Cookie, pancake or both? Who cares when they’re just plain good?
I’ve got some money to bet! You either (a) know and love Welsh Currant Cookies/Cakes, or (b) have only the vaguest impression that such a thing exists. We fell in the latter category. Yes, I have a number of friends who chimed in with, “Oh, you’ve got to research currant cookies!” So we knew they existed. But I’d honestly never tasted one until we got into the recipe testing.
You may now put us in category #1. They’re wonderful.
NOTE FROM KATE: When this intriguing cookie came up for trials, I was of two minds about it. First, leaves were falling and we were carving pumpkins. For most people, October 31st is just Halloween, cosumes, and candy bars. The holiday originated as Samhain, a Celtic New Year. One Samhain tradition is thanking the warm part of the year for its bounty, and greeting the cold hibernation with its hunting season. Traditional offerings include bannocks, biscuits, or, indeed, cookies. I was all in favor of this concept: we would try a recipe and I would have some genuine griddle cookies to share with the garden.
And yet… pan and griddle means oil. Have I mentioned that we fry have not researched a single fried cookie because I loathe even the idea of the cleanup? If you’re like me, fear not. The amount of butter or oil is minimal, and these curiously enticing cookies are well worth the effort.
The brits have a wonderful word that catches the essential appeal of Welsh Currant Cookies/Cakes: they are moreish. It means they’re one of those foods that don’t taste “special,” but trigger that mysterious need to just keep noshing until there is nothing left in range. Simple, tasty, accessible, and fun.
“But are they a cookie or a pancake?” That’s a whole other debate. They have one foot firmly planted on each side of the line. Thus their assignment into our category for Not Quite A Cookies. Another perfect description.
To a naturalist “currants” means one of two species in the genus Ribes, both of which produce small, round berries that look like itty bitty grapes (which are in the unrelated genus Vitus). There’s Ribes rubrum, which can be red, pink, or white (my favorites are the classic reds), and then there’s Ribes nigrum, the black currant species favored by our daughters. Kate’s favorite would be Ribes uva-crispa a/k/a Gooseberries.
Red currants have that classic sweet/tart flavor profile you find in currant jam. The black ones have a unique, musky flavor. Gooseberries are sort of like a sour blueberry with the size and texture of a very firm grape. All three are delicious once you acquire the taste. Heck, we grow them all in our yard! But they’re only good when eaten fresh or turned into some kind of jam, preserves, or compote.
HISTORICAL NOTE: America has a fascinating history of actively destroying these crops. It happened because currants and gooseberries are required species for the spread of blister rust, a fungal disease capable of wiping out entire forests of white pine. White pines were a major U.S. natural resource in the early 20th century, so both state and federal authorities felt compelled to fight it off. The easiest solution? Eradicate the vector. And so they did. Currants and gooseberries disappeared from American soil for many decades, and are only now making a comeback due to the fact that resistant white pines have evolved to take over the forests. Mostly. Ribes of all kinds are still illegal in Maine and several other states.
Getting back to the point, culinary “currants” are not currants at all. They are miniature grapes that dry into extra small raisins, which are then sold under names such as “Corinthian grapes,”Zante raisins,” and “Zante currants.”
ANOTHER HISTORICAL NOTE: Those names have their own history worth reading about. The grape varietal originated in Greece and became a significant export crop. The main shipping point was the city of Corinth, a major seaport in the country’s northeast. The actual farms were, and largely still are, located in the Greek southwest, on an island called Zakynthos f/k/a Zante. Hence the descriptive words Corinthian and Zante. The name “currants” gets used because the berries aren’t much bigger than actual currants.
Those miniature raisins are what the recipe refers to. We’ve never had a problem finding them in any large supermarket.
Research showed surprising consistency in the ingredients and amounts. The dough contains (by weight):
3 parts flour;
1½ parts butter, lard, or shortening (which you can stretch to 2 parts if you want);
1 part sugar;
1 part Zante currants (see above);
1 part egg combined with dairy (buttermilk, soured milk, yogurt, whole milk, etc.); and
A surprising amount of baking powder, with some nutmeg and grated orange zest to tie it all together.
Yes, there are some bakers who view the orange zest as an option rather than a requirement, and I’m sure that most of them are perfectly nice people, but in this case they are wrong. You’ll see. ‘Nuff said.
Those proportions vary a bit from recipe to recipe, but never by enough to change the basic pattern in a fundamental way. It’s so consistent that I now believe old country Grandmas passed the recipe down more or less as follows: “Use these proportions and then vary according to taste.”
If it’s good enough for Grandma, it is good enough for you and me.
The method varies more than the ingredients. Our recipe adopts the most common, cut-in-the-butter approach. Almost as many recipes use a creaming method, and more than a few call for melted fat. We didn’t bother to try them all because the message is clear. Pick whatever method you want so long as it gives you a rollable dough.
Yes, that’s right: a dough. Pancake batter has much, much more liquid in it than what you use to make Welsh Currant Cookies. It really does feel and act like a cookie dough, albeit one with too much leavening to yield a normal cookie texture.
Roll to ¼” thick, and cut out rounds or other basic shapes
The dough holds its shape surprisingly well, but you want to stick with basic shapes nevertheless. We tried making a few animal shapes in addition to rounds, hearts, stars, and the like. The problems occurred halfway through the cooking process, when we had to flip each cookie/cake over. The animals inevitably lost their heads, tails, and/or legs. Feel free to try, but we will stick to the basics.
Cook on a skillet or griddle
Up to now we’ve had cookie technique in making the dough; cookie technique in the rolling; and more cookie technique in the cutting. From here on it looks much more like a pancake. Heat a skillet or griddle over a medium-low flame just like you would for pancakes, butter/oil it as you would for pancakes, and then cook the cut-outs as if they were miniature pancakes; i.e., until both sides are a light, golden brown. The exact timing will vary tremendously because of tiny factors ranging from the color and weight of your pan/griddle, to the thickness of your cookie and the fraction by which your flame leans toward medium- or low heat. You’ll be fine if you exercise a bit of touch and cooking experience, especially since (a) the ones that go too far will still taste great, and (b) a dusting of powdered sugar will cover all sins.
What you get will taste like a raisiny, not-too-sweet cookie with the texture of a pancake. Absolutely delicious, and incredibly moreish.
NOTE FROM KATE: Just like with pancakes and crepes, griddle cookies take its own bit of practice. A few of my observations are as follows:
SIZE MATTERS: Both of the pan, and of the cookie. Every pan holds heat differently, and a larger and thicker cookie will require more time.
CONTROL YOUR HEAT: A relative of the pie crust, the raw cookie will soften if left waiting in the hot kitchen for too long. Pop the sheet in the fridge between pan-batches in order to retain cookie shapes. As the cookies hit the pan, they will want to set, not burn. They will warm up and turn flaccid. For an easy and cooperative flip-over, use a tool the width of the cookie (offset spatula works well) and make sure its bottom is set. It will be darker than you think it should be.
