On the 7th night of Chanukah I baked my true love Florentines. Thin, crispy, lacy, delicate and just drop dead gorgeous! I will warn you that these cookies are a bit of a pain in the ass to make. They require a candy thermometer and you will need to temper the chocolate for them, but they are so pretty (and delicious), that I think they’re worth the effort. Ever since I watched Anna create these on her show “Bake with Anna Olsen,” I became obsessed with making them. I have made similar lacy cookies with oats , but these are something totally different.These are essentially an almond cookie. Sliced almonds get coarsely crushed. Honey, cream and sugar are cooked until they reach 244°F.The almonds get mixed into the batter and then the cookies are formed and baked. The baked cookies are quite fragile, so they get a coating of melted chocolate on one side, to give them some extra strength. The cookies can then be embellished further, by placing the wet chocolate side of the cookie onto a chocolate transfer sheet. This is an acetate sheet embossed with cocoa butter and powdered food colouring. Once the chocolate hardens, you peel the cookie off the sheet and the design transfers to the chocolate, producing a stunning pattern. They come in a wide variety of designs. There are many differentonline sources for them.
On the third night of Chanukah I baked Macadamia Coconut White Chocolate Shortbread cookies for my true love. This is a Martha Stewart recipe, from her lovely Cookie Book. Her recipe used coconut and macadamia nuts, but I added white chocolate to mine. These tropical shortbread cookies are buttery and crumbly, everything a good shortbread cookie should be.
Certain foods just belong together. I learned about the magic combination of white chocolate and macadamia nuts many years ago when I worked at The David Wood Food Shop in Toronto. I was pregnant at the time and consumed a very large quantity of pastry chef Daphna Rabinovich’s Macadamia and White Chocolate Chip Cookies.
I find it much easier to roll out the dough right after I make it, before chilling. Roll it out between two sheets of parchment paper. Then stick it in the freezer for about 30 minutes before cutting it into shapes. I love these fluted square cookie cutters. They remind me of Nice cookies from my childhood.
My husband arrived home from work last week with a gift for me. From the sound of my squeal when I opened the package, you would have thought the box held a large square cut diamond ring. Nope. Just a jar of maple salt.
Yes, I said maple salt!! Who knew? My mind was reeling with the possibilities. Maple glazed chicken thighs finished with a sprinkle of maple salt, salmon with a maple soy glaze and strewn with a light dusting of maple salt, maple salted pecans? I settled on maple macadamia milk chocolate cookies, finished with a fine mist of maple salt. Maple syrup would be the natural addition to give these cookies a serious maple bent, but too much syrup would make the dough too soft and liquidy. The solution was to add maple extract to the dough. I added almost 1 1/2 teaspoons and it was perfect.
This recipe was adapted from the Lindt chocolate web site. The dough came together quite quickly in my stand mixer.I formed one round log and one square log (check out this video if you need help forming a square log). If you are impatient like me, freeze for 2 hours. If not, chill dough in fridge for 6 hours or even overnight. Slice, top with maple salt or just regular fleur de sel, and bake.Be patient and let them cool completely before tasting. They spread quite a bit in the oven. They are quite thin and you will be utterly surprised that such a thin and delicate cookie can pack such a wallop of deep maple flavour. Buttery and crispy, these cookies are really unique. The tiny crystals of maple salt crunch delicately between your teeth and keep you craving more. You can find maple salt online at Saltworks (in the USA), or at Maison Côté in Canada.
Before we get down to biscotti business, can we just chat for a few minutes about the PBS series “The Great British Baking Show“. Is anybody else as obsessed with with it as I am? I can’t seem to get enough of it. These are supposed amateur bakers who are blowing my mind with their sweet skills. Plus, the drama and controversy is really quite riveting to watch. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills have nothing on these Brits!
I was totally “Team Martha” until sadly, she was eliminated last week, Only 17 years old and already so accomplished. Creative, artistic and cute as a button, I predict big things ahead for her.
