Tag Archives: Cookies

Robin’s Egg Malted Milk Chocolate Macarons

Macarons (not to be confused with macaroons) have a reputation for being difficult to make. Essentially, a macaron is made from ground almonds, powdered sugar and egg whites. Seems simple enough but so much can go wrong. They are a tricky little cookie. If you overmix, or undermix, fail to measure correctly, overbake or underbake you won’t get the pretty frilly “feet” or smooth surface. You need to pay attention to every step of the process. The best way to become proficient at macaron making is to make them often. Since I only make macarons once a year, at Passover, I have not become proficient.

Some years they turn out perfectly, other years, they are cracked and hollow. They always taste delicious, no one complains and they all get eaten, but it bothered me that I couldn’t get consistent results. I am in charge of desserts at our family Passover Seders. That’s dessert for 45 people on the first night at my sister-in-law’s house (my husband’s side of the family) and 36 guests at my mom’s house on the second night.

As I was planning what to bake and going through my cookbooks for inspiration, I noticed a little book on my shelf titled, “Secrets of Macarons”. I think it was a gift, but I had never read it. I was curious to see what French chef, Jose Marechal, had to say about this little diva of a cookie.

I made a startling discovery. Apparently there are two methods by which macarons can be created, the French meringue method and the Italian meringue method. In the Italian method, the sugar is boiled into a syrup, and once it reaches 240°F, it is carefully incorporated into the egg whites. In the French method, the raw sugar is added into the egg whites. I had only ever tried the French method. While on the surface it would seem that the French method is simpler, no dealing with candy thermometers and boiling hot syrup, you need to consider the benefits of that extra step of boiling the sugar. Cooking the sugar into a syrup creates a more stable macaron batter.

Marechal explains the science behind the Italian method. “Since the sugar is incorporated in the form of a syrup, it disperses into the beaten egg whites well, puffing them up while evaporating some moisture. Since the Italian meringue has a denser consistency, it is easier to incorporate into the almond paste. It has a less brittle structure and the macaronage (working the batter) is more manageable.”

I was curious to see if the Italian meringue method would give me more consistent results. I made 6 batches of macarons over 2 days. (Two batches each of these Robin’s Egg, two batches of salted caramel macarons and two batches of PB&J macarons). Every batch came out almost perfectly. No hollow shells, no cracked tops and lovely frilly feet.

Although the Italian method involves the additional step of cooking the sugar, the consistent results are worth it. If you’re a macaron newbie, take the extra step and boil your sugar. You’ll thank me!

Click here to print recipe for Robin’s Egg Malted Milk Chocolate Macarons Download

Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp Hamentashen

Citrus and Brown Butter Shortbread Sandwich Cookies

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After almost 35 years of marriage, what passes as a romantic gesture changes with the progression of time. Many years ago, his expression of love was was a gorgeous bouquet of tulips, since he learned that I hate roses. Mine was bringing him coffee in bed. These days we convey our affection a bit differently. I surprise him with a “morning, noon and night” pill tray, and he arranges to have the divots I have made in our new wood floors fixed, all with a smile on his face. (I dropped my marble and my wooden photography backdrops a few too many times.)

Valentines Day is not a big celebration in our house, but I can’t pass up an opportunity to bake something photographic and pink! These citrus and brown butter shortbread cookies are from Mindy Segal’s book, “Cookie Love.” I decided to sandwich these cookies with some strawberry jam and make them fancy with a pink top.

Start by browning some butter in a pot on the stove. Whe your kitchen begins to smell like heaven (or toasted nuts), it’s time to pull the butter off the stove and chill it. The dough uses lots of citrus zest. I incorporated lemon, lime and orange.

I decided to make round and square sandwich cookies with a heart cutout on the top cookie.

For decorating the cookies, I decided to do two versions. The first was to make pink powdered sugar to sift over the top cookie. I bought freeze dried strawberries and using my spice grinder, I ground them up in with some icing sugar. Most health food stores carry freeze dried fruits. They are also a fantastic way to naturally flavour and colour buttercream.

The second variation is to make a glaze. Grind up the freeze dried strawberries with powder sugar and mix in some citrus juice. I used a combo of lemon, lime and orange, since I had already zested them for the dough. It makes a lip puckering glaze that is perfect with the sweet cookies.

Click here to print recipe for

Citrus and Brown Butter Shortbread Sandwich Cookies

With a big glass of milk, these cookies are the perfect way to express your love!

Pretzel Crusted Peanut Butter Bars

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As I was scrolling through Instagram the other day, someone asked us to fill in the blank to this statement. “I am happiest when…..” My quick response was, “when I am finished spin class!” But I got to thinking seriously about this.

