Tag: Filberts

HAZELNUT DROP COOKIES, Simple, Sleek, Elegant, and Awesome

Simple, sleek, hazelnutty perfection

Imagine the esthetic behind Danish Modern furniture: minimal, sleek, efficient, elegant, useful, classically beautiful, and easy to customize. Now take that esthetic and design a cookie to match. We’ve got you covered.

Click here for the recipe without the discussion

Minimalist: Six ingredients: nuts, butter, sugar, salt, an egg, and baking powder. No more, no less.

Sleek and Efficient: Beat it all together, divide into balls, and bake. There’s no flour to hydrate, and thus no actual need to chill in advance (though I will admit it makes the dough less sticky).

Elegant: How about we kick up the baking temperature to ensure a golden brown, extra-toasty bottom that enhances the basic nut flavor? Clever! And let’s add just enough baking powder to keep the cookie from ever feeling dense or pasty.

Useful: Unexpected guests? Need a moment of self-reward? I’ve yet to meet a cookie that freezes better, and they’re delicious right out of the chill chest.

Classically Beautiful: This is the girl next door of Cookieville, and you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t love the type.

Easy to Customize: Want your cookie textured and noshable? Done. Use ground nuts, and remember to bar your door against the likes of my wife. Want something firm but soft, like a shoulder to rest on? Grate the nuts to meal, and do not bar your door because I may be dropping by for a surprise inspection. Want to go all out, and make something that melts on the tongue like almost-liquid flavor? Pulse the grated meal all the way down to flour. Or play with a different nut. Or a mix of nuts. Or… You get the idea.

(A NOTE FROM KATE: I would like to point out that aside from being naturally gluten-free, this cookie is, with the exception of sugar, a “whole food.” Nuts are good for you, eggs are good for you… and why say no to just a bit of sugar? In fact, I predict that cookies such as these will become a new health food trend!)

NOTES ON PROCESS AND PROCEDURE

There isn’t much to say. This really is as simple as it sounds.

(NOTE FROM KATE: To be fair, I did find that the pre-roasted hazelnuts were just a bit too hard for the rotary grinder. Husband + food processor = easy solution.

Do I really need to roast the nuts…? For heaven’s sake, most stores sell them pre-roasted! But if you bought fresh, unroasted nuts, the answer is yes. Roasting develops the hazelnut flavor, which is what you’re after in the first place. Cookies made with raw nuts will work just fine, but the same can be said of furniture no one’s bothered to varnish.

“I’m so confused? Where do I get ground nuts? Or hazelnut meal? Or hazelnut flour? Who carries that?” [Sigh] Start with whole nuts. Then:

  • For ground, put them in a food processor and pulse until you arrive at rough, finely pebbled, ground-nut sand; i.e., the stage right before they start to turn into nut butter. Remember to scrape the sides of the food processor bowl as you go in order to (a) release any fine particles, and (b) check see if you are getting too close to the nut-butter stage.
  • For nut meal, pull out a rotary grater with a middle-fine wheel. Put the nuts in and proceed until you have a light and fluffy meal. Food process coarsely if you need to break down the whole nuts first.
  • For nut flour, pulse the grated nut-meal a few times in the food processor.

Besides, this ability to customize is part of the fun! Some recipes have no room for wiggle. This recipe has wiggle room built into its bones, which is nothing but a plus if your family is anything like ours.

Kate has a strong preference for using ground nuts. She considers that the purest example of what hazelnuts really are, and a nice change from all the shortbreads of the world that melt in the mouth without thought. Yours truly is a softaholic. “Melt in the mouth” is a good thing for me, though I will grant that this cookie benefits from the rustic appeal of nut meal rather than whole scale flour.

In a pastry shop, for elegant tea time nibbles? Okay, now we’re back to proper nut flour, probably with each cookie halved in size for the sake of proper, lace linen daintiness.

You cannot lose. It’s all about how you choose to win on this particular day, for this particular situation. Asset, not hurdle.

(NOTE FROM KATE: I enjoyed the coarser texture of the machine-ground nuts for its rustic appeal. They look good, and the one hazelnut reserved for the top is very cute, albeit a bit fussy to position nose-up. I admit, however, that fine-textured hazelnut drops would be just as lovely, yet… slightly different.

Here is some good tricks to keep in mind:

  • We don’t use cookie scoops (not enough room in the drawers), so I like to weigh a few dough balls until I have the size right. It keeps a consistent result every time.
  • When forming, give each ball a gentle squish with the heel of your hand to prevent rolling, and garnish with one hazelnut each. These nuts have a pointy “nose,” which I like to aim in the same direction every time.
  • If you want a fine nut meal, start with raw nuts, then toast the flour on a cookie sheet in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 4 minutes. Pull out, stir gently, then toast for another few minutes until its scent JUST begins to develop.
  • Unroasted nuts blanch better, so you will have tidier nut toppers. I tried blanching store-bought roasted nuts and almonds, but to my surprise, the skins wouldn’t slip off!

