Category: British Cookies

England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales

WELSH CURRANT COOKIES a/k/a CAKES, Fresh From The… Griddle?

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.

As always, click here to jump to the recipe without any discussion.

Currants?

Linguistically, yes. Biologically? No.

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.

The supermarket brand works just fine

Getting at the “dough”

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Enjoy!

CANADIAN ARMY MOLASSES COOKIES, A Classic WWII Recipe

The Canadian soldier’s secret trading weapon

Who’da thunk it? Soldiers like to trade amongst themselves, particularly when different groups have different supplies. In World War II the U.S. GI’s were the source for chocolate and smokes. The English always had tea. And the Canadians? They marched into the trading wars armed with cookies that no one else could match – the ones you’ll see below.

Click Here if you only want the recipe without the discussion

The basic recipe comes from the 1946 Canadian Army Cook’s Manual, as published in the Canadian Government website. All we did was test it, which turned out to matter because the volume-to-weight ratios on that page are a little bit off. Following the weights yields a thick drop cookie dough, while the volume measurements (cups) give you a very soft slice-and-bake result. We went with the second one because the instructions specifically mention slicing off pieces before baking. Our version below has corrected weights according to our tried and true conversion tables. Please note, however, that some ingredients (particularly flour) can vary a lot depending on both grind and protein content.

NOTE FROM KATE: When I tested this recipe, I used the scale with an expectation of tidy, slice-and-bake logs. I got a goopy mess of a drop cookie dough, and a discussion ensued along the lines of “You know, this cookie has a HUGE proportion of molasses!” Scott did some recalculating, et voila! The next try yielded slice and bake logs. The cookies bake and taste the same, but I prefer the tidy handling of the logs. It makes for an easier cleanup.

We made only two changes aside from that tweak. (1) The original recipe calls for sour milk, which we successfully replaced with both buttermilk and with fresh milk soured in the kitchen by adding some vinegar/lemon (a standard workaround). Yogurt ought to work too, though we haven’t tested it. And (2) We added raisins and extra spices as optional ingredients. Those might be too expensive for army-level production, but they do yield a tastier result for home cooks making dozens instead of thousands.

So what does it taste like? We found a few dozen tasters for this recipe and got a pretty standard reaction: “Entirely inoffensive with a finger on the scale toward good.” Call it a universal 6 out of 10, with no one going higher than an 8 or lower than a 4. They’d also be a 6 if you had a 1-10 scale from savory to sweet. Add the optional raisins and both scores go up by a notch. Extra spices push it up another.

NOTE FROM KATE: I admit to being spoiled by molasses cookies that bite back. You know, the memorable ones, loaded with spices from the obvious cinnamon to the expensive cardamom, with pepper and ginger for good measure. This is not that kind of a cookie. This is like a mild dish from a famously spicy cuisine. It’s still delicious but it defies your expectations.

People who like spicy cookies will notice a certain lack in this one, while mild food eaters should be thrilled to have a cookie that goes well with both coffee and tea. The restraint on the spice end of things was likely a result of not only preference, but also economy. Spices are expensive, and that matters once you multiply their cost by making enough for the entire Canadian army!

Soft or crunchy?

It’s entirely a matter of baking time and personal taste. Kate prefers these with a bit of residual chew. Scott likes them better when crispy. Choose for yourself. 15-20 minutes gives you one or the other, with all the stages in between.

NOTE FROM KATE: Despite my chew preference, I find that even dry cookies, which sat out for a few days, tasted good! Surprisingly, they didn’t go stale, and they had a nice crisp. Even though the low spice level took me aback at first, this eminently practical cookie grew on me and has now become a part of my “easy and travels well” repertoire!

Enjoy!

ANZAC BISCUITS (a/k/a COOKIES), The Down Under Cookie Of Home

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.

Click here if you only want the recipe without the discussion.

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.

Enjoy!

POURABLE FONDANT AND COVERTURE – the ideal cookie coatings

All we’ve learned on how to make cookie coatings with texture, thicker than icing but thinner than frosting, which are also safe for shipping

Up until now we’ve been happy to use either a thin chocolate glaze, a ganache filling/frosting, or a coating made from actual chocolate melted with butter. Ischler Cookies, a chocolate coated sandwich with nutty shortbread and apricot jam, wanted that chocolate/butter coating, but had to dry into something that could be packed in a tin without heroic efforts like cutting out custom sized bits of parchment paper.

