Maple Banana Almond Macaroons

The Banana Cookie recipe from Donna Hay’s new cookbook, Life in Balance: A Fresher Approach to Eating, sounds like its shouldn’t work; and the sight of the batter will not inspire more confidence. Have faith, though, and you will be rewarded with moist macaroons that taste intensely of banana and faintly of caramel and maple.

The ingredients are extremely simple: ground almonds, mashed banana, a small amount of maple syrup and a bit of cinnamon. When I mixed together all the ingredients, I had a thick batter rather than a stiff dough (kind of like the texture of matzoh ball batter before you refrigerate it). I was perplexed as to how to follow the instructions to “Roll 16 to 18 spoonfuls of the banana mixture into balls, Press them into the sugar-cinnamon mixture to coat all over, spacing the cookies an inch apart. . .” I ended up dropping spoonfuls of batter on a parchment lined baking sheet and sprinkling over the Turbinado sugar.

The resulting cookies were at their most delicious straight from the oven: crispy and chewy on the outside from the caramelized coat of raw sugar, and moist and soft on the inside like a macaroon. When the cookies completely cooled, the sugar on the outside melted a bit and the texture of the crust softened. I stored the cookies in an airtight container in the refrigerator and that seemed to restore a bit of crispness to the sugar coating.

Chag Sameach! (Easy Chanukah Cookies)

“We are lucky to be living in an age where we have products that our grandparents never even dreamed of, probably because they had priorities . . . So nowadays you can buy a package of cookie cutters that comes with a menorah shape, a dreidel shape, a Magen David, a shield, and a Maccabee. At least  we think it’s a Maccabee. We’re not sure what the Maccabees looked like, but they probably looked like gingerbread men.” –“Chanukah Gelt,” Mordechai Schmutter, Inyan Magazine, Hamodia, December 17, 2014.

Yes, the Maccabees in the Chanukah cookie cutter set are basically just gingerbread men–that is until you decorate them. My daughter added tzitzit and kippot, which at least makes them obviously Jewish gingerbread men.

Easy is probably not the right word for these cookies. You still have to make a dough, roll it out, cut out shapes, bake the cookies and then decorate them.

I really mean easier Chanukah cookies. The dough is oil-based, which means you can just stir everything together instead of getting out the mixer to cream the butter and sugar together. That is easier.

The hard way to decorate cookies is with lots of different colors of royal icing in lots of different piping bags. The easier way is dipping the cookies in icing, letting the icing dry and then drawing on details with food coloring markers.

So, easier, not easy, but still . . .

Chocolate “Salami”

Don’t worry–this is a no-bake chocolate cookie, not real salami.  It is called “salami” because the cookies are dotted with bits of crushed tea biscuits in a way that evokes the mottled appearance of salami slices.  Sometimes the chocolate salami log is rolled in powdered sugar, which is meant to be reminiscent of the film of white mold that covers authentic Italian salami. (Don’t think too hard about why someone would want their cookies to remind people of mold covered salami–stay focused and remember that these are yummy chocolate cookies that are super easy to make. In fact, this is an excellent project for your kids to make if they are bored and kvetchy.)

I decided to make this in a roundabout way. First, I was admiring this recipe on My Bisim for no-bake tahina cookies made with crushed tea bsicuits, tahina, honey and coconut. I wanted to make it, but the whole point of the recipe is that the cookies taste like halvah and my kids aren’t that keen on halvah.  Then I thought about adding chocolate and substituting peanut butter for the tahina. And THAT is when I remembered about chocolate salami.

Chocolate salami is usually made with chocolate, cocoa, sugar, butter, eggs and chopped cookies. The first recipe that I ever saw (or tried) for chocolate salami was in a book by Meri Badi called250 Recettes de Cusine Juive Espanol. Recipe 219 is “Gateaux Salami.” It calls for 350 g. petit-beurre biscuits, 125 g. margarine, 2 eggs, 3 spoons of cocoa, 3 spoons of powdered sugar, 4 spoons of milk or liqueur, 5 bars of chocolate (chopped) and 75 g. of nuts (slivered almonds, pine nuts or pistachios).