OK, now onto more important matters, Cookie Butter Biscotti! When I mentioned to my husband that I was planning to blog about biscotti this week he got very excited. Then I had to gently break it to him that I wasn’t planning to make those biscotti, but a new recipe instead, since I already posted about those biscotti already a few years ago. “Why bother making a different kind of biscotti, when your white chocolate, dried cherry, coconut biscotti are the ultimate?” he asked me. Not sure he really gets the concept of a food blog. You can’t post the same recipe over and over again. Oh well, I was convinced that once he crunched into one of these sweet and spicy babies, he’d come around.
The inspiration for this recipe came from my sister Bonnie. She is always sending me recipe ideas and photos. The original recipe was for peanut butter chocolate biscotti. But since I had lots of cookie butter in the cupboard, left over from making these, I decided to substitute cookie butter (speculoos spread) for the peanut butter.
Cookie Butter is just ground up Speculoos or Biscoff cookies (a gingersnap type Belgian cookie), sugar and oil. If you live in the U.S., Trader Joe’s carries their own brand. In Canada, the Lotus brand is available at Loblaws.
I thought that the buttery rich flavour of toasted hazelnuts would really complement the spicy ginger in these biscotti. And of course, bittersweet chocolate is always invited to any cookie party.Hazelnuts come with a thin skin on them, which can taste bitter. Removing the skin is simple. Toast hazelnuts on a baking sheet in the oven 10 to 15 minutes, or until lightly coloured and skins are blistered. Wrap nuts in a kitchen towel and let steam 1 minute. Rub nuts in towel to remove loose skins. Don’t worry about any stubborn skins that don’t come off. Let cool completely.
The dough gets divided into thirds and using your hands, form 3 flat logs. The logs spread quite a bit, so give each log its own baking sheet. Here’s a before and after shot of the first bake. Cool the logs for at least 30 minutes and then slice on the diagonal into 1/2 inch thick biscotti.Back into the oven for a second bake (Hence the name biscotti – or twice baked!) While the cookies are baking, melt some bittersweet chocolate and grind up some Speculoos or gingersnap cookies.
I was first introduced to Speculoos over 20 years ago by my Belgian neighbour Brigitte. These were the cookies of her childhood. Imagine if you can, a gingersnap on steroids. Bolder and much more aggressive than typical gingersnaps, Speculoos are brimming with dark brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cardamom and white pepper. A few packages of these crunchy thin biscuits always made it into her suitcase to bring back to Ottawa to share with us after a visit home with her mom. Brigitte speaks with a bit of an accent and the first time she served us the cookies I thought I heard her say “Speculum.” Kind of an odd name for a cookie I thought! Sometimes my mind wanders to strange places. Then in 2007, something wonderful happened. Els Scheppers, a very creative Belgian woman, crushed up some Lotus brand Speculoos cookies and mixed them with sugar and oil to create a sweet, creamy cookie butter spread. Hearing about this delicious concoction, Lotus Bakeries got in touch with Els and collaborated to perfect her creation. When it was released for sale to the Belgian market, it promptly sold out. People went bonkers for this stuff. Reminiscent of Nutella or peanut butter, but way more delicious! There is no end to the creative uses for Speculoos Cookie Butter. I have also heard that some people just eat it straight from the jar.
Trader Joes jumped on the bandwagon in 2011 and Speculoos Cookie Butter was born. In 2013 they launched Speculoos Cookie and Cocoa Swirl and pretty soon after that they had to start limiting customers to 1 jar each. It got a bit crazy there for a while. Luckily, it has become so mainstream that you can find several brands of speculoos cookie spread on most supermarket shelves, right beside the peanut butter and hazelnut spreads. These oatmeal lace sandwich cookies are the creation of cookie wizzard Nick Malgieri. I may have mentioned him in a previous post! He sandwiched them with chocolate ganache. I decided to use speculoos cookie butter.
The batter for these gossamer thin lacy cookies gets mixed by hand in a bowl. Leave lots of room on the baking sheet as you form them. They really spread. Once cooled, pipe a generous dollop of speculoos cookie spread on half the cookies and then sandwich them.