We have now (finally!) found two answers to the dilemma. The first is coverture, which is essentially a chocolate coating made with cocoa butter instead of regular butter. This has a higher melting temperature and won’t lead to sticky hands until you get toward body temperatures. Think of chocolate bars and you’ll have it.

The problem with coverture? It’s very hard to find in a store, and impossible to make at home unless you keep cocoa butter in the pantry. Most people don’t.

That leaves fondant. You may know this better in the rollable form that people drape over cakes. But did you also know about pourable fondant, the version used for petit fours and the like? It creates an icing that’s almost indistinguishable from coverture from both the visual and textural perspectives. It’s just a good bit sweeter and less chocolaty inside the mouth. An ideal compromise for anyone who wants to stick with standard pantry ingredients.

Heritage Cookies of the Old and New World does include a basic pourable fondant recipe, but we never really dug into the subject to understand how and why it works. Until now. Enjoy!

NOTE FROM KATE: APPLICATION TRICKS. If you have great many cookies and a lot of fondant, by all means use a screen and pour over it, as described above. However, this requires extra sheets, space, and materials. We tested it, and it works. I personally find that dipping a cookie in while holding it yields an excellent result, without having to make coating, and is better suited to the average home kitchen. The only downside is chocolate on your fingers. But I have an answer! To keep having from washing your hands, or fighting the constant temptation to lick your fingers, try using a thin, snug glove! It sure worked for me and my work moved faster. Also, I had absolutely no desire to lick my glove!

P.S. THE HOT WATER TRICK. Our experiments on chocolate coatings led to a wonderful trick:

  • The Problem: Chocolate icings begin to harden as soon as they cool, and it often takes a bit too much time to get all your individual cookies dipped or poured.
  • The Solution: Duh. Keep your icing warm enough to prevent it from cooling too fast. But how?
  • The Method: You have a bowl of molten coating. Fill a slightly larger bowl with hot water, and place your bowl of icing inside. The hot water will keep the icing warm for twice as long, leaving you all the time you need to work.

GRIBOCHKY – Eastern European Molded Mushroom Cookies

Spectacular eastern European mushroom cookies made with a stove top mold

Kate and I are avid foragers who spend a lot of time in the woods hunting for local chanterelles, morels, boletes, maitake, and other species. We do okay.

Kate, the porcini hoard, and tonight’s risotto dinner-in-waiting
Down boy! Even edulis is better when cooked. This is the 4-5 gallons (15-20 liters) we draw down each year for gifts.

Every September the local mushroom club hosts a large foray that features a gigantic set of potluck meals supplied by the different members. What did we contribute for 2022? What do you think?

LEFT: poppy seed mushrooms. UPPER LEFT: scottish shortbread leaves. LEFT CENTER: caramel, raspberry, and butterscotch gribochky. CENTER: faux button mushroom caps. BOTTOM: roll and cut mushrooms. RIGHT: laskonky (walnut meringue) mushroom caps. UPPER RIGHT: The insane display made with structural gingerbread trees, poured sugar backdrop, Marshmallo Crispy treat landscape and gingerbread crumb dirt, and two large meringue Lepiotas (or Amanitas, as you wish). NOTE FROM KATE: Oh, definitely Lepiotas!

This article covers our experiments with Gribochky, those colorful little mushroom gems you can see scattered around the display and piled on the bright blue plate. Time permitting, we’ll do another on the other ways to create faux-mushroom illusion cookies. It takes a little fussing, but they’re great fun for baker and eater alike once you get them finished.

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

We purchased this specialty mold online. It’s the same company that made our walnut (oreshki) molds
Put a small ball of dough in each hole, close, and then cook on the stovetop until done. Both sides of course.

Gribochky is a slavic word that means “mushrooms”, just as the very similar Oreshki means “nuts.” Both are made from a dough so soft that it could even be called a super-thick batter, and both use a unique stovetop mold as shown above. But where Oreshki come out as stamped halves waiting to be filled with a rich and milky caramel, Gribochky come out as solid, 3-dimensional pieces waiting to be decorated. That’s the point when they turn special.