The big note from Scott? At some point you are going to make the dough and then wonder, “Maybe I should add in some vanilla, or spice, or a tough of extract…” You can, and it will be good, but do us a favor and try it straight up the first time. Lilies look best before they’re gilded.

In all honesty, I very seriously considered a preemptive addition of vanilla before our first test batch. After all, vanilla and hazelnut have a historic love affair, and the dough didn’t have as big a flavor hit as I imagined it would. She Who Must Be Heeded prevailed on me not to, and I’m glad to say she was right. The high temperature oven triggers a lot of browning on the bottoms, which adds the exact thing I had been missing.

CONCLUSION

These really are the Danish Modern of cookie baking. Minimal, sleek, efficient, elegant, easy to customize, and absolutely luscious. Plain old cookies just don’t get any better.

Enjoy!

ELISENLEBKUCHEN – Flourless honey gingerbread (a/k/a honeycakes) from Nuremberg

The Immortal Queen of Nuremberg Gingerbreads

Here’s a funny but true: we love our classic Lebkuchen recipe so much that we hesitated to work on this one out of pure loyalty. We’ve amassed a great number of honey gingerbread recipes (a/k/a “Honeycakes”), but Lebkuchen remains the a family favorite. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas if we left them off our tray.

It turned out to be a misplaced loyalty. Elisenlebkuchen bear very little resemblance to regular Lebkuchen when push comes to shove. Our old favorite is a classic built on a flour-based dough that’s jam packed with nuts, fruits, a bit of spice, and a whole lot of honey to act as the binder. Elisenlebkuchen have even more nuts, no flour at all, and instead rely on both honey and a full five (5!) eggs to act as the binder. They are two very different experiences.

On the Upper Left: chocolate glaze with sliced almonds.
On The Upper Right: vanilla glaze with sliced almonds.
On The Bottom: vanilla glaze only.
Use whichever you think is prettiest.

NOTE FROM KATE: These cookies are horribly deceptive in their overall “goodness.” That is, with the exception of the brown sugar, they are a “whole food,” so what could go wrong, right? I’ll have to do a caloric breakdown one of these days. Let’s just say, they contain more energy than meets the eye. If you were riding across the mountains and had to choose a fabulous, long-lasting food source for the extra space in your saddle bags, these would be it. They remind me of Panforte in their composition, but have eggs for eggstra protein. [Insert eye roll from Scott] The good news? With eggstra protein and the good-for-you fat from the nuts, the sugar in the brown sugar and honey won’t hit your bloodstream too fast. A cookie or two could hold you for hours.

Best of all? Of all our cookies and especially waybreads, these are the closest to the Lembas the elves made famous in the Lord of the Rings. Toss in an apple, and you got yourself a balanced diet for the day! (Shh…don’t tell Scott!)

The recipe explains itself, and includes an extensive Cookie Nerd Moment with extra background material, so I will only take the time to discuss a few of the decision points you’ll face when trying this out on your own:

  1. Should I use marzipan or ground nuts? It’s entirely up to you, and makes very little difference. Just remember that Marzipan has almost as much sugar as nuts (our recipe has a ratio of 4:5), and usually has some extra sweetness lurking in the background. If you make this substitution, do it by weight and assume the Marzipan is actually a 50/50 mix. You need to reduce the amount of both almonds and sugar accordingly.
  2. Can I play with the spices? Of course you can! But we do recommend that you (a) stick to the basic, quite generous amount of overall spice, and (b) think of the spices as an accent to bring the best out of your chosen nuts.
  3. Can I substitute in other nuts? Yes, but these are the classics used in Nuremberg. Be aware that you’ll be departing off road from the One True Tradition.
  4. Should I glaze the cookies? Yes. That was easy enough. The glaze definitely enhances the overall look, especially since the bottoms are not glazed.
  5. Should I use the vanilla glaze or the chocolate? Tradition allows for either one, so it’s entirely up to you. Both are thin enough to be only an accent flavor. This cookie is all about the nuts, and even I, a lifelong chocoholic, don’t want to mess with that purity.
  6. Should I add the nut garnish on top? As you wish. They are only there for the sake of appearance and fair warning to anyone who sees them lying there on your tray.
  7. Should I add the optional salt? And why specify “large grain” salt? This is a nontraditional option that we liked so much that we felt obliged to share. Both Kate and I have a strong preference for salted nuts over plain when we snack on them out of hand. The optional salt creates that effect in a light way. We recommend large grain salt sprinkled on top of the glaze because that is the best way to give a salty highlight. The base recipe also contains some salt, but that is more of a bare minimum that the cookie would suffer without.

That’s it folks. Enjoy!

Nuts, nuts, nuts, and fruit. The only other things inside this cookie are honey and eggs as the binder.