When I first spotted this cookie cutter on Etsy about 6 months ago and I knew I had to have it! Many years ago, when I was in culinary school I vividly recall, with great agony, having to memorize all the butcher’s cuts. These cookies just made me giggle!My oldest nephew, who is now living in Los Angeles, recently quit his corporate job to became a butcher’s apprentice. I think it is fantastic that he has found something he feels so passionate about and that he is now able to practice the craft. I knew I had to bake these cookies for him. In addition to being a butcher, he is also following the Paleo diet. I did briefly consider making Paleo friendly cookies for him, but my Google search for “Paleo Cookies” turned up some scary looking treats that I could not, in all good conscience, bake!
I used my favourite sugar cookie recipe, and whipped up a batch.
My daughter happened to be home from college this weekend, when I was baking the cookies. She is a vegetarian with an unusual sense of humour. She applied some carnage to one of the cookies.No animals were harmed in the making of these cookies! The blood is just smeared raspberries.
My nephew was thrilled with these cookies. He was also visiting this week and he is going to take them back to L.A. to share with all his new butcher friends!
One of the things I love best about blogging is connecting with other like-minded food obsessed folks. These are my people, they speak my language. Not only do they share my passions, but they share their ideas and always give credit and a huge shout-out of love and support to those that inspired them. It’s a wonderful freaking mutual admiration society. Food bloggers are generous of spirit. They are excited by what they discover and rather than hoard this new knowledge, they want to share it.
The inspiration for this blog came from Jayne Maynard’s blog, What’s for Dinner. She blogged about these crispy crunch chocolate chip cookies she had created. Jayne was inspired by a chocolate chip cookie with Rice Krispies in it that a bakery in her hometown made. She could not seem to get the cookies quite as crispy as they did. it was bugging her. Then she had her eureka moment when she remembered Christina Tosi, the genius behind Momofuko Milk Bar, and her brilliant creation of “The Crunch”.
Basically, Christina takes different cereals (Rice Krispies or Corn Flakes or Captain Crunch or Fruity Pebbles), mixes them with milk powder, a bit of sugar, melted butter and salt and bakes it at a low temperature which yields a perfect balance of sweet, salt and caramelized crunch in every bite. The melted butter acts as the glue to hold it all together and the milk powder coats everything and adds a bit of extra sweetness. She uses “The Crunch” as an addition to pie crusts, cookies, cakes and every other imaginable sweet out there.
Jayne mixed up a batch of “Crispy Crunch” (Rice Krispies baked with milk powder, melted butter, sugar and salt) added it to some chocolate chip cookie dough and arrived at the cookies she was dreaming about.
I was curious to see what would happen if I added the crunch to something already crunchy, like Biscotti. Would Crunch + Extra Crunch be amazing?
I started by mixing up a batch of Rice Krispie Crunch.
Golden brown and gorgeously caramelized once out of the oven, this is some pretty addictive stuff.
Butter and sugar get creamed together. Add eggs and vanilla.
Flour, baking powder and salt round out the dry ingredients. I added some toasted slivered almonds along with the Rice Krispie Crunch, because, really, you can never have enough crunch! This is a wet and sticky dough. You will need some extra flour for your hands and counter as you shape logs. I formed 4 logs, each about 9 inches long, 1 inch wide and 1 1/2 inches high. Place 2 logs on each parchment lined baking sheet.
After 25 minutes in a 300° F oven, they will look like this:
Turn down the oven to 275° F and let biscotti loaves cool for about 30 minutes. Slice on the diagonal about 1/2 inch wide, using a serrated knife. Place cut side up back onto parchment lined baking sheet. Dust with cinnamon and bake for an additional 20-25 minutes.
While traditional biscotti typically contain very little fat, this recipe uses a full cup of butter. They are firm and crisp like biscotti should be, but not at all dense and heavy. Because of the extra butter, they have a wonderful light and airy texture.