ENJOY THE PROCESS. This is a very zen, in-the-moment activity as compared to more precise baking. Imperfections happen. Eat them.
Note the inside texture. Just like a very firm pancake.
Shelf Life
Even moreish cookies end up having leftovers now that our nest is emptying out. We stored those leftovers in an open bowl, an airtight container on the counter, and an airtight container in the fridge. None were as good on Day 2 as they’d been on Day 1, but they didn’t actually go stale. They just went meh. And they stayed at that same level of meh day, after day, after day. More than that, meh turned right back into yum as soon as we refreshed the cookie/cakes on a pan/griddle or through a few seconds in the microwave.
LAB REPORT FROM KATE: Side-by-side testing has shown that a fresh-made and frozen cookie, when brought to room temperature, will taste just as good upon thawing as a fresh-made cookie cooled to room temperature. Furthermore, these cookies don’t go stale as much as they simply dry out. Older ones are just fine with coffee or tea as-is, or you can revive them with a judicious 5-15 second microwave burst.
So the moral of the story is this: Welsh Currant Cookies keep like pancakes. They change very quickly, but they also store extremely well, especially when frozen, and will taste basically as good as new once you get them warm again.
Conclusion
How good is this “cookie?” We have a local diner near our house called Pamela’s (one of a Pittsburgh chain). They are famous for their hotcakes. The owners were even invited to the White House to make brunch for the first family! They are also good people we like enough to treat as our go-to place for a diner breakfast.
I’ve already stopped by with samples and a recipe, and will almost be surprised if they don’t leap at the chance to add Welsh Currant Cakes to the menu after doing some testing of their own. So my bottom line answer is this. They are good enough that some of you readers will bless this article for a great many years to come, and your heirs for that much longer.
Maple shortbread sandwiched around a not-too-sweet maple buttercream.
Alfajores: the legendary South American cookie of childhood formed from two tender, shortbread wafers that sandwich a rich caramel (dulce de leche) filling. Add a bit of maple flavor to the shortbread part, replace the filling with a rich maple buttercream, and you get a cookie that’s just as good, and almost equally loved across its range in North America.
Exceptionally pretty, and featuring a deep sweetness that hovers right on the line of “children adore it” and “adults can too,” this regional specialty is going to find its way into your repertoire and simply won’t leave once you see the children in your life squealing with glee. Just be aware that no child on the planet can resist snitching a few from a low lying jar, which means you’ll have to carefully be looking in another direct.
Perhaps with a plate of your while sipping nice cup of tee or coffee.
A NOTE FROM KATE: The cookie itself isn’t particularly sweet without the filling, which is a bit too sweet for my personal taste. Now, to be fair, this filling grew on me with every tweak. Still, my European alter-ego would like to point out that you don’t have to use all the sugar in the buttercream recipe.
I do agree that Maple Sandwich Cookies are a lovely addition to the fall repertoire, sans “pumpkin spice,” and make an enticing visual statement for both kids, and kids at heart.
A few years back we published a wonderful recipe for easy Maple Drop Cookies. This is the upscale, extra pretty version: tender, maple flavored cookies sandwiched around an intensely maple filling. What could go wrong?
The answer proved to be nothing, though it did take a little bit of fidgeting to get the details just, exactly right.
The Cookie Part
Shortbread cookies a/k/a butter cookies mostly follow a standard set of proportions. Here’s a alphabetical list of examples normalized to the same two sticks of butter in this recipe:
Testing showed that we liked this cookie just a bit more tender than a standard Butter Jelly, but it was a close call. Feel free to substitute the specified mix of flour (2½ cups) and starch (½ cup) for a straight 2¾ cups of flour.
As to thickness, keep them thin if you want to make sandwich cookies and a little more robust if you want to skip the filling. Just remember to increase the baking time too! Thicker cookies need to bake longer, especially with doughs like this with a decent amount of starch. Starches stay pasty on the tongue until the inside gets hot enough to break down. The magic temperatures are about 130° for tapioca, 140° for potato starch, and 145° for cornstarch. We prefer tapioca because you can’t exactly probe your cookies with an instant read thermometer. The lower degradation temperature to provides an extra safety margin against pastiness. Note: We have no trouble finding affordable tapioca starch at any good Asian grocery.
The cookies are done when the edges begin to brown, which also means the bottoms will be what the pros call GBD (Golden Brown & Delicious). Those toasty notes pair exceptionally well with the maple and vanilla flavors inside the cookie itself.
NOTE FROM KATE: The GBD bottoms work just fine for thin-rolled cookies. IMHO, I wouldn’t mind getting the thicker, molded-pattern ones a bit toastier. Giving them an extra minute or two will make sure that all the starch is properly degraded by heat. This is especially important when you place a tray of molded cookies in the fridge. In fact, I think a slight hint of darker, well-toasted edge would play well against the sweet buttercream filling.
NOTE FROM SCOTT: I completely agree. And for those who don’t know, refrigerating molded cookies can help to keep the pictures clear.
Next up: fancy touches, which turned out to be a lot of fun. This kind of shortbread holds its shape exceptionally well. They’re perfect for really fine cutouts on the sandwich caps, and even for patterns stamped into the dough. Have a look!
FWIW, we had more success stamping the dough first and then cutting it out. It would have been an ideal situation for using a patterned pin if we had one.
NOTE FROM KATE: This cookie holds its stamp well, but it didn’t do as well with very deep, molded cavities. It won’t be as forgiving as gingerbread, so make sure the dough is at a pleasantly cool temperature. You will also want to clean your molds between every stamping (we have a bowl of oil with a toothbrush, a bowl of starch with a powder brush, and a skewer on duty between each stamping.) For this cookie, it worked well to lightly dust the dough as well as the lightly-oiled mold. The type of your mold will also make a difference. Unlike with a hand-carved wooden mold or stamp, a laser-cut mold with sharp-angled features tends to cut all the way through the dough when pressed too hard. Use a gentle hand. In a larger production situation, I would roll the dough directly on the parchment, stamp the shapes, cut the rounds, and then remove the excess for reuse.
The Filling
Our standard buttercream filling uses half a stick of butter to three cups of powdered sugar, with whatever flavors you want added in. It’s dead reliable, thick enough to hold its shape, easy to thin as desired with a bit of milk or other liquid, and the heat characteristics are easy to understand. Butter gets soft at around 65° F (18° C), and so do these fillings.
In this case we started by simply adding in some maple syrup as the liquid. The texture was spot on, but the syrup made the filling a lot too sweet and a little too loose . Solution for the first: reduce the amount of syrup and add in some maple extract. [See Note below] This came close, but still edged over the line into the too-sweet-for-grownups realm.
Have three standard solutions for something that’s a bit too sweet: add salt, add acid, or add something bitter. Salt came first. I upped the amount from a healthy pinch all the way to ¾ tsp. That did the trick for me, but Kate said she could taste it. ⅔ tsp. proved to be the [ahem] sweet spot.
