger one from adults who grew up in the Oreshki Zone. It’s like dropping a puppy in the lap of their inner child.

First comes the delighted grin. Then the delighted cry, “Oreshki!” Then some insight into a delighted childhood soul. Everyone who eats Oreshki has his/her own special technique. Some pop them in whole and crunch. Others twist them in half, and then crunch. There’s a twist-and-stretch school too; twist, scrape, and crunch; twist, stretch, and lick in midair… You get the idea. Pure, childish glee.

Think that’s going too far? Head on back to the beginning of this article, and the analogy to Oreos®. Imagine your typical American expat who has moved overseas and built a life somewhere that knows nothing about their childhood treats. Get him or her in a friendly environment, like visiting your home or receiving a tin as a gift. Now open it up and reveal a crispy, black-and-white, twist-apart cookie. What will happen? The exact same thing.

That memory is what Oreshki are really about. That, and creating a similar memory for future generations. It will work, I promise. There’s nothing that Littles enjoy more than something gooey, sweet, and crunchy that looks like something it isn’t. Oreshki are flat out fun at every level.

Enjoy!