I didn’t make that recipe this time. Instead, inspired by the My Bisim recipe and chocolate salami recipes, I kind of made something up. It isn’t a traditional chocolate salami recipe, but it is delicious, so who cares?  I combined crushed and crumbled tea biscuits with melted chocolate, cocoa, powdered sugar and peanut butter. I formed a log, which I rolled in cocoa and then powdered sugar. I sliced the log after chilling it for a little bit. The result tasted pleasantly like a cross between peanut butter cups and milk chocolate with rice crispies in it.

Tahina Maple Oatmeal Chip Cookies

These cookies are gluten free (provided, of course, that you use rolled oats that are certified gluten free). You can leave out the rolled oats (old fashioned oats) if you prefer or replace them with chopped walnuts.

The inspiration for these cookies was stuff I had left in my pantry before Passover that needed using up. I had finally used up all my flour and then realized that I had meant to use up my tahina in a cookie recipe. All I had left was a small amount of old fashioned oats.

My tahina cookies would have to be flourless, I realized. The classic flourless peanut butter cookie recipe was the perfect template for my flourless tahina cookies. Instead of sugar, I decided to use up some maple syrup. I added in the oats and the remains of  an open bag of mocha chips.

I spooned the cookies on a lined baking sheet, baked them at 350 degrees and hoped for the best.  I pulled them out from the oven, let them cool and then tasted one. They came out! They were good! That was a relief.

The cookies taste like a cross between peanut butter cookies and halvah. I you like halvah, you will love these cookies.

 

Raisin Bran Muffin Top Cookies

I needed to use up some silan (date syrup), dates, raisins, bran and whole wheat flour before Passover. The obvious choice was bran muffins.

My original idea was to replace the brown sugar in my favorite bran muffin with the silan. Googling for a rule of thumb on converting from brown sugar to silan, I came across a recipe on imamother.com for chocolate chip bran cookies. I came up with my own recipe for raisin bran muffin top cookies by combining the muffin recipe with the cookie recipe and then kind of winging it based on whatever I needed to use up in my pantry.

I was a little worried how my experiment would come out, but the cookies tasted deliciously like raisin bran cereal and had the texture and appearance of bran muffin tops.

A bonus: these cookies are high in fiber and have no refined sugar. In addition to having been a great way to use up pantry items before Pesach, these are also a great way to cleanse the body after Pesach.

 

Coconut Macaroon Tuiles

Imagine a cookie with the flavor of a coconut macaroon, with a undertone of salted caramel. Sort of like the flavor of Girl Scout Samoa/Caramel deLite cookies. Now imagine that this cookie has the crisp texture of a potato chip. That is what these tuiles taste like.

The original recipe comes from a Seattle-based pastry chef, Laurie Pfalzer. When she baked for the bistro at the Salish Lodge and Spa, she used the tuiles as a garnish for creme brulee and layered them with strawberries and whipped mascarpone.

I haven’t decided what to do with these cookies yet. Layer them with lemon curd/whipped cream/strawberries? Drizzle them with chocolate or sandwich them with chocolate (like Brussels cookies or lace cookies)?

The batter is extremely easy to mix up. The tricky part is shaping. The sticky batter must be patted out into thin rounds. This is fiddly work.

The original recipe called for baking the tuiles at 350 for 8-10 minutes, but my tuiles did not bake evenly that way. I had better luck baking them at 250 for a half hour.

Molten Chocolate Chip Hamantaschen

Ok, I guess this is a bit late in the day to post. But, better late than never!

Chocolate chip cookie dough filled with ganache, served warm so that the chocolate filling is all melted and runny. The hamantaschen will spread if they are not contained, so it is best to enclose the shaped cookies with foil to keep them from spreading.

Hamantaschen Puff Pastry Shells

This post is for those of you out there who want to make hamantaschen without mixing or rolling out dough, without worrying if the filling is bake-proof and without worrying about the hamantaschen exploding open in the oven.

Part of the answer is using puff pastry dough, and part of the answer is in the method of baking it.  If you have ever tried baking hamantaschen with puff pastry dough, you know that it can be frustrating. Shaped in the traditional manner, from a circle folded into a triangle, puff pastry hamantaschen have an infuriating tendency to explode open when they bake.

So frustrating, right? But a solution is at hand! Instead of working against the tendency of puff pastry to puff, this technique works with it.

Following the method for making puff pastry cases (bouchees and vols-a-vent), the puff pastry is cut into triangles, with a triangle cut out into the center. As the pastry bakes in the oven, the sides of the triangle rise straight up to form a rim around a hollow triangular center. The hollow center can then be