Serendipity can be defined as a happy accident or pleasant surprise; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. Some of the greatest foods we know today were discovered serendipitously.
Chocolate Chip Cookies are but one example of serendipity in the kitchen. Nannette Richford at Yahoo! Contributor Network explains how that happy accident came to be.
It all began when Kenneth and Ruth Wakefield purchased a Cape Cod-style TOLL HOUSE, located between Boston and New Bedford, in 1930. This house was originally a “toll house” where travelers stopped to pay a toll for using the highway. While their horses were being changed, they enjoyed a home cooked meal in the toll house. The Wakefields later turned the toll house into a lodge and called it The Toll House Inn.
Ruth, and her guests, had a passion for Butter Drop Do cookies which called for baker’s chocolate. One day, while Ruth was making these cookies, she ran out of bakers chocolate. As any resourceful woman would do, Ruth looked around for a substitution. She grabbed a semisweet chocolate bar that had reportedly been given to her as a gift from Andrew Nestle of the Nestle Chocolate Company. She chopped this chocolate bar it in small morsels and added them in place of the baker’s chocolate. Ruth expected the morsels to melt like bakers chocolate, but instead she discovered smooth gooey bits of chocolate throughout her cookies.
Serendipity recently struck food blogger Mandy Mortimer. I came across Mandy’s blog when I was checking out new entries on Food Gawker. Her Pecan Caramel Cookies stopped me dead in my tracks. I immediately clicked on them and went to her blog. Using Jacques Torres chocolate chip cookie recipe as a base, she took out the chocolate and added pecans and chunks of vanilla fudge instead. She expected the fudge bits to stay all chewy in the middle of the cookies, but they melted out and oozed all over the edge of the cookies, making a yummy crispy caramel accident.
I have to say that finding the fudge was the hardest part of making this recipe. Mandy is originally from South Africa but now lives in Ireland. She found fudge chunks made by Dr. Oetker, right in her local supermarket. No such luck here. No prepackaged fudge bits in my neck of the woods. I decided to just buy some fudge and chop it up. Fudge is one of those candies that everyone has heard of but no one sells anymore. Fudge making is at risk for becoming a lost culinary art.
After much searching, I found some at Kilbourne’s in Newboro Ontario, near my cottage. Mandy used vanilla fudge, Being the proud Canadian I am, I chose maple fudge! I think that the combination of pecan and maple is incredible. Something magical happens when you combine those two and somehow the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Be sure to toast the pecans before chopping them and adding them to the dough.
Chill the dough for a few hours before forming and baking cookies.I like to use an ice cream scoop so that all my cookies are exactly the same size. I used a 1 1/3 ounce sized scoop (about 1 3/4 inches across). A little sprinkle of fleur de sel on top of each takes these cookies to the next level and helps to tame the sweetness.
They will still look a bit underbaked when you remove them from the oven, but they will firm up upon cooling. Some of the fudge will ooze out, but don’t worry about it. Once it cools, that’s the baker’s treat!
I got Mickey Mouse ears in this batch.
I let them cool a bit and then had a warm one. Crispy around th edges and chewy in the center, nutty and almost butterscotchy. Completely addictive. Mandy warned me, and now I’m warning you. As soon as they cooled, I packaged them up and put them in the freezer so I would not snack on them any more. Well, 4 frozen cookies later, I can attest to the fact that they are even excellent straight from the freezer. I took the rest of them to my hairdresser today because I can not be left alone in the house with them!
For our family Passover seders in Toronto, I help out by bringing desserts. Last year I made Matzoh Crunch, Salted Caramel Macarons, Chocolate Macarons as well as Coconut Macaroons. My nephew Riley will cause a revolt if I don’t show up with Matzoh Crunch, so that stays in the rotation, but I needed to come up with something new to add to the plate this year. Passover desserts are quite limiting as you can’t bake with flour during Passover. For many years, people used Matzoh Meal as a substitute for flour in their favourite desserts. The results were always leaden and heavy and stayed with you almost as long as the eight days of Passover. Coconut is a very prevalent ingredient on the Passover dessert table, usually in the form of macaroons. But even coconut lovers have their limit.