But the filling was still awfully sweet, and toed right up to the children-only line! It needed some extra help. Lemon didn’t seem to fit, so I decided to whisk in a tablespoon of cream cheese. Perfect! The extra mass tightened the filling that essential bit, and the mild acidity was enough to bring the sweetness under control.
TECHNICAL NOTE: Our go-to means of adding bitterness are molasses (also acidic), coffee, and chocolate. The molasses was tempting, but in the end we worried that it would have tried to steal the scene instead of playing a supporting role. [Additional Note: That observation all but demands a comment about molasses being a ham, but three decades of marital wisdom suggests that I might not get away with it. So never mind.]
NOTE FROM KATE: He thought he got away with it. That’s…kind of adorable, and really sweet! Just like these cookies!
Concerning Maple Syrup…
“Pancake syrup” is basically corn syrup with coloring and maple extract. I have nothing against that on some philosophical level, but it would substitute for extract rather than syrup in baked goods. All the cookies we make use real maple syrup.
But that doesn’t end the story, because real maple syrup comes in several grades that basically correspond to the time of year it’s tapped out of the tree. Think of it as analogous to the change from veal to beef, or lamb to mutton: the syrup becomes progressively darker and more intense as the season moves on. We would have loved to try some extra-dark syrup in these cookies, with less extract, but simply don’t have access. If you do, please do, and let us know the results.
Note that syrup “grades” don’t really help because it is an industry term. The only law on point comes from the USDA’s Grade A vs. Processing Grade vs. Substandard. You and I never see anything but Grade A according to that definition.
The industry used to divide the color/flavor lines using the same letter grades with different meanings, going from lightest (Grade A) to darkest (Grade C), but that made consumers perceive the darker colors as inferior. As of this writing the industry has adopted color descriptions instead of grades. Vermont’s industry page describes them like this:
Golden color with delicate taste
Amber color with rich taste
Dark color with robust taste [used in this testing]; and
Very Dark color with strong taste.
The Canadians follow suit, though they often grade by “colour” instead of “color;” except when marketing to the U.S.
Storage
Unfilled cookies should keep for a solid week in a cookie tin or other airtight container. Freeze for longer storage.
Filled cookies, and unused filling, will start to get soft if kept above 60° F (18° C), which equates to a chilly room. We prefer to use the refrigerator for convenience, but take extra air to have an airtight container lest the filling absorb flavor from some garlicky pasta in the bowl next door.
I believe the filled cookies can also be frozen, but haven’t tested it yet.
CONCLUSION
That’s a lot of detail, but it all adds up to common sense for any experienced baker. The recipe is for a simple, maple flavored shortbread, and an even simpler maple buttercream. Put the two together and you have maple nirvana. There’s a whole lot worse you can find in this world of ours. And very little that tastes a whole lot better.
P.S. We had some filling left over from the photo shoot, and a few Gingerbread cookies from another project. I combined the two on a lark and… Goodness Gracious and My Oh My! This maple filling loves, Loves, LOVES to be paired with spice cookies! It’s so good that I may well sneak some onto this year’s extravaganza tray. Make an extra batch of Ginger Snaps without the sugar crust, combine with the maple filling… Oh yes. This could definitely be a thing.
The national cookie of Australia and New Zealand; a perfect combination of oatmeal cookie with just the right amount of coconut
Anzac Day is the Down Under holiday of remembrance to honor “the contribution and suffering of all who have served or died in wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations” as part of the Australia New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC). Squish the U.S. Veterans and Memorial Days into one and you’ll have something close to the importance of Anzac Day: a big deal when every school will close, but not quite up to the 4th of July.
The holiday occurs every April 25th in honor of the men lost in the disastrous WWI invasion of Gallipoli, an event also tied to both of the cookie’s[ahem] biscuit’s contending origin stories. The first goes like this: “These were the cookies that mothers and wives tinned up and mailed to their soldier in the field. Isn’t that romantic?” The second says, “These were the cookies sold by the million at post-war fundraisers to raise money for the boys who came home. Could anything be a better symbol of the love and loyalty that isn’t romantic?” I personally suspect the true answer is “both. The recipe predates the war and was indeed sent overseas, but it boomed in the aftermath when something – anything! – just had to be done.
NOTE FROM KATE: The mention of “our boys” may sound old-fashioned in a world where women comprise close to a fifth of enlisted personnel – the number depends on the country (I checked only US, Australia, New Zealand, and Ukraine.) However, did you know that in WW1, well over 2,000 Australian women served overseas? These biscuits didn’t go out only to our boys but to our girls too, and the holiday expressly covers everyone who served, not only those who saw combat. Cheers!
Origins aside, Anzac Biscuits (the British Commonwealth word for “cookies”) have become more firmly entrenched as an Anzac Day treat than they ever were as one for the actual troops, and by now have stretched far beyond the bounds of a single holiday. This is the national biscuit of both the Aussies and the Kiwis, and the “why” couldn’t be any more clear. They’re flat out delicious. They’re simple. They are an ideal treat to make with kids. The proportions multiply like a charm if you want to feed a whole corps instead of the neighborhood bake sale. And the recipe is as close to bulletproof as we’ve ever seen, as witnessed by the fact that even an unfortunate testing mistake turned out so well that we’ve made it an official variation down at the end.
How to describe them… Take a good, solid oatmeal cookie and then give it an elusive hint of coconut that macaroon lovers will adore, and even I (a notorious hater of Demon Hair) can enjoy.
It’s one ace biscuit mate. That’s “a darned good cookie” to you Yanks.
First things first. This cookie is simple, tasty, friendly, lasts well, and is both easy and fun even for bakers who can barely see over the counter. It’s an easy, everyday cookie, not an elegant one, and certainly not extravagant. Don’t lose sight of that essence as I go down all the niggling little details and questions we had to address.
“Lyle’s Golden Syrup” does not mean “Go and buy a special ingredient”
Golden syrup is a product used across the British Commonwealth in much the same way as Karo corn syrup here in the U.S. They behave exactly the same in baking. The only difference is taste. Corn syrup has an all but invisible, vaguely vanilla flavor, while the British product has a pronounced butterscotch/caramel vibe. We ordered a bottle online as part of our research, for something like twice the cost of cheap, supermarket corn syrup. We enjoyed it too, much more than we expected. It’s a fun thing to try if you want to recreate the genuine Australian flavor. But only if authenticity is your goal.
The true spirit of the cookie has more to do with the flavor of childhood than the flavor of golden syrup, and that memory changes with where you grew up. So ask yourself this. What would remind my boy in the army of Home? Honey? Molasses? Maple Syrup? That taste will give your lad (and your little helpers) the true experience of an Anzac cookie even if it would seem a little off for your visiting friend from Sydney. Still good, but not quite right.
The substitution is simple. A 50/50 mix of corn syrup and maple syrup produces a very similar intensity of flavor. Just add them to the melting butter in place of the Lyle’s, and proceed.
“Rolled Oats” is all you need to know.
Do some online research and you will find recipes that stress the importance of using “quick oats” versus “old fashioned oats.” We’re here to tell you it makes no material difference. Use what you have on hand.