I feel deep satisfaction when i create order out of chaos. I think it has more to do with creating beauty where there was none before. I am an acutely aesthetic person and i feel a strong desire to create beauty. Author Alice Walker once said, “Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.”

I choose to express my creativity using the medium of food. When i saw these peanut butter squares on Martha Stewart, I knew I had to recreate them. This is my twist on her version. I swapped out her shortbread crust for a pretzel crust. All that sweetness needed some salt for balance. I created a velvety smooth middle layer with white chocolate, peanut butter and butterscotch chips. A crown of bittersweet chocolate topped these beauties off.

Here’s how it all comes together:

You could of course make these without the mold. Just spread melted bittersweet chocolate over peanut butter layer and chill. But, if you need more beauty in your life, you can order the mold from here.

Pretzel Crusted Peanut Butter Bars Download

Perfect Chocolate Chunk Cookies 2.0

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Still on the cookie train over here at saltandserenity.com. It’s pretty much all I bake in December. I adore cookies and so I give myself permission to bake, blog and talk about cookies all month. I’ll be back with some vegetables in January, I promise.

I decided it was time to update my post on these cookies. I first blogged about them back in 2011. And then again in 2015. They are my most requested cookie. Actually, it’s not even my recipe. The original recipe comes from Ashley of the wonderful blog “Not Without Salt.”

I have given the recipe to lots of friends and family members. Often they will tell me that they just don’t taste the same as the ones I bake. I have been tweaking Ashley’s recipe and technique over the past few years, so I figured it was time to share exactly what I do to make mine so yummy. Plus, it was time to update the pictures. Along with my baking skills, my photography skills have also improved over the years and these fabulous cookies needed a new headshot!

First, let’s talk butter. (because talking about butter brings me great joy!) Room temperature butter means butter that has been sitting on the counter for 30-45 minutes. You will know your butter is at the perfect temperature when you press your finger into it and make a slight indent. It should still feel firm, but not cold and it should not feel greasy. If it’s too soft, the butter won’t aerate properly when beaten with sugar, leading to flat cookies.

Eggs should also be at room temperature. Just remove them from the fridge when you remove your butter. Cold eggs can curdle the butter and they just won’t mix properly into the ingredients, leaving you with a poorly mixed dough, which results in inconsistent cookies.

Let’s chat chocolate. If you make these cookies with regular chocolate chips that you find in the baking aisle, they will be good cookies, but they won’t be outstanding. I use Valrhona Guanaja Feves. The lovely Michelle at The Vanilla Food Company in Toronto will ship them to you. This is not a sponsored post, I just really love this chocolate.

Ok, we’ve sorted out butter, eggs and chocolate. What about sugar? Ashley came up with the brilliant idea of using 3 kinds of sugar, light brown sugar for chewiness, white sugar for crispiness and turbinado sugar (also called sugar in the raw), for a bit of crunch.

The last ingeredient we need to talk about is flour. I have recently tried making these cookies with a mix of bread flour and all-purpose flour. Alton Brown and Jacques Torres (Mr. Chocolate) swear by using some bread flour in your chocolate chip cookies. Bread flour has a higher gluten (protein) content which gives the cookies a chewier texture. I made a batch with all bread flour but found them to be too dense. I settled on a ratio of about 1.3 bread flour : 1 all purpose flour.

I like to chill the dough for before baking. Chilling the dough firms up the butter, so that the cookies spread less, making a chewier thicker cookie. That hour in the fridge also dries out the dough slightly, which concentrates the flavour. If this kind of baking science is your jam, check out this awesome article on the King Arthue website.

I scoop my cookies with an ice cream scoop so that they are all exactly the same size.
Finally, don’t forget to sprinkle with a tiny bit of coarse salt. That salty-sweet balance is really important. Kind of like a metaphor for life. Without the salty tears, the sweet moments are not as meaningful.

Click here to print recipe for The-Perfect-Chocolate-Chunk-Cookie-2.0-1 Download

Chewy Brown Sugar and Toffee Cookies

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I won’t post a recipe with an obscure ingredient just for the sake of novelty. I try not to ask you to special order something unless it truly adds to the recipe and significantly improves the dish.

So it was with some trepidation that I ordered a $15 bag of smoked brown sugar to experiment with. In my defence, I was curious. I had never seen smoked brown sugar before and I was intrigued. I’m not a huge fan of smoked fish, but I adore smoked almonds and smoked turkey. Plus, I love nothing more than kitchen experiments. My inquisitive brain wanted to see what would happen if I snuck some into a batch of cookie dough.

I was envisioning a cookie with a hint of that campfire smoke you associate with making s’mores. Sometimes there is a huge gap between what you wish for and what actually transpires. I ended up with a batch of cigarette flavoured cookies. Too smoky!! I tried them again with just a scant 1/4 cup of smoked brown sugar and while the smoke flavour was mild, they had an odd smell. reminiscent of sweaty gym socks. Not what you are looking for in a cookie.

