I come from the school of taste that says cookies are supposed to be crisp. I suppose I should qualify that – most cookies are meant to be crisp. Surely there are some that simply can’t be crisp by their very nature. My mother loved persimmons, and every year she made persimmon cookies. More like little bite-sized cakes than cookies to me. I like persimmons, but not that kind of soft cookie. My preference, always, is for crisp. Some years ago I read a very in-depth article in Gourmet Magazine about cookie standards, and exactly what makes a cookie come out crisp vs. soft, vs. crisp outside, soft inside. That kind of thing. It was fascinating reading the chemistry of it all. I still have the article, although I rarely refer to it.

One thing I know for sure is that using butter makes for a crisp cookie. I haven’t used margarine for anything in many, many years. I used to use Plugra unsalted for all my baking, but have found that it’s too HIGH in butterfat, if you can believe that! So I use grocery store types at the high price end because I don’t want butter that is watered down. Grocery store brands usually contain less butterfat and added water. So I use Danish Creamery, or something similar. I always keep a pound of butter in the refrigerator and usually one in the freezer. Just in case I feel inspired.

Last night after I’d gone upstairs to go to bed, my DH’s blood sugar went a little low, so he rooted in the freezer hoping to find a frozen cookie somewhere. No luck whatsoever. We ate the last of the homemade cookies about 3 months ago. Since my broken foot on July 6th, there’s been zip-zero-nada baking going on in this kitchen unless he did it. He’s never made cookies in his entire life, so that wasn’t about to happen! But, now that I have my walking papers, he said, please make some cookies. As a Type I diabetic, my DH doesn’t eat many desserts. Or at least, he’s very careful about when and why he eats anything sweet. But he does enjoy an occasional cookie. Some sweets I’m able to incorporate Splenda, so he can have all he wants. I have yet to try chocolate chip cookies using all Splenda. They might be just fine.

Over the years I’ve collected plenty of cookie recipes and make a variety throughout the year, and enjoy having something stashed in the freezer for the occasional afternoon cup of tea, or a snack now and then. My first choice, though, is always chocolate chip. It used to be the usual back-of-the-bag Nestle’s recipe. But, because I’ve had trouble a time or two with the recipe (the cookies would come out too flat) I’ve made one significant change to the master recipe: I add approximately one tablespoon of additional flour to the mixing bowl. If I happen to use Plugra butter (remember, more butterfat) I add 2 tablespoons. I’m also a fan of chocolate chip cookies WITH nuts. Any nuts could be okay, but walnuts just float my boat, as they say. So, these cookies are chocolate chocolate chip walnut cookies.

This time I wanted to do something different, so I added 2 heaping tablespoons of Dutch process cocoa to the batter too. And, I used Nestle’s relatively new “Chcolatier” chips that are made with bittersweet chocolate, rather than the usual milk chocolate chips in the yellow bag. So these are really chocolate bittersweet chocolate-chip cookies with walnuts, with 1 T. of added flour.

A few months ago I had trouble finding Dutch Process cocoa when I ran out, so since I needed some new spices and herbs anyway, I ordered it through Penzey’s. If you don’t know about Penzey’s, you’re missing a real treat. I buy nearly all my herbs and spices from them now. Even though I live in a busy urban area teeming with grocery stores, and my local markets carry just about everything. But nobody had Dutch Process cocoa. This cocoa from Penzey’s is fragrant and dark. The label says it has twice as much cocoa in it as grocery store varieties. Good!

I don’t know about you, but I always make one pan of cookies to make sure the batter is right. That’s what I did here, and they came out just fine. And if you don’t have one of these scoops shown above, you should. If you’re a cookie baker, this scoop makes short work of putting the dough onto sheets. I use large sheet pans with a Silpat on each one. There are three sizes of scoops – they’re made in Britain. This one is the tablespoon size. The larger is more for muffin sized scoops. The smallest, the teaspoon size, I don’t know what I’d use for. My scoop came from the Baker’s Catalog (the one associated with King Arthur Flour). Click here if you’re interested.

If you want the recipe, click here for the original Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie from Nestle’s site. If you use rich butter, just add a T. of extra flour, and about 2 T. of Dutch Process cocoa. Dutched cocoa is processed differently than regular cocoa, a very fine smooth powder that easily dissolves in liquid and disperses in baked goods.

So, DH, these are for you. Look in the freezer in the Ziploc bags in the door. So, excuse me, I need to make a cup of tea.

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All those little flecks you can see in the cookies? Those are tiny pieces of ground dry-roasted peanuts added to the batter to make them more peanut-ty. America’s Test Kitchen really works on their recipes to develop techniques and recipe additions to make foods taste even better, sometimes, than tried and true recipes. They weren’t happy with the standard peanut butter cookie recipes they tested, so finally came up with the addition of the dry-roasted peanuts. They liked the use of both white and light brown sugar too.