This post is dedicated to all the coconut haters out there. I may not be a member of your tribe, but I respect your right to hate coconut. I may not understand it, but I do respect it. Coconut is one of those polarizing flavours, much like cilantro. You either love it or hate it. I happen to love it.
This is a great recipe to make for the coconut haters. This recipe was sent to me several years ago, by my sister Bonnie. I keep a very organized filing system and the recipe was exactly where I thought it should be. Trust me, that doesn’t always happen. Aside from being simple to make, they are quite beautiful to look at. They glitter like Kim Kardashian’s engagement ring and will disappear even quicker than her marriage! The texture of these cookies is a perfect combination of crunchy on the outside and chewy in the middle.
Eggs, sugar and honey are beaten very well, then melted chocolate and butter are mixed in. Ground almonds and a touch of cocoa powder are added and then the whole mixture is chilled for several hours.
Scoop cookies onto baking sheet, roll in coarse sugar and bake.
After the hard work of the baking is done, it’s time for the fun part…packaging it all up to give away. I am always on the lookout all year for interesting, reasonably priced containers in which to package up my treats. Ordinary “holiday themed” cookie tins are a little too pedestrian for me. I like to think outside the box. One year I packaged Pecan Almond Caramel Corn into a cello bag and stuffed it into an outdoor lantern from Ikea. Another year, I packaged up all the cookies in cello bags and then presented them in a huge watering can.
This year, I found these adorable treasure chests at HomeSense. The problem was, they only had about 8 of them, and I needed 40. So, I spent an afternoon driving around to all the HomeSense stores in town. (There are 5 in the Ottawa area) By the end of they day I had enough. I attracted a bit of attention at the cash when I piled my 10 treasure chests onto the counter. Everyone felt the need to ask me what I was planning to do with them.
This year I was very excited to have some help doing the last bit of baking and packaging. My girlfriend and her daughter, (who is my god-daughter!) from Toronto, came for a visit. My god-daughter wanted to come and learn how to bake with me. She is 20 years old and has wonderful fine motor skills. Within minutes, she was piping the gingerbread snowflakes like a pro! With their help, I got everything packaged up in record time. I loved having their company and can’t wait for them to come back next year and help me again!
The treasure chests were black and white so I downloaded a black and white pattern to use on my labels. We played around with a few different accent colours (lavender, yellow, pink and turquoise) and the blue shade was voted tops! I use a software program from Broderbund called Print Shop. The circular labels are from onlinelabels.com.
It was a bit of a challenge to fit all the cookies into the chests, but my girlfriend is a deep thinker and very intelligent and she figured out the best way to do it in no time flat. My spatial skills are very weak so I was tremendously grateful for her assistance, as it would have taken me forever to puzzle it all out.
I used to tie up all the cello bags with ribbon but that caused a few different problems. Firstly, it was very time-consuming and secondly, it was way too easy to untie the bags, steal a cookie and then tie it up again, without anyone being the wiser. I finally invested in a bag sealer which has saved me money in ribbon, time in bow tying and calories in keeping my grubby little hands out of the bags!
Ever since I watched Anna create these on her show “Bake with Anna Olsen,” I became obsessed with making them. I have made similar lacy cookies with oats , but these are something totally different.
These are essentially an almond cookie. Sliced almonds get coarsely crushed. 
Honey, cream and sugar are cooked until they reach 244°F.
The almonds get mixed into the batter and then the cookies are formed and baked. 
The baked cookies are quite fragile, so they get a coating of melted chocolate on one side, to give them some extra strength. 
The cookies can then be embellished further, by placing the wet chocolate side of the cookie onto a chocolate transfer sheet. This is an acetate sheet embossed with cocoa butter and powdered food colouring. Once the chocolate hardens, you peel the cookie off the sheet and the design transfers to the chocolate, producing a stunning pattern. They come in a wide variety of designs. There are many different online sources for them.
The possibilities are endless with Florentine cookies.