Amp Up The Flavor. We know at least one excellent baker who tried to make Gribochky and came away disappointed. We can’t blame her. The online recipes, which are very similar, produce a cookie so plain that it isn’t worth eating. Boooooring. We solved that by treating the base recipe as a platform rather than an end point. It worked like a charm.

We made two versions for the foray and both came out great. The first had a 1.2 oz package of freeze dried raspberries (crushed into fine dust), with an extra tablespoon or two of butter/other fat for moisture. Delicious, and a perfect way to mimic the sour tang of candy apple boletes that grow under out local oaks. The second included a tablespoon of our Pardubice honey-gingerbread spice mix. Just as good in a totally different way. And it was obvious that any comparable ‘fix’ would have worked just as well. From “yawwwwwn” to “how interesting…” in one easy step! And it’s a step you can take in any direction that suits the spices in your cabinet, the extracts in your drawer, the freeze dried fruit in your local market, and the whims in your heart.

Trust In Tradition. Many will be surprised to see sour cream or mayonnaise listed as an ingredient. Don’t be. It’s quite common in Eastern European recipes, adds tenderness, and provides a certain complicated je ne sais quoi. I may well try some Greek yogurt for our next batch.

Shorten The Flour By A Lot. Those who know us may be surprised to see such a healthy amount of cornstarch. The reason comes down to simple physics. Gribochky would be amazingly thick if treated as a regular cookie, and the gluten from pure flour would make them prohibitively tough. The starch backs that down into plain old crunchy. Yes, we usually prefer to use rice, tapioca, or potato starch. They avoid the danger of a pasty aftertaste, which can happen when you use cornstarch in flat cookies because it breaks down at a higher temperature than the others. The internal temperature of Gribochky gets high enough to remove that fear. Use whatever starch is cheap and convenient.

Cooking Time Varies. The stove top time varies with burner size, flame height, how often you flip, how often you turn, the underlying color of the dough, and probably the moods of your local household gremlin. Heck, sometimes you want a better cooked specimen, and sometimes a blonder one, so the target changes too. The only universal guidelines I can provide are these:

  • We never got the cookies done in less than 4-5 minutes (2-2½ minutes per side), and usually wanted to add a little bit of time after peeking inside to check for doneness.
  • It helps to make regular turns to change the angle, which avoids hot spots caused by an uneven flame.
  • It also helps to flip them over as they cook in order to to equalize the cooking on both sides. Look closely at the photos and you’ll see one batch that looks a little odd because I cooked them first on Side A, and then on Side B. The first side cooked more, leaving a distinct stripe. No one will notice a thing like that in the decorated cookies unless you point it out, but we knew, and so it nettled.
  • NOTE FROM KATE: I found that preheating the mold gets too heat-dangerous and fussy for me. I made as many balls as we had holes to fill, and rolled them into a conical shape. I placed the wide part of the cone into the cap of the mold in each cavity (both sides, please!) The mold was warm but not too hot, so I could use my fingers to push the dough all the way in. I closed the mold and popped it over the flame. Time it, flip it, go again, and repeat until done. The lack of preheating doesn’t hurt the cookie (you can vary the time or the flame height) and it avoids “casualties.” Also, you don’t burn your fingertips!

DECORATIONS; a/k/a TURNING ON THE MAGIC

There are four parts you can pay attention to on each cookie: (1) the cap, (2) the base, (3) the stem, and (4) the pore/gill layer. The first two matter most, but you can certainly gild the lily by playing with #’s 3 and 4 as well.

Decorating The Caps: We’ve tested two basic techniques for the cap coating. Both worked, and playing with either approach yields a vast number of options. It’s a no lose situation.

The first method centers on melted chocolate. Dark, milk, white, food-dyed-white, and even commercial candy melts – each and every one of them will work. We like to thin them out with a bit of cream, but your mileage may vary.

The best approach is to hold each piece by the stem, dip it into the coating at an angle, and then roll the cookie to cover the entire surface of the cap. Remove, let the excess drip off, and then set them cap up in a place where they can dry without flattening one part of your coating. Egg cartons worked great, with ice cube trays a very close second.

Dark chocolate, textured by accident because I melted it without any cream, cocoa butter, or other fat to make it thinner and smoother. I love the contrast created by painting the “pores” bright yellow.