But it was not a total failure. As my sister Jody is fond of saying, “mistakes are how we learn”. The texture of these cookies was stellar. They were slightly crispy at the edges with a pronounced chewiness in the center. I decided to make them with all regular brown sugar and I added a bag of chopped Skor/Heath bits to really enhance the toffee notes of brown sugar. I finished them off with a light sprinkling of flaked sea salt before baking.

As I munched my way through the new batch, I knew I had a winner on my hands. And I saved you $15. You’re welcome!

Click here to print recipe for Chewy Brown Sugar and Toffee Cookies Download

Tropical Macaroons

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This year for Passover I wanted to try something a little different for our dessert table. I always make coconut macaroons diped in chocolate. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. They’re practically perfect.

I decided to put a tropical twist on my macaroons. This year our Seder theme is to come dressed as a character from a Tom Hanks movie. (don’t ask!!). I figured that these cookies would be right at home on the set of Cast Away. I started with a recipe from David Lebowitz for coconut pineapple macaroons. Cook down some crushed canned pineapple and sugar until it reaches a jam-like consistency. I ramped up the tropical vibe with some macadamia nuts and white chocolate.
It is traditional to utter these words at the end of every Passover Seder, “Next year in Jerusalem.” It’s entirely possible these little macaroons will have us declaring “Next year in Hawaii.”

Click here to print recipe for Tropical Macaroons.

Cinnamon Bun Hamentashen with Almond Shortbread Dough

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I first made these hamentashen six years ago. Inspired by cinnamon buns, I stuffed the hamentashen with brown sugar, cinnamon, butter and chopped almonds and pecans. What could be bad about that? I used my Aunt Carol’s traditional oil based dough and once baked, I drizzled them with an icing sugar glaze. They were a big hit.

But then, last year I had a hamentashen epiphany. I discovered Israeli bread baking guru Uri Scheft‘s almond butter shortbread dough . He wrapped up his poppy seed hamentashen with this gorgeous buttery dough. I made them and I was hooked!

I wondered what would happen if I put the cinnamon bun filling into the almond shortbread dough? I mean, I knew it would be good, but I had no idea how seriously good it would be. That chewy cinnamon filling wrapped up in a crumbly cookie dough is off the charts good!

I went a little bit rogue and made the dough with salted butter, given my success with the Salted Butter Skor Shortbread cookies.

Click here to print recipe for Cinnamon Bun Hamentashen with Almond Shortbread Dough.

Maple Pecan Hamentashen

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Hamentashen are the traditional treat baked for the Jewish holiday of Purim, which, this year, falls on Thursday March 1. The Festival of Purim commemorates a time when the Jewish people living in ancient (4th century BCE) Persia were saved from extermination.

The celebration of Purim will be bitter-sweet for me this year. Sweet because, well…. Hamentashen! Bitter because this will be my first Purim without my Aunt Carol. She passed away, suddenly, a few weeks ago. She is actually my husband’s aunt, but from the very first time I met her, over 36 years ago, she always made me feel like a part of the family. I miss her very much.

It was from Aunt Carol that I learned that all hamentashen didn’t come from a bakery. (I also learned that it is rude to stack dishes at the table when clearing.) Until I met her, I’d never had a homemade hamentashen. My reaction was not that dissimilar to when I found out, from my big sister Faith, that babies don’t come from the stork.

Every year, Aunt Carol and her sister-in-law, Aunt Jen, went into factory mode and produced vast quantities of tiny little triangles of dough filled with a prune and raisin filling, dipped in honey and walnuts. They shipped these hamantashen off to all their children, nieces and nephews across the universe. Sadly, Aunt Jen died about 26 years ago, but Aunt Carol soldiered on alone, continuing the tradition of making hamentashen for everyone in the family. We all looked forward to our little parcels in the mail. It’s possible that my addiction to online shopping is her fault. She conditioned me to get happy when boxes arrived in the mail.

I spent some very happy afternoons in Aunt Carol’s kitchen learning how to master hamentashen. The dough for this recipe is hers. The filling recipe for these hamentashen is my creation. While I love the traditional flavours of poppyseed and prune, I like to play with different flavour combos.A few years ago year I made Cinnamon Bun Hamentashen. Last year I baked Salted Caramel Apple Hamentashen, Poppy Seed Hamentashen and Dried Cherry and Pecan Hamentashen.

I love the combo of maple and pecans. I blitzed some toasted pecans, maple butter and some cream cheese together to make this delicious filling. If you can’t find maple butter, a combo of brown sugar and maple syrup would be a good substitute. In the recipe link below, I give proportions.