Cookie

These are very thin, crisp, fragile cookies that complement soft desserts such as sherbets, ice creams, and fruit compotes.

This is a classic cookie to serve with a bowl of sliced fruit or a poached fruit compote (see page 364). The dough can be formed into logs of different shapes—round, square, oval—before chilling and slicing; or roll it out and cut with cookie cutters.

What makes these cookies crisp is the mixing together of baking soda and boiling water before adding them to the batter.

In Italian, biscotti means “twice-cooked.” Biscotti are baked first in long loaves, then sliced into thick cookies, and baked again until lightly toasted. The cookies are crisp and dry, and store well; and I like the fact that they are not extremely sweet. Various ingredients such as nuts, chocolate, spices, liquor, and dried fruits are added for flavor. I make biscotti flavored with lightly toasted almonds and aniseed. They go equally well with a cup of coffee or tea or a glass of wine. The biscotti recipe I use most often has no butter. Eggs and sugar are beaten together until they increase in volume, turn light in color, and form a ribbon when you lift up the whisk or beaters. This means the mixture will fall back onto itself slowly and thickly in a ribbon-like pattern. When the eggs are warm it will take about 3 or 4 minutes to beat the eggs to this point; when they are cold, it can take up to 10 minutes. If you have forgotten to take the eggs out of the refrigerator in advance, warm them for a few minutes in their shells in a bowl of almost-hot water. Air trapped in the beaten egg mixture lightens the texture of biscotti. Be careful to stir in the flour only until it is just incorporated, and then gently fold in the other ingredients so as not to deflate the eggs. Form the dough into long loaves on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. The dough will be very wet and sticky. Wet your hands before touching it to keep them from sticking. Use a spoon and your hands to smooth the logs. Bake them until golden and set. When removed from the oven, the loaves are quite delicate until cooled. Carefully pull the whole sheet of paper with the loaves right onto a cooling rack. When cool, slice the loaves with a long serrated bread knife (on a diagonal, for longer cookies). Spread the cookies out on the baking sheet and bake again until golden and toasted. They will keep for up to a month in an airtight container.

A vast array of cookie recipes spring from one basic formula: butter and sugar are beaten together, eggs are stirred in for moisture, and flour is mixed in at the end. The consistency of the resulting cookie dough can range from one firm enough to roll out and cut, to a dough soft enough to drop from a spoon right onto a baking sheet, to a very wet dough moistened only with egg whites that has to be piped and thinly spread with a knife onto a baking sheet. (A charming cookie called a langue de chat, or cat’s tongue, is made from this last kind of dough.) Beating butter and sugar together until fluffy and light-colored is called creaming. Sugar is added, and the beating continues until the mixture is light and fluffy again. The creaming process aerates the butter: air bubbles are literally forced into the butter mixture. These air bubbles expand during the baking, making the cookies light and tender. Butter can be creamed by hand or with a mixer. If using a mixer, the butter and sugar can be added at the same time. Mix at medium-high speed for 2 or 3 minutes (if using a stand mixer, use the paddle attachment). Stop the machine once or twice to scrape down the sides to ensure that all the sugar gets incorporated into the butter evenly. In a pinch, cold butter can be used: just put it in the mixing bowl by itself and beat until soft before adding the sugar. The butter has to be soft to cream properly. Once the butter and sugar are creamed together, add the eggs and mix well. If using a mixer, scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed. It is important that the eggs be at room temperature, too. If they are added cold, the butter will seize up, deflating the air bubbles, and the dough will resist thorough mixing. Add liquid flavorings and sweeteners such as vanilla extract, liquors, molasses, and honey along with the eggs. Flour is the last ingredient to be added. Be sure to measure the flour the same way every time. This will make your baking more consistent. I recommend this method: Stir the flour up to fluff it. Use a dry measuring cup, the flat-topped kind that fills to the brim, and either scoop up the flour with it or spoon the flour into it; then draw a spatula or knife across the top of the cup to level the flour. Don’t tap the cup or the flour will compact. Add the flour to the butter and eggs and stir it in until just mixed. You want all the flour to be completely mixed in, but too much stirring will activate the gluten in the flour and make the cookies tough. Mix salt, ground spices, and baking powder or baking soda into the flour before it is added to the cookie dough. Chunky flavorings such as chopped nuts, chocolate, or dried fruit should be stirred in gently after the flour has been mixed in. Dough for drop cookies can be baked right away or chilled and baked later. Cookies that are to be shaped or rolled out often require chilling first to firm up the dough. Many cookie doughs can be rolled into logs, chilled, and then sliced into neat cookies to bake. Shape the logs into ovals, squares, or rectangles for different shapes. The logs can be frozen for up to 2 months and the sliced cookies require no defrosting before baking. Slice off as many cookies as needed and return the rest to the freezer for later. To bake cookies properly it is worth investing in one or two heavy baking sheets. They help the cookies to bake evenly, particularly by keeping them from browning too much on the bottom. An oven thermometer is helpful for determining your oven’s actual temperature. I like to line baking sheets with parchment paper or a silicone mat, both of which keep cookies from sticking and make cleanup much easier. The parchment paper can be reused from batch to batch. Bake the cookies in the center of a preheated oven. Adjust your oven racks if necessary. Every oven has a hot spot where the cookies will bake more quickly. To compensate for this, rotate the baking sheets halfway through the baking. Turn the ...