Two of our grandchildren have been visiting for the last 10 days, and I thought maybe some cooking lessons were in order. What child isn’t happy with making cookies, I ask you? They were more excited about eating the batter in the bowl and those few little clumps that just happened to get stuck to the sides of spoons or fingers than they were about the cookies themselves, but that’s okay. That’s part of the fun of it. I’ve made these cookies before and knew they were good. You need to like very crispy cookies, though. These aren’t soft at all. And the addition of the ground peanuts is a very nice one. Another successful America’s Test Kitchen recipe.

Logan (13), Grandpa Dave and Taylor (9) sampling the finished product.

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I’m an avid reader of Cooks Illustrated. The magazine, founded and edited by Chris Kimball, is about recipes, of course, but the interesting difference is the fine tuning the developers do with each and every subject. Now you can buy special book editions of Cooks Illustrated recipes.

I’ve been a magazine subscriber, though, for probably 20 years. They take no advertising whatsoever, and each issue is about 24+ pages long. Each contains maybe 10 articles altogether, so it’s not overwhelming. They take a subject — like cabbage, let’s say, or brownies in this case — and they not only develop the recipe or a group of recipes, but the writer explains the process in great length and detail. I like that – I enjoy reading about the trials and errors. That may not be for everybody, however. So they talk about the ingredients process, sometimes the chemistry behind food combinations, and explain why using something in the recipe didn’t work and how she/he/they finally found the “right” recipe. Of course, it’s just their opinion, but I’ve rarely been disappointed by any of C.I. recipes. They also do taste tests of canned or bottled items – like tomatoes, (Muir Glen won the last time they tested them) or paring knives, or pie crust shells. That kind of thing.

So, back to brownies. This recipe was printed in April, 2004. The recipe developers and authors, Erika Bruce and Adam Ried, worked on this recipe for awhile to come up with their combination. After reading the article I just had try it. I was doing a dinner party that weekend for a fairly sizable crowd, and wanted something like finger food for dessert. The brownies were prepared, baked, and about an hour before the guests arrived I carefully cut them up and delicately balanced rows of them on an elevated cake stand and covered them with plastic wrap so they wouldn’t dry out before people got around to eating them. People began to arrive and someone oohed and aahed over the large stand full of brownies. She reached in and grabbed one and ate it right then. She was in ecstasy, she said. So, someone else had to have one. Then someone else. About a third of the brownies were gone before I’d even served appetizers (*$%!+$). But the consensus was that these were the best brownies. Do I agree?Absolutely. I’ve made them several times since then, just not recently.

So when I was telling my younger daughter, Sara, about the creation of my blog a couple of months ago, she immediately piped up and said,”Mom, the Best Ever Brownies have to go on your blog.” Now she’s an affirmed chocoholic from wa-a-ay back. But, this being 2007, I’d almost forgotten about them, lo these many years ago (3). Since I had a hankering for some chocolate today, and I’m meeting my friends Joan, Janet and Darlene later this afternoon for coffee, I thought I’d surprise them with a little treat. We have a new Peet’s that’s opened up about 4-5 miles away (we have another one closer, but it’s small). The new one is large and has lots of outdoor seating. And it’s not that crowded yet. I do love Peet’s coffee – they have a corner on the foam market in my book. I know, some people don’t like or want foam, but I love it. Theirs is dense and flavorful. Always. We buy our regular drinking coffee from Peet’s and have for years. I make espresso mostly, but Dave drinks Peet’s Decaf Sumatra nearly every day.

These brownies aren’t all that unusual, really. If you put the ingredients side by side with other brownie recipes you might not find much difference. It probably has more eggs – 4 – and not a lot of flour (although it is cake flour) which gives them a bit of a chiffon texture, so they’re not as cakey as some. There is a punch of chocolate in these, but they make 24, so really 6 ounces isn’t all that unusual. The color of the finished brownie is more like cocoa, or milk chocolate, but there isn’t any of either in the brownies. The chocolate flavor is certainly there, but it’s not like these are dense or chewy.
I’ve used Ghiradelli chocolate and Lindt too. And now I really like using Scharffen Berger. But in’04 people hadn’t gotten into designer chocolate like they have now. When I entered the recipe into my recipe program I noted back then that I didn’t have any unsweetened chocolate (which is what it calls for), so I’d used Valrhona dark instead and cut down on the sugar. Funny thing. I didn’t have any unsweetened chocolate today, either, so I used Trader Joe’s Bittersweet (it’s a Belgian chocolate) and reduced the sugar by about 1/3. The pan preparation is a bit unusual – you line the pan in both directions with foil (leaving the edges hanging over the sides, which you use to grab ahold of when you’re removing them), then spray the foiled pan with baking spray (the kind that has both oil and flour in it). I forgot to sprinkle the pecans on the top of these, as directed, but mixed them into the batter instead. Whatever you do, don’t overbake these, and it’s easy to do. I rely on my handy-dandy cake tester whenever I bake. My oven runs a few degrees hot, so I always cut down the temp by at least 5 degrees, sometimes 10, and reduce the baking time. These took 27 minutes today at 315 degrees.

