Tag: powdered sugar

Pistachio Rosewater Tea Cakes

Pistachio Rosewater Tea Cakes // Serious Crust

Pistachio Rosewater Tea Cakes // Serious Crust
Pistachio Rosewater Tea Cakes // Serious Crust

During the holiday season, all I want to do is make cookies. All of the cookie recipes I’ve been eyeing throughout the year, this seems like the time to make them. I want chocolate cookies, I want mint crinkles, I want pecan shortbreads, I want soft sugar cookies decorated with frosting designs, I want ginger snaps. Maybe this is why I always add a layer this time of year? Maybe.

I recently bought a bottle of rosewater (mostly because there’s this dish in Jerusalem (the cookbook)- swordfish with harissa and rose – that I had once and I’ve been wanting to make it again), and it had been sitting on my pantry shelf, looking pretty but also lonely. And then I came across this recipe for “Pistachio Rosewater Snowball Cookies” in the latest issue of Kinfolk Magazine. They sounded like a beautiful twist on what some people call Mexican wedding cookies or Russian Tea Cakes or any other number of cookies: nutty with pistachio, and aromatic and floral from the cardamom and rose.

After making the recipe from Kinfolk, I made a few small changes to the recipe, and I wanted to share them with you. I thought the original was a little heavy on the rosewater, and a little light on the cardamom (though my roommates and Jonah really enjoyed them as they were). They’re buttery and crumbly. They’re sweet but with a unique flavor with them. And they smell beautiful.

Pistachio Rosewater Tea Cakes

Note: I found rosewater with the cocktail mixers at my local grocery store. It might also be in with the extracts in the baking aisle. If not, you can find it online.

Second note: Before you invest in making this recipe, you should definitely read through this recipe, and know that 1) pistachios are pricey, especially if you buy them already shelled and 2) there is a lot of kind of annoying pistachio prep. You’ve been warned.

Ingredients

1 cup unsalted, shelled pistachios
2 cups plus 2 Tbl all purpose flour
3/4 tsp ground cardamom
1/4 tsp salt
2 cups powdered sugar, divided
1 cup (2 sticks) butter unsalted butter, room temperature
3/4 tsp rosewater

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment, or butter them.

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil, and blanch the pistachios for 1 minute. Drain them, and place them on a clean dish towel. Fold the dish towel over the pistachios and rub off the skins. (There may be some stubborn ones that you need to peel off.) Spread them in a small baking dish and roast them in the oven until they’re just dry, about 8 minutes. Set them aside and allow them to cool. When they are cool, pulse in a food processor or blender until they’re finely ground, but definitely not a paste. Transfer them to a small mixing bowl and whisk together with the flour, cardamom, and salt.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat together 1 cup of the powdered sugar and the butter until pale and fluffy. Add the rosewater, and mix it in. With the mixer on low, add in the pistachio flour mixture and mix just until a dough forms, scarping down the sides of the bowl as needed.

Roll the dough into 1-1.5 inch balls. Arrange at least 1 inch apart on the pan, and bake until they’re just golden on the bottom, ~20 minutes (mine took a little less). While the cookies are baking, pour the remaining cup of powdered sugar into a wide bowl. Remove the cookies from the oven, allow them to cool from a minute or two, and when they’re cool enough to handle, roll them in the powdered sugar. Allow to cool the rest of the way on a wire race.

Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

Chocolate Crinkle Cookies
Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

You’ll notice that this is my second chocolate cookie recipe within a week. I know, I know, why Annie? Why do you tempt yourself with these delicious chocolatey cookies? First, I can’t help it. Sometimes I just want something fudgy and gooey and crisp around the edges. Second, I don’t eat all of them myself. The first cookies (the salted chocolate cookies) were mostly consumed by a bunch of friends we had over, and the second cookies (the ones I’m about to tell you about) I brought to Jonah’s boss. We’ve started a little tradition that whenever I make cookies, Jonah takes some into work so that we don’t eat them all, and his coworkers are loving it. Jonah works at a great start-up company in Portland that does internet radio, and we may be hitting the airwaves ourselves soon with a food/cooking show. We’ll see what happens, but we’re talking about it. Thoughts?

Anyway, now onto some chocolate crinkle cookies. I wanted to make something that did not require me to buy anything since we have so much baking stuff in our apartment. So after some searching, I found this recipe on 17 and baking for these. Easy, delicious, and pretty. I halved the recipe because, well it supposedly yields 7 DOZEN COOKIES and let’s face it, we really didn’t need that many. So I’ll give you my miniature version.

Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

Makes 3 dozen cookies

Ingredients

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cups granulated sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4-1/3 cup confectioners’ sugar

Instructions

In a bowl (or in the bowl of your electric mixer, if you’re using one) combine the cocoa powder, sugar, and oil. Scrape down the sides, and add the eggs one at a time, mixing well between each addition. Add the vanilla. Now throw in the flour, baking powder, and salt and mix to combine. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for at least 4 hours. I let mine sit in the fridge overnight because I didn’t feel like starting the baking process at 11 p.m.

When you’re ready to bake the suckers, preheat your oven to 350 degrees, line a baking sheet with parchment paper, and pull out the cookie dough. Put the powdered sugar into a shallow bowl, and roll the dough into balls about 1 inch in diameter or about a rounded teaspoon. You’ll want to lightly oil your hands so the dough doesn’t stick to your palms when you’r rolling it. After making the balls of dough, roll them in powdered sugar to coat evenly, dusting off any extra, and put them on the cookie sheet at least an inch apart.

Now put them in the oven and bake for 10-12 minutes (mine were perfect at 11). Let them cool on the cookie sheet for a minute before moving them to a rack to cool completely. These cookies look like cookies you see in the magazine. They cracked beautifully and looked so pretty with the contrast of the white powdered sugar and the dark chocolate insides. Enjoy these treats with a glass of milk!

Key Lime Meltaways

Key Lime Meltaways

Key Lime Meltaways
Key Lime Meltaways

Key Lime Meltaways

So, I had gone over a week without baking. OVER A WEEK. That’s a long time for me. Seeing as we’re trying to cut down on our sweets intake, I was trying to be good and, for the most part, succeeding. But the time came when all I wanted to do was to try out a new cookie recipe and I just couldn’t help myself. I had been stalking this recipe for Key Lime Meltaways from Smitten Kitchen for quite some time, and I finally decided to make it. We had everything except the limes, so I just popped over to the store and grabbed a couple (we were going anyway to get ingredients for a delicious dinner that will be posted shortly). The recipe recommends key limes, but I didn’t want to buy an entire bag of them, so I just bought a couple of small limes (and ended up only using one actually). I used bread flour because I’m still trying to work my way through that giant bag Jonah bought me. I also halved the recipe, but I’ll give you the full recipe because…well…sometimes more is just better.

These cookies were so good, sweet at first and then sour, and the zest were these little crunchy bits from being baked… Yum! We made a half a batch which yielded 2 dozen cookies, and they were gone quickly. A little too quickly for my liking. But what can you do. Enjoy!

Key Lime Meltaways

Makes 2 dozen cookies

Ingredients

1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
Grated 2 (small) limes
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice (I added a little extra because I like sour stuff)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 3/4 cup plus 2 Tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt

Instructions

Put the butter and 1/3 cup of the powdered sugar into the bowl of an electric mixer and cream until it’s nice and fluffy. Then add the lime zest, juice, and vanilla and beat it until fluffy again. For me, the mixture wasn’t absorbing all the liquid (the lime juice and vanilla), so I just continued on my merry way without worrying about it.

In another bowl, mix together the flour, cornstarch, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the butter/sugar mixture and mix until combined. Now, the recipe says to roll the dough into two 1 1/4-inch-diameter logs between two pieces of parchment paper. I didn’t have any parchment paper, so I wrapped the dough in plastic wrap and rolled it out in that, which worked just fine. Now, throw the logs in the fridge for an hour to chill.

When you pull out the logs, start heating your oven to 350 degrees. Either grease your cookie sheet a little bit or line it with parchment paper. Put the rest of the powdered sugar (2/3 cup) in a ziploc or other resealable bag. Take the plastic wrap or parchment paper off the logs and slice them into 1/4 inch thick slices. Put the rounds on your baking sheet about 1 inch apart and bake them for about 15 minutes (I turned mine part way through baking because the back right corner of my oven is hotter and I wanted them to be evenly cooked).

Take them out of the oven and transfer them to a wire rack to cool. After cooling for a few minutes, but while they’re still warm, put cookies in the ziploc baggie of sugar 3 or 4 at a time. Seal up the bag, and toss the cookies around to coat them in the sugar. Remove the cookies from the bag and put them on a plate to serve!