The two products aren’t all that different in any event. Rolled oats are made by steaming whole oat seeds (“groats”) and then rolling them flat between two steel cylinders while they are soft. They are then dried, packaged, shipped, and sold. Quick oats are made the exact same way but with cylinders aligned a little closer together to squish the groats that much flatter. It reduces the cooking time on a stovetop. It matters not at all in a cookie. Or at least not in this one.
The amount of oats is as flexible as the rest of this recipe. The basic formula here is 1 cup flour to 1 cup sweetened flake coconut, to 1 cup sugar, to slightly more than ½ cup of melted butter, to X cups of rolled oats. X varies from 1 cup to 2 cups depending on who you ask. We settled on 1½ cups. Do as ye will, they all worked fine and were not very easy to distinguish.
NOTE: “Steel cut oats” a/k/a “pinhead oats” are toasted groats cut into thirds to provide a nicer mouthfeel. I love eating them, but it’s a much bigger production that requires you to put them up to soak on the night before cooking. Steel cut oats would not work as a substitute in this recipe.
There is one weird instruction we still don’t understand
Every recipe we found included a fairly hefty amount of baking soda that has all its lift removed before it goes into the cookie. Some of the recipes mix it with boiling water, which makes it foam up before you add it into with the melted butter and syrup. Others mix it in cold water, and then add the slurry into the pot of still-hot butter and syrup, which makes that foam up instead. [We went with the second because it’s just spectacular enough to delight everyone’s inner child]. Either way, this initial treatment means the baking soda adds basically nothing in terms of lift. So what’s going on?
Theory one was an old trick of using water to dissolve any potential clumps of leavening agent that sifting couldn’t handle, and also ensure the most even distribution possible. But even distribution can’t be the answer in this case because (a) modern baking soda products do not clump, (b) every recipe writer in the world knows enough to specify cold water if you want to make a slurry, and (c) even those who don’t know that rule in advance would get the idea pretty darned quickly once they watched their leavening power fizzle away before the dough ever had a chance to come together.
Could it be a typo, with some particular writer making a mistake? Nope. The same instruction appears in every recipe, including the most up to date ones.
Our current theory has to do with the fact that more alkaline doughs brown a bit better and deeper. And it’s true that Anzac Biscuits have a particularly GBD (chef speak for “golden brown and delicious”) bottom. But even that has some issues, because why go to all that effort for such a relatively minor result?
So it’s still a question without an answer. But do it anyway. It really is fun to watch, and there’s probably a reason even if we haven’t figured it out yet.
The cookies have an amazing flavor balance that works just as well if you play around with the basic concept.
I made a mistake in my first test run. I doubled the amount of butter. Doh! Rookie blunder. The result is the cookie you see on the left:
I think I like them even better. It’s basically a lace cookie with lovely bits of oatmeal, scented by a perfect amount of coconut. #Yum.
We added the salt
We’ve yet to see salt in any recipe from a native Aussie or Kiwi. That said, we greatly preferred the cookies with an invisible bit of seasoning to bring the other flavors out. It’s a modern trick, but one so good that we could not leave it out of the actual recipe
The baking temperatures and times vary a lot, but even this seems to make very little difference
Do some reading and you’ll find many recipes that carefully specify a “medium” oven (350° F = 175° C) for 10-12 minutes. Others are just as clear about using a “moderately low” oven (325° F = 163° C) for 15-20 minutes, with a third group insisting on a “gentle” oven (300° F = 150° C) for 20-25 minutes.
We tested all three. The differences among the three were subtle to say the least. We made a careful side by side comparison of the fresh, same-day cookies and found that (a) the 350° result was hint more crispy, (b) the 325° cookies were right in the middle, and (c) the 300° oven made something that was a little more chewy if you squinted real hard and insisted on finding a difference. All those distinctions more or less vanished overnight. What can I say? Bulletproof.
NOTE FROM KATE: This is a very “moreish” cookie, so when I wanted to nibble the next day, I went after the “ruined” batch that mistakenly cooked at 300° for only 18 minutes. They were, after all, too tender to ship on the day of baking. An obvious failure… right? Not so. Their texture came together overnight into a wonderful, chewy texture. Two days later, even these were hard to tell apart from all the others.
P.S. A gentle hint: try nibbling your cookie with a square of dark chocolate in your other hand.
And if you want a truly authentic recipe:
It took some searching, but we did find a native Australian to use as a sounding board. An extremely generous native, who spent way more time on the back and forth than she probably expected, and even shared her favorite, classic recipe from Australian Women’s Weekly. You can recreate that recipe by using ours with only 1 cup of rolled oats, no salt, and applying a baking time of 20 minutes in a “moderately low” oven (325° F = 163° C). But you want to hear something funny? The magazine’s most current, “best ever” recipe has tweaked the recipe in a couple of ways, and now uses a baking time of 12 minutes at 180° C (355° F).
Why be consistent when you’re already bulletproof?
CONCLUSION:
We get asked for recipe recommendations on a fairly regular basis. It always follows the same general pattern. “We have XYZ going on next [date], and I’d like to bake some cookies. What would you suggest?”
We now have more than 300 carefully tested cookie recipes from all over the world, so it’s not that easy to give a straightforward answer, and we end up asking a series of questions in return. “What are your favorite flavors?” “Who is your audience, and what would he/she/they like best?” “What kind of vibe are you looking for?” “How much time/expertise do you have to put into the project?”
The most common scenario looks something like this. “Oh, I just like plain old cookies. Same for [audience]. I’m just looking for something easy, that we wouldn’t already know. And I’d love to bake them with my [child of choice] when we meet next [date].” I’d be hard pressed at this point to recommend anything other than Anzac Biscuits. They are all of that, and have a great story as well.
Turn your favorite chocolate-and-spice bars into exquisite cookies
“Infinite Temptation” may make more sense in the title than “Infinite Delights.” The testing began with a Chocolate Black Pepper cookie, and the batch looked good as it came out of the oven. Thirteen nice, hefty, 2½” pieces. I tasted one, and liked it. A lot! So I duly brought them out to my beloved, and left them there on a plate so she could try one too. Then I went off do some work on another project.
I strolled back in about 30 minutes later. There were 4 cookies left on the plate. Our pup had been with me in the office. Kate had been left alone with the plate, parked on the sofa with her laptop.
13-1 = 12. 12-4 = the sort of math that wise old husbands forgot how to do a great many years ago. Make that wise and generous husbands, since I immediately ate three more and was kind enough to leave her the last.
Batch #2 got made when we hosted a dinner for our daughter and niece. Miranda had the will power to resist, thanks to a bit too much spice for her taste. Amanda? Amanda ate so many that I don’t have the heart to rat her out in public. Let’s just say that we now have testimony to how well the cookies go with a glass of wine, and with a glass of water, straight out of hand when no one seems to be looking, and with coffee too.
Get it? Got it? Good. These really are all of that; as simple as can be, absurdly rich, and with just enough of a twist to always be unique.