We also tested chocolate chips, but they didn’t work nearly as well. Chips are carefully designed to not melt, and overcoming that is like fighting the tide. First you must add cream to help them melt evenly. Then you find that they harden, curdle, and/or to harden in inconvenient ways despite the cream. And then they’ll suddenly discolor if you try to keep them warm on the stove top. I can’t recommend chips except for something odd like butterscotch chips, which do double duty as a coating and a unique flavor addition.

NOTE FROM KATE: instead of cream, I prefer using cocoa butter melts. They help your chips or chocolate melt, loosening the mix and helping with dipping properties, but they also yield in a nice and solid surface with none of the tackiness that cream can cause. We winged it with the chips here. For exact instructions, kindly refer to our “Chocolate coverture” recipes associated with chocolate-dipped marshmallow treats.

Butterscotch chips for the cap. It was a PITA but we made it work! White chocolate base, with poppy seed dirt. BTW… did you notice the stripe on the left hand cookie? That’s the one where I forgot to flip them as I cooked.
Butterscotch chips cooked into a dark caramel. Still usable and edible, but it came at the cost of frayed tempers and a few choice words that cannot be shared in public. They looked pretty good anyway, and could have been great if we had enough time and energy to paint the underside of the cap.

The other cap technique uses molten sugar. The prettiest of them all is a candy apple coating made from “hard crack” sugar syrup mixed with some bright red food dye. Your target is 300°-310° F (149°-154° C). Caramel works well for light and dark browns.

The problem here comes down to safety. 310° sugar syrup can burn you badly enough to leave obvious scars. No bueno. We came up with a workaround, but it requires three hands. Hand #1 steadies the pot. Hand #2 holds the cookie stem in a pair of tongs, dips it into the hot syrup, rolls it around to get even coverage, and then lets the excess drip back into the pot. Hand #3 then takes the cookie out of the tongs with a pair of chopsticks, inverts it, and lays it out in an ice cube tray (cap up) to dry. NOTE: The sugar is so hot and so sticky that it will melt a styrofoam egg carton, and pull off shreds of a cardboard one. Yes, the cardboard easily peels away from the cooled cookie, but better to avoid the issue in the first place. NOTE FROM KATE: peel cardboard bits off the sugar with fingers, then moisten a small brush and work the surface over a bit. When in doubt, remember that you are making the cookies healthier by incorporating an extra microdose of fiber!

The upside? Behold!

Candy Apple Gribochky
Gotcha! These aren’t cookies. They are the real life Candy Apple Bolete, Exsudoporus frostii. Nature’s pretty cool, isn’t it?

Decorating the Base: This step is easier because there aren’t many options, all of them are easy, and the shape can be handled with fingers alone. Did you know that mushrooms are actually the fruit of the fungus and not the main entity? The apple of the tree? ‘Struth! The main body is called “mycelium” and will be spread in a mat over a relatively vast area in and around the soil or the nearby wood. This is what you’re seeing at the bottom of mushrooms poked fresh out of the ground.

Mycelium is almost always some shade of white or pale yellow, and is easy to replicate with white chocolate or a tinted candy melt. Add poppy seeds or cookie crumbs for “dirt” and presto! Your illusion is complete on both top and bottom.

The Underside Of The Cap: Mushrooms with this shape will have either gills or pores on the underside of the cap. Adding this layer is a special touch that true mushroom geeks will appreciate, but it’s very hard to see unless you make it a bright, contrasting color like the yellow-on-dark specimen up above.

Gills can be any color of the rainbow, but most people will want to make them white, pink, or cocoa brown to imitate the best known species. Lilac will make the mushroom hunters happy. Mushroom pores will be white, yellow, pink, or red at this spot in the vast majority of cases, sometimes with blue or brown bruising on the surface.

Decorating the Stem. Stem features, ironically enough, are often the most useful part of a mushroom for field identification. For Gribochky? They’re an afterthought, because the features are impossibly subtle to duplicate. The only time it’s worth an effort is something along the lines of painting/dipping the stem to make it white, and that only makes sense when you’re trying to model an Amanita or Agaricus (see below). OTOH, adding berries or food dye to the actual dough can be a fantastic trick for species like the red Candy Apple Boletes. That, and cooking the Gribochky to a lighter or darker shade of brown, is almost always enough to complete a high quality illusion.