You could make a half of a recipe, which might be less dangerous to have around. These freeze nicely, however. See how long these last in YOUR house! And Sara, these are for you.
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Are all cookies seasonal in your book? Certainly I have a few cookie recipes that I don’t make year around . . . like gingerbread men . . . or sugar cookies decorated with red and green. But otherwise, cookies are calendar universal. I had a bag of dried cranberries that needed to be used, and I remembered this recipe that’s become a personal favorite since 2000 when my friend Darlene brought them to a Christmas cookie exchange.

If you haven’t ever been to a cookie exchange, you should try it. These days, every woman’s magazine blasts ideas for how to streamline our shopping, wrapping, decorating, cooking and entertaining during the holidays. Happily I’ve hostessed cookie exchanges for years. I had my first one in about 1971. And I’ve had them many times since – not every year, but every few. I love to have a variety of cookies to serve friends and family during the holidays, so what’s easier than inviting a group of baking friends to share everyone’s goodies. I can remember many times trying to figure out the math – okay, 11 people coming, everyone’s bringing 5 dozen, how many of each cookie do we take? Got it. Oh, one gal didn’t come at the last minute? Oops, change the number. Oh, another gal only got 50 out of her batch? Uhm, what do I change the number to now? Eventually we just took a bunch and if there were still lots of cookies, we’d make another turn around the cookie table adding a few more to our stashes.

I didn’t intend this to be a lesson in cookie exchanges, but one thing I’ve learned is that each different cookie needs to go into its own plastic bag and sealed. Otherwise, someone’s double mint cookies will infect all the other cookies in your container with mint. And all the bags go directly into the freezer after the exchange.

These Cranberry Noel cookies were the hit of the cookie exchange that year. Hands down. (Thank you, Darlene.) They came from Martha Stewart, but at the time they were the #1 winner of a Christmas cookie contest Martha had on her website. For this posting I did look it up and finally found it on one of Martha’s forums here. I know they were originally part of a cookie contest because I wrote it into my recipe program in 2000. Martha subsequently published it in a Christmas special issue, apparently. These are super simple – you mix up the batter, roll into two logs, roll the logs in shredded coconut, chill, slice and bake. And once they’re cooled they go into Ziploc freezer bags and back into the freezer.

So, just because these contain dried cranberries, pecans and coconut, that doesn’t mean you can’t have them in May! I had one yesterday in the mid-afternoon with my cup of Earl Grey tea. Delicious.

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One of the joys of reading food blogs is finding new recipes that are tried and true. Naturally, celebrated chefs know how to cook. Often they cook things that are quite complex and complicated. AND time consuming. Sometimes famous chefs actually pay a recipe developer to create recipes for the cookbooks they “write.” Kind of boggles my mind that chefs are willing to take that kind of risk to put their name to a cookbook and then pay somebody else to develop recipes and claim them as their own. Not many do this (I hope). Food magazines do this too, but one hopes that the developers know what they’re doing and work hard at creating something special. For all kinds of tastes.

But when you find a blog with photos taken in a home kitchen, you’re assured this is the real thing. These aren’t professional photos (although some of them could rival those taken by the glitzy pros who do the photography for cookbooks and magazines). One of my favorite blogs with fabulous photography is Lucullian Delights. Ilva, originally Swedish, is a wonder behind the camera lens. You never know what you’re going to find on her blog – food sometimes, but also scenes from her home territory, Tuscany.

So, back to cookies. I’ve been reading Culinary Concoctions by Peabody for many months, and always enjoy reading her witty and sometimes pithy posts. And when she posted this recipe, I knew I needed to give it a whirl. (Her photos are great too, by the way.) It’s really been made in a home kitchen AND it’s good. You’ll see Peabody’s link over there on the right in my list of blogs I read. And these cookies, these cute little mounds, are just plain deliciousness. You’ll notice the little flecks of orange peel, and the hint of chopped dried cranberries. I must admit, though, that I made a boo-boo from the original recipe. Can you imagine that I made a mistake? I forgot to flatten the cookies just before baking. Guess what? It didn’t make a whit of difference. I may have added a minute of cooking time, but that’s about it.

Cookies last a good long time in my house because after cooling them, they’re always piled into freezer Ziploc bags and frozen. I don’t eat a cookie every day. Maybe every other. And this recipe will be a keeper, and they are just perfect with a cup of afternoon tea or coffee. The batch I made a month ago is just now gone, so it’ll be back to the kitchen for me. Soon. Thanks, Peabody.
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