NOTE FROM KATE: One whole pound of chocolate, divided into only four dozen cookies. That’s a lot of antioxidants per cookie! So these aren’t just delicious, they are a regular health food! [Yay! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!]
This is a fairly standard drop cookie, so there’s no need to bore you with the chemistry. Go look at a regular Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. Subtract ¼ cup (1¾ oz = 50 g) of flour, and replace it with half a pound (8 oz = 225 g) of melted chocolate. Bing, bang, boom, you’ve got it. The chocolate adds back the structure you lost by removing that bit of flour.
Add another half pound of chopped chocolate (or really good chips), the spice du jour, and you’re done. The only tricky part comes with the baking time. It’s easy to overbake a cookie this dark, and doing means sharing chocolate essence with the air, so we limited the baking time just to be on the safe side. 10-11 minutes instead of the more normal 10-12.
Just make sure to use a good chocolate. There is a full pound of chocolate in every batch. The flavor comes through, and cheap chocolate will show.
NOTE FROM KATE – ABOUT CHOCOLATE: Some of you might’ve seen articles about chocolate with elevated heavy metal levels. Long story short: which risk factor do you want to go with on a given occasion: chocolate or chardonnay?
Development
Chocolate is great. Chocolate is awesome. But the special part here comes from the spice.
Please note that I didn’t actually create this cookie. We publish heritage cookies not mind numbingly good original creations. That said, the accusation has been made and so I feel the need to defend my process.
I began the project looking to highlight a black pepper cookie. Think about it: all those spice snaps, with flavors ranging from across the map, and yet almost no one remembers to try the one spice that’s in basically every kitchen across the breadth of Western civilization. It couldn’t be right… and it wasn’t. Examples abound. And I may get back to them idea later on. But the thought of chocolate black pepper cookies could not be resisted, and thus I went a little sideways.
A Google search for the term “chocolate spice cookies” comes back with a bit more than 68 million results! Italian recipes lead the way, but U.S. versions (like this one) aren’t far behind. There’s one from South Africa with just black pepper… there are a few based on Mexican chocolate… Viennese chocolate pepper cookies (a roll out)… It doesn’t end. This isn’t an original idea, just my version of one that every baker across the world has thought about from time to time.
So what did I do? (A) I elected to go with a U.S.-style drop cookie, and (B) I made it so good that all the other 67,999,999 are stuck with trying to come in second.
NOTE FROM KATE – ON FLOUR: We had a batch where we ran out of AP flour (11.7% gluten) and ended up using pizza flour (14% gluten) for about a quarter of the required amount. Those cookies didn’t spread. They had so much more structural integrity that if you made a little pyramid, it would probably look like a little mountain upon baking. The cookies in the photos are made with regular AP flour, and they did spread some but not very much. This begs the question, would a softer flour yield a more traditional cookie with more spread? Would substituting some starch for 10% of the flour do the trick? If you try it, let us know on our eponymous FaceBook group.
FYI, there was nothing wrong with the pyramidal cookies went came to taste. Their centers remained soft and may even have held on to moisture better. High levels of either cocoa or chocolate will suck moisture out of any baked good, and this is a great example of the phenomenon.
The Spice Part
The first test batch stuck with black pepper. Four teaspoons of it! The result was superb, but it did push right up against that line between “right” and “too much.” The recipe accordingly says 3-4 now. But the big Aha! moment came when we realized that black pepper was just the tip of this particular iceberg.
Go out to your favorite chocolate shop and you’ll find a whole shelf of well spiced options. Chocolate flavored with cinnamon. Chocolate flavored with cinnamon and chili (the Mexican chocolate profile). Chocolate flavored with cayenne, garam masala, ginger, nutmeg, star anise, cloves, gingerbread mix… It’s endless! I mentioned this to Kate and her eyes lit up with an evil gleam.
Every single one of those would work in this recipe. Just compare the potency of your chosen spice to the designated 3-4 tsp. of black pepper in this master recipe, and keep notes so that Version B will be perfect. Bing, bang, boom.
NOTE FROM KATE: I prefer more spice. The cookie doesn’t have to bite back, but higher spice level helps the flavor linger. The pepper version is warming and makes you raise an eyebrow in surprise (use fresh-ground for best effect.) The cinnamon-chipotle one is familiar, with a long and warm finish. Cardamom alone didn’t have the same bite, but the high floral notes carried beautifully, and I plan to see how that spice would play well with black or spicy pepper or to attain an extended note.
One whole recipe gives you approximately 1,200 grams of dough. I divided it into four bowls with 300 grams each, rounding them off to get even weights. (The exact amount of each batch will vary depending how much dough you use for “quality control,” how hard you pack your brown sugar, the size of your eggs, etc.). Then I added proportionate amounts of spices, getting 15 cookies of each per cookie sheet. Label your baking parchment so you know which is which. These are mystery cookies. They all look the same, the first bite keeps you guessing, but by the second bite you know.
NOTE FROM SCOTT: That might even be a fun game. Make several versions with different spices, and then let the party figure out what’s what...
Let us know your favorites so we can give them a try. I might even get to try a few myself before the invisible cookie gremlins get hold of the dozen I left on the plate. Deaf, dumb and blind, thy name is husband of 30+ years.
Speculaas filled with almond paste? Thank you Mom, can I have another?
Our published book, Heritage Cookies of the Old and New World, has a wonderful recipe for Nut Dough Speculaas, which offers up a soft, tender version of the famous Dutch spice cookie. This recent article is all about the ultra-authentic, thin-and-crispy version, featuring a recipe straight out of Belgium. Our research for that article accidentally revealed a third style that is immensely popular next door in Holland (a/k/a the Netherlands): Speculaas dough filled with almond paste.
The Nut Dough recipe makes an extra tender version. The 100% Authentic recipe comes out thin and crisp. This is the one in the middle; toothsome, gently spiced, and made with U.S. pantry ingredients. Take that and fill it with homemade almond paste? [Finger Kiss]
As always, you can skip to the bottom if you want the recipe alone. The discussion of our stumbles and revelations along the way is going to take some time.
A SIMPLE, PANTRY-FRIENDLY SPECULAAS DOUGH
Easy peasy, I promise. Yes, this is a top shelf American version of a very European cookie, but that doesn’t make it complicated. The approach couldn’t be more standard. Cream the butter and sugar, beat in an egg, and then mix in the flour, leavening, and spices. Cover and refrigerate overnight so the flour can hydrate and the spices even out. Form and bake however you wish.
The only potential complication lies in the hydration part. You are after a drier dough with only enough moisture to hold together when squeezed. (the Almond Paste filling will add any richness you think is missing). That means the base recipe is likely to be too dry outside of a humid environment. You solve that by adding extra water a tablespoon or two at a time until it holds when squeezed. One or two is usually enough, though it could take as many as six to eight.