A Few Common Mushrooms To Mimic.

The so-called “toadstools” with white spots on top are in the genus Amanita. These can have caps ranging from bone white through basically any color, have white gills, almost always have a white stem with a ring of extra tissue about 2/3 of the way up.

Supermarket button mushrooms are in the genus Agaricus. They have white caps with white stems, and gills that start off pink before aging into brown. These will also have a ring on the stipe. Oh! And the answer is “yes.” Store bought mushrooms are all the same species, Agaricus bisporus. The little buttons are babies, cremini are teenagers, and portabellas are full sized grownups.

White chocolate “agaricus” with chocolate “gills.” This was our very first effort, and the illusion is as poor as any version you’ll ever made. And it doesn’t exactly suck even so, does it? Gribochky are show stoppers, plain and simple.

The pored mushrooms, a/k/a boletes, are my personal specialty and it pains me intensely to mention some but not others. You can find a list of every North American species at The Bolete Filter, written by yours truly under a different hat. The true “porcini,” a/k/a Boletus edulis and its close cousins, will have a yellow, orange, light red, or light brown cap with a white or yellow pore surface.

CONCLUSION

Gribochky are a perfectly acceptable eating cookie once you kick up the flavor with berries or spices, in the same way as Vanilla Snaps and the like, but their real glory lies in the illusion. There are other techniques one can use to create the illusion of a mushroom out of different kinds of cookies. They work too, particularly as part of a scene. But none allow for this level of absurd creativity, let alone the chance to customize things toward a copy of real life species. Fun, fun, fun!

Yes, the cookies require a special mold, and can definitely qualify as “fussy” on the decorations side if you try to copy real life. But the results can be shockingly beautiful, especially if you take the relatively easy step of dipping the bottom to mimic the mycelium, and then adding in poppy seeds or cookie crumbs to mimic the dirt. They start at “Cool!” and work their way up to “Spectacular.”

If pure, visual fun is your thing – or mushrooms! – this is a cookie that needs to be in your repertoire.

Raspberry candy apple, dark caramel-spice, and butterscotch-spice Gribochky

CHOCOLATE COVERED MARSHMALLOW TREATS – Part 1, An Overview

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

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

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

Easy, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

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

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

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

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

Think not? Let me leave you with this:

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

THE CHOCOLATE MARSHMALLOW TREATS SERIES

Part 1, The Chocolate Marshmallow Treat Overview

Part 2, The Cookie Base Options

Part 3, The Marshmallow Filling Options

Part 4, The Chocolate Coating and Finishing Options

Part 5, Experiments With Fruit-Based Zefir Marshmallows

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

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

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

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

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

The recipes we tested include:

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

CONCLUSION

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

THE CHOCOLATE MARSHMALLOW TREATS SERIES

Part 1, The Chocolate Marshmallow Treat Overview

Part 2, The Cookie Base Options

Part 3, The Marshmallow Filling Options

Part 4, The Chocolate Coating and Finishing Options

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plus, of course, practice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Palm Oil Is Out, What Then?

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

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

What did we try before cocoa butter?

“Everything.”

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

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

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

But What About The Pretty, Shiny Part?

Aha! You want to grow beta-crystals.

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

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

Compare the two enrobed treats in the photo below:

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

What If Your Chocolate Seizes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Mold Or To Pour?

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

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

THE CHOCOLATE MARSHMALLOW TREATS SERIES

Part 1, The Chocolate Marshmallow Treat Overview

Part 2, The Cookie Base Options

Part 3, The Marshmallow Filling Options

Part 4, The Chocolate Coating and Finishing Options

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problem #3: The Infinite Variations

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

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

So where are we at?

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

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

THE CHOCOLATE MARSHMALLOW TREATS SERIES

Part 1, The Chocolate Marshmallow Treat Overview

Part 2, The Cookie Base Options

Part 3, The Marshmallow Filling Options

Part 4, The Chocolate Coating and Finishing Options

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

VANILLA SNAPS AND WAFERS – a classic cookie and ingredient

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First the Eggs

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

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

Wait; Haven’t We Made This Before?

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

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

What’s In A Name?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

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

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

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

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

Would A Drop Cookie Work?

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

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

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

Bake Until The Bottoms Are Good And Tan

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

CONCLUSION

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