Using pomegranate juice instead of water to make this nut brittle not only makes for a beautiful magenta-tinted caramel color but also adds a very subtle flavor of the pomegranate. Serve this buttery treat with ice cream, or pack it in cellophane bags and tie them with festive bows for delicious party favors.

These traditional baked coconut squares are served by street vendors all over Mexico. They take no time at all to prepare and are great for picnics and for packing in lunch boxes—if they last long enough! My favorite part of this dessert is the crunchy golden edges. When I make it at home, they disappear first.

My very close friend and colleague Elsa Flores, a Baja pastry chef, shared this recipe with me. It’s a wonderful fusion of one very Mexican ingredient, amaranth, with one very French dessert, macaroons. Be sure to let the raw macaroons rest after they are piped. This will dry out the tops and will result in a shinier and perfectly puffed macaroon.

Polvo means “powder” in Spanish, which is exactly what these crumbly, buttery cookies turn into in your mouth. My mom made polvorones for us every Christmas. These melt-in-your-mouth Mexican wedding cookies are very easy to prepare and are the perfect accompaniment to a cup of after-dinner coffee—or for dipping in hot chocolate, as I did when I was a child.

The smell of fried tortillas and cinnamon engulfed our home during the Christmas season as my mom made dozens of these crunchy treats and wrapped them in cellophane to give to friends and family. I’ve now taken over the tradition, and my son loves to help me cut the tortillas into holiday shapes with cookie cutters or scissors before I fry them. Using authentic Mexican tortillas (lard and all) makes all the difference.

Biscotti are probably the best-known Italian sweet, and every region has its own specialty, from very simple ones flavored with anise seed to those made with flavored doughs or packed with fruits and nuts. I grew up eating biscotti made with hazelnuts and sometimes dipped in chocolate, and much as I love those, this combination of almond and lemon has become my new fave. They are crunchy and subtly flavored. For a dinner party I dip them in melted white chocolate to make them a little more special.

Compared to American Christmas cookies, Italian cookies are a bit less sweet. They bake up nice and buttery, and the dried apricots make them moist and chewy rather than crisp and crunchy. The dough freezes well, so I like to make a double batch and store some to bake when unexpected guests drop by (just be sure to increase the baking time by two minutes if baking from frozen). The cookies will fill the whole house with an alluring fragrance and make you look like a superstar, even if you don’t have time to make the glaze.

Most of my desserts are fairly low-maintenance to assemble, so I hesitated to include the recipe for these in this book. But they are so incredibly irresistible and delicious—imagine a homemade candy bar with a chewy caramel center—that I decided it would be unfair not to. Take care not to overcook the caramel, so it stays soft and chewy and doesn’t become hard and brittle. Investing in a candy thermometer takes away the guesswork and ensures a perfect outcome.

You need not use your best olive oil for these cookies, but extra virgin olive oil will make them more interesting than “pure” or “light” olive oil.

Cookies are always easy to make, but even they can use streamlining. One solution is to whip up a single dough in a food processor and finish it in different ways. This basic dough is great plain (with white sugar or brown or even molasses), but it can be varied with ginger or a mix of spices, chocolate chips, or orange. Or with one batch of dough you can make four different types of cookies—add lemon juice and zest to one-fourth of it, for example, chopped walnuts to the second, raisins to the third, and coconut to the fourth. Finally, it can produce rolled-out, cut, and decorated cookies; just chill it first to make it easier to handle. You might call this “the mother of all butter cookies.” Make these with more flour and they’re cakey; use more butter and they’re delicate, with better flavor; here, I go for the second option.

In Verona, Italy, you can buy bags of I baci di Romeo e Giulietta—chocolate and almond cookies honoring Shakespeare's mythical, star-crossed lovers. I prefer to sandwich these two types of cookies together by sealing the "sighs" and "kisses" with a sweet filling. You will need two sets of mixer bowls and paddle attachments for this recipe.

Chef Grunert shares another inventive cookie recipe that utilizes interesting ingredients, such as red fife flour, a hard wheat grain that imparts a nutty flavor. Buttery, lemony, and sweet, these cookies are easy to prepare. Makes about 80 small cookies.

Ginger, my mother, never liked a bunch of kids in her house. Even as a young girl, I could feel her angst when too many neighborhood kids were around. Her clever solution was to bake a plate of my favorite Bacon Banana Cookies and leave them on the front porch, locking the door behind her. I never minded being sequestered outside with my food loot in the summer because the porch concrete cooled my skin. The winter—that was a different story. When I bake these cookies now for my son, Anthony, I'm secretly baking them for myself. I wonder if my mom did the same thing? I'll be sure to ask her...as soon as she unlocks the front door.

This is the best use of leftover egg whites you’ll find. Generally, one egg white will support one cup of shredded coconut or ground nuts, but I like to be safe and use an extra egg white. You can combine nuts and coconut or use any of them alone.