Just go sparingly! It is much easier to add more water in than to take any out. I did one batch with the full eight tablespoons (½ cup), and had to double the batch in order to avoid throwing the whole thing out. Tripling would have worked even better. Fortunately, the recipe has enough flexibility to have saved me from that extreme.
THE ALMOND PASTE FILLING
No need to waste a lot of time on this piece either. Almond Paste is super easy to make, and we have a whole discussion of it in the article on Marzipan. The only difference for this purpose is the subtle addition of some citrus zest to help it meet and marry with the flavors of the dough.
We include instructions for the almond paste in the cookie recipe down below. I’ve added our recipe for Marzipan and Almond Paste too, as a free bonus. [NOTE FROM KATE: I love anything resembling marzipan, and the orange notes in this paste have a delicious more-ishness to it. So much so that Scott had to keep chasing me away as I tried to execute numerous rounds of diligent quality control.]
THE MANY DIFFERENT SHAPES
And now we get to the long part. But not because the shaping is hard! It isn’t. The dough is friendly, too, and the techniques are all straightforward. The length comes from the sheer number of options. This article lists a full dozen (12!) possibilities, and you don’t have to stop there. Jam and fruit fillings spread in the oven, searching for any crevice where they can leak out to create black and bitter disaster on your cookie sheet. Almond Paste does not. That feature opens up your options to basically any cookie shape you can imagine.
Bar Cookies? We Don’t Need No Stinking Bar Cookies!
Honesty compels me to admit that most people make Gevulde Speculaas as a bar cookie. You simply coat the bottom of the baking dish with one layer of cookie dough, spread a thick layer of almond paste on top (it should be noticeably thicker than the dough), and then cover that with a second layer of dough. Bake at 350° F (175° C) for about 18-25 minutes, or until the cookie part on top has set by the edges but is still a little soft in the center.
We, however, have a rule: no bar cookies! (Read the article on Chocolate Fudge Cookies if you insist on knowing why). That changes the focus to all those infinitely more interesting options, such as…
Sandwich Cookies!
Roll out the dough to 3/8″ thick. Cut out your choice of shape (we used larger rounds) and mark half of them with whatever you want for the top (we did a cutout for one, and a cookie stamp for a second.
Array the bottoms on a lined baking sheet (or two), keeping 1″ between each piece to account for spreading. Coat the bottom of the cookie with almond paste,* and then place the tops on top. Bake at 350° F (175° C) for about 12-15 minutes, or until the edges have set and the cookie has puffed up.
* Our favorite way to spread the almond paste goes like this:
Roll up a ball of almond paste of the size you estimate you’ll need. Place this in the center of the bottom cookie, and then place a piece of parchment paper on top. You can dust it with some powdered sugar if there is an excessive amount of sticking.
Press down with a rolling pin to evenly flatten the ball without spreading it all the way to the edges.
Now stop, peel off the paper, and check where you are. (A) Was your estimate about right? Hooray! Replace the paper and use your pin to spread the paste out to the edges. (B) Were you a little short? Add a little more almond paste and repeat the process. Your new almond paste will meld right into the original piece. Or (C) did you add a little too much almond paste? If so, use dampened fingers or a dampened spoon to remove the excess and then proceed, giving thanks that you did not press down all the way when you started.
Trim the edges with a dampened cookie cutter as needed. NOTE: You need it to be damp because the almond paste will stick like crazy if it isn’t.[NOTE FROM KATE: I was way too impatient, so I made a ball of almond paste and squished it with the bottom of a wet glass. It’s messier, I admit I had to sop up extra water off a cookie or two. It was fast though, even enough, and got the job done.]
Spiral a/k/a Pinwheel Cookies!
Roll out the Speculaas dough into a 13” x 7” (33 cm x 18 cm) rectangle ≈ ¼” thick.
Use the “balls of almond paste” trick described above in the sandwich cookie section to create an almond layer that is also ¼” thick on top of the dough layer. Making it as even as possible will yield the best patterns in the end.
Roll the whole thing up “jelly roll” style, and then move to a refrigerator to firm up for at least 15 minutes.
Use a thin thread, lightweight fishing line, or dental floss to cut off ⅜” cookies, and then array prettiest-side-up on your parchment lined sheet, leaving 1” between each to account for spreading. You should end up with 35-40 cookies. NOTE: This is a great trick if you do not know it! Shimmy the thread under the roll ⅜” from an edge. Bring up the sides so the thread crosses over at a spot ⅜” from the same edge, but on top of the roll. Pull on both threads so the loop shrinks down to cut off your piece. The thread has less surface area than even the thinnest knife, and will therefore leave a cleaner pattern. You can roll a sticky thread in flour or powdered sugar if you want to gild the lily, but we didn’t need to.
Bake at 350° F (175° C) for ≈10 minutes, or until the edges are firm and the cookies have puffed. Let them set on the tray for ≈1 minute, and then move to a rack to cool completely. NOTE: The baked tops should show a distinct pattern, but the bottoms against the tray will turn into an almost uniform brown.
The ends are never as pretty, especially when you need to press down to flatten the odd shaped pieces out. This shows three end pieces surrounding one middle piece.
Bullseye Cookies! [NO PHOTOS]
Roll out the Speculaas dough into a 13” x 7” (33 cm x 18 cm) rectangle ≈ ¼” thick on a sheet of parchment paper.
Place a long, 1” diameter sausage of almond paste down the middle of each strip. Roll up lengthwise to encase that sausage in the dough.
Use a thin thread, lightweight fishing line, or dental floss to cut off ⅜” cookies, and then array them prettiest-side-up on your parchment lined sheet, leaving 1” between each to account for spreading. You should end up with 35-40 cookies.
Bake at 350° F (175° C) for ≈10 minutes, or until the edges are firm and the cookies have puffed. Let them set on the tray for ≈1 minute, and then move to a rack to cool completely.
Tubes and Lengthwise Lines!
Roll out a thinner spiral and cut it into 2” lengths. Starting with a 13” x 6” (33 cm x 15 cm) rectangle should do it.
For tubes, bake at 350° F (175° C) for ≈11-12 minutes, or until the outside is firm and the cookies have puffed. NOTE: The tubes will settle into being flat on the bottom. We haven’t figured a way around that.
For Horizontal lines, use a thin paring knife or a long thread to cut through the top from end to end. Array these curved side down on the baking sheet. What would have been spirals when viewed from the edge in will appear as lines when the roll is cut lengthwise. NOTE: you can also use the paring knife to cut almost all the way through, leaving only a thin piece at the bottom to connect the two halves. Unfold this like an opening flower and you’ll have a double-width line cookie. Bake these at 350° F (175° C) for ≈9-11 minutes depending on thickness.
Let the baked pieces set on the tray for a few minutes, and then move to a rack to cool completely.
Line cookies on the left, spirals on the right. It’s basically the same pattern, but in one case you cut across to reveal the spiral, and in the other you cut lengthwise to reveal straight lines.
NOTE: You can use the “Bullseye” method here as well, or make the final shape a little thinner and broader by creating a filled rectangle instead of a filled tube.
NOTE #2: For Tube Cookies it’s it’s often worth decorating the top of the tube/cake with slices almonds. See the photos of the “Bake And Slice” method down below.
Molded and Filled Speculaas (Works With Jam Too)!
Apricot jam for the filling worked great, but we lost the pattern on top because I forgot to chill before baking.
Filled and plain Speculaas using the 100% authentic, Belgian Brown Sugar dough instead of this U.S. Brown Sugar dough. That time I did chill before baking.
Our favorite mold for individual Filled Speculaas (and gingerbreads of all kinds). We bought it at an actual castle on a trip to visit family in the Czech Republic! It was actually called a “butter mold” rather than a cookie mold, not that it makes any difference.
This Ma’amoul mold would have also worked, but can you imagine the amount of almond paste in each cookie?
Fill a bowl with with rice/corn/tapioca flour. Spoon this in to fill your mold, turn it over to pour the excess back into your bowl, and then rap the back firmly to knock off any excess. Voila! A perfectly dusted mold. (See the articles on the Speculaas Master Class and Filled Gingerbread cookies for more variations and details). FYI, we used this mold to make individual portions:
Roll the dough out to ¼” thick (thicker for a larger mold, of course), and then cut out a piece of dough just large enough to fit inside the entire mold while leaving a thin rim of dough up and over the side of the mold. Use well-dusted to press it gently into the pattern. NOTE: Too much dough is better than too little since you can always trim. NOTE #2: Holes aren’t a disaster. Patch them by pressing in extra dough with your floured fingertips. It will subtract from the inside space by a smidgen, but no one should see it when the cookies are baked.
Add a filling of your choice to a level that reaches level with the top of the mold. REMEMBER: That does NOT mean the top of your dough rim around the edge! Do that and you’ll have too much filling, which will lead to leaking, bursting, and other bad results.
Roll and cut out a second piece of dough sufficient to cover the filled in mold. Place this on top and then run a rolling pin over the entire thing to join the seams. Tap the filled cookie out with the mold-side up, and then use a paring knife to clean up the edges.
Array on a lined baking sheet, and then chill in the refrigerator for at least 15-30 minutes. This will help to keep the pattern a little sharper.
Bake at 350° F (175° C) until the edges are firm. It took ≈11-12 minutes for our smaller mold, but will obviously vary according to the size and thickness of the one you choose to use.
NOTE: It’s a good idea to precook any jam filling before you use it (simply bring it to a boil in the microwave or a small pan). Raw jam tries very, very hard to find a crack it can seep out of. The precooked jam is much, much less runny and will only seep out if you’ve made a noticeable mistake in sealing things up.
Cookie “Dumplings” and “Ravioli”!
Note the extra thick amount of almond inside
Our handy dandy dumpling press, last used when we were working up the recipe for Croatian Rafioli
NOTE: This method uses a bit more almond paste per piece. It should also work with a pre-cooked fruit filling, but we haven’t tried it.
Roll out the Speculaas dough to ⅜” thick, cut out a circle the right size to fit your handy dandy dumpling press, and then fill it with a football-shaped piece of almond paste. Squeeze gently to seal the edges.
Array on a parchment lined baking sheet as you pop the piece out of the press. Leave 1” between each one to account for spreading.
Bake at 350° F (175° C) until the edges are firm. It took ≈ 10 minutes for ours, but we anted to make sure they were baked all the way through.
Leave the cookies on the tray for 10 minutes and then move to a rack to cool completely.
Thumbprints! [No Photo]
Duh. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this in time to get some done for the photo shoot. Bad baker. Bad, bad, bad. No biscuit for you.
Roll the dough into balls ≈ 1¼” in diameter.
Use the handle of a wooden spoon to poke a deep hole, and then fill that hole with almond paste.
Array on a parchment lined baking sheet, and give each ball a gentle squish to make sure it will stay in position with the almond paste facing up. Keep 1-2” in between each piece to account for spreading.
Bake at 350° F (175° C) for ≈ 10-12 minutes, or until the edges are firm.
Bake-And-Slice Rolls and Rectangles!
This began it’s life as a Spiral Cookie roll. It was baked before slicing, which allowed it to slump into a rectangle.
The flattened spiral from a baked-before-slicing roll.
Make a roll as described above for Spiral or Bullseye cookies, but a little thicker. You achieve this by starting with a 13” x 8” (33 cm x 21 cm) rectangle.
Bake at 350° F (175° C) for ≈20 minutes, or until the outside is firm, the tube has slumped down into a rectangular “cake”, and cookies have puffed.
Let this set on the tray for ≈5 minute, and then move to a rack to cool completely. Slice with a thin, sharp, serrated knife after it’s completely cool. You will end up with elongated, almost-rectangular spirals.
A “Bullseye Cookie” bar decorated with almond slices. We tried to have this one start as a filled rectangle instead of a roll, but that only enhanced the slumping. Still tasty, and kind of nice if you want the sharper edges in the end.
Don’t Bother To Fill At All
Straight, unfilled Speculaas made from this dough. Not bad, are they?
The dough works fine as a plain old Speculaas cookie pressed into a mold. It doesn’t hold patterns quite as well as the 100% Authentic Speculaas, but it’s pretty darned close. Bake according to the instructions in that article using 350° F (175° C) instead of 375° F (190° C). The molasses in the U.S. brown sugar apparently makes them cook just that little bit faster.
NOTE: You may (may, not will) want to knead in a small amount of extra flour or starch if the dough is particularly soft and sticky. That’s a useful characteristic for the many methods described above, but can result in either sticking or unreliable patterns for straight-out molded cookies. Be judicious, as it won’t take much.
CONCLUSION
The dough is standard and easy. The almond paste is standard and easy. The shaping is fun and interesting once you pick a method (and get used to liking off almond paste from your fingers). And the flavor is just about perfect if you want the world’s friendliest, most accessible, spice cookie treat.
What’s not to love?
We urge you to give it a try. If you do, there’s basically no way it’s ever going to leave your repertoire. They are, as our English friends say, intensely “more-ish.”
Enjoy!
IMPORTANT: You want to make Almond Paste for Gevulde (Filled) Speculaas, not marzipan
The first of two articles on Poppy Seed Cookies. This one contains a roll-and-cut cookie (Queen Esther Cookies) and a drop Cookie (Poppy Seed Sour Cream Cookies)
Admission: poppy seeds are not my thing. They don’t offend me or anything, but my world would be no worse if poppy seed desserts simply disappeared. Kate? For Kate that would be a disaster on the same level as a plague to destroy the worldwide apple crop. My beloved wife adores poppy seeds, to the point where that’s one of her favorite bagels. [Shakes head].
NOTE FROM KATE: Poppy seeds! Oh my, they are…well…strangely addictive. I’ve loved them since childhood.
It turns out she’s not alone. Poppy seeds are one of those flavors that some people put at the very top of the food pyramid. My guess would be somewhere between one in five or one in ten based on recent conversations. Calling them “devoted” barely scratches the surface! And you know what? Almost everyone else is like me. We don’t dislike the flavor, it’s just the sort of thing we’re happy to leave to those who care.
Common? Check. Beloved by a lot of people? Check. A significant part of the culture from the Baltic States down through Turkey? Absolutely.
Sounds like the sort of thing we need to discuss.
But here’s the thing: poppy seeds are an ingredient more than a concept. They’re used in almost endless ways. So this article is going to focus sharply on cookies where poppy seeds are the central theme. I count four basic categories, plus a few that fall outside our scope:
Poppy seed roll-and-cut cookies, like the Queen Esther Cookies down below; and
Poppy seed drop cookies, like Poppy-Lemon Cookies.
Those are the subject of this article. Then there’s
Poppy Seed Filling;
Cookies made with Poppy Seed Filling, like Hamantaschen and Kolachy; and
Other beloved treats that cannot be called a “cookie”.
Those will get addressed in Part 2 of The Great Poppy Seed Adventure.
See that toasty bottom? It’s a secret key to getting these just…exactly…right. The bottoms add both texture and a flavor that neatly ties together the poppy seed and lemon elements.
I’m going to ignore the infinite versions that use poppy as an ingredient (Poppy Snaps, Lemon-Poppy Icings, etc.), and get to the meat of the question. What is the best fancy-looking cookie to make for friends and family who are [ahem] addicted to the flavor of poppy seeds?
The best answer we have found are Queen Esther Cookies, a treat from the Jewish tradition that’s often paired with Poppy Seed Hamantaschen.
It’s an easy cookie to make, and the development process was even easier because we started from a century-old family recipe. Not our family. This one comes from our online friend Carolyn, an estimable baker, who received it in turn from her grandmother. Here’s the original recipe for the sake of full disclosure and free giveaways:
Grandma made these for Purim, the Jewish early-spring holiday, and used margarine to avoid any potential issues with the kosher laws on a holiday. We have specified butter instead, and normalized the recipe to an even 2 sticks of butter. We also increased the amount of poppy seeds because, well, Kate. [NOTE: My beloved even wanted to try a full ½ cup! I put my foot down, but you might too if you fall in that camp.](NOTE FROM KATE: It would’ve worked. While experimenting with a Lithuanian recipe, I baked up cookies the color of asphalt. Yum! Usually, we give away our trial runs. Not this time-these are bagged in the freezer for “emergencies.”)
Two flavor notes: First, we found over and over again that the best cookies were the ones with the browner bottoms. That little bit of toastiness enhanced both the lemon and the poppy seed flavors.
We also choose to go with baking powder instead of soda, because we enjoyed the bright hit of lemon as a counterpoint to the cookie. If you want it more restrained (and Carolyn did say the lemon flavor should be subtle), try using baking soda instead. It’s an easy 3:1 conversion; exchange ½ tsp. baking soda for the designated 1½ tsp. baking powder. That will remove some of the extra acid from the lemon juice? [N.B. You can make baking powder at home by using two parts cream of tartar to one part baking soda. Thus baking soda makes up one-third of the designated 1½ teaspoons of powder; or to put it another way, is 3x as strong]
As you might expect, the recipe was nigh unto perfect. We did play around a bit, and found that the standard creaming method in a mixer works as well as cutting the butter in with a food processor. Does it work as well as doing it by hand? Try it and let us know. We are children of the machine age.
We also tested ground poppy seeds versus whole. The first has slightly more flavor and is a lot less gritty, but makes for a gray cookie with darker specks. The whole seeds make a vastly more attractive cookie that’s black-on-pale, but you do end up with seeds between the teeth. I’d go with the whole because I’m not eating them anyway, but She Who Snarfs [Ow! That hurt!] thinks it is a much closer call. (NOTE FROM KATE: I won’t kick whole-poppy seed cookies out of bed, but I prefer the more developed bitter edge of ground seeds. They may look a bit modern and abstract, but the flavor is superb. Also, there’s no danger of getting seeds stuck between your teeth.)
So that’s the first. Queen Esther’s Roll and Cut Poppy Seed Cookies. Check.
POPPY SEED DROP COOKIES
For good or ill, this is a cookie where I had to get a bit creative. We had just finished developing our version of the roll-and-cut Queen Esther cookies, and wanted to do a parallel, poppy-heavy drop cookie. Online recipes are all over the place; cutting back on the amount of flour would have been too easy; and I wanted to use the basic Queen Esther flavor balance while creating something with a very different, more pillow-like texture. So I started by noodling around in the world of online drop cookie formulae until I happened across a recipe for Sour Cream Cookies. Aha!
We haven’t written that recipe up because they’re heartlessly plain, and aren’t common enough to demand a spot on the list. But I have baked them, and knew they would perfectly match the target texture. Besides that, the flavor of sour cream would enhance both the lemon and the poppy flavor, while shifting the focus just sideways enough to really distinguish them from the roll-and-bake recipe. So I set to work, did a sample batch, and [Insert Proud Daddy Preening].
It’s a similar lemon-poppy flavor profile, but with sour cream as well to broaden the edges. Note the toasty bottom. Same thing here as with the Queen Esther cookies. We liked them distinctly better when the bottoms were properly browned. Our dark cookie sheet worked significantly better than the lighter one in this regard.
Are you a married man? If so, you know that moment when your wife gets that look of surprised, big-eyed delight, and then looks at you with pride and admiration. It’s rare. It’s precious. And I got just such a look when my beloved gave the test run a sample. “OMG Scott. You’re goooood. [Munch, munch, reach].”
I don’t know what else to tell you. Is it a “heritage” recipe? Debatable. The two halves are, but the combination is original. But as they say in Paris, c’est la vie. And who cares? They’re goooood!
NOTE FROM KATE: Unlike the Queen Esther cookies, which soften in the tin, the drop cookies tend to harden overnight. Adding a slice of bread in the morning restored them by mid afternoon.
NOTE: We haven’t tried it, but this should be a cookie where you can replace the actual poppy seeds with a commercial poppy seed filling. Our homemade filling (see below) is somewhere close to 65% poppy seed, 20% milk, and 15% sweetener if you measure by volume. Assuming a comparable proportion in the canned versions… [click, click, click]… the math says one should get an almost identical product by replacing the ⅓ cup of poppy seeds with ½ cup of filling, and then reducing both the sour cream and the sugar by 2 tbsp. each. It won’t be perfect (experiments never are), but it should be close enough for the second batch to be just about right if you keep good notes.
CONCLUSION
So much for Part 1 of our poppy seed adventure. Part 2 will cover the tips, tricks, and secrets to making the world’s best Poppy Seed Filling, along with a couple of sample recipes for how to use it, and some discussion of the poppy desserts world beyond just cookies.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
‘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:
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.
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.
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.
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…
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:
Make a simple, basic cookie base.
Make a marshmallow filling and pipe it on top of the base.
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:
Cookie Base, flavored with anything you want;
Marshmallow Filling, flavored with anything you want; and
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!
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.
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.
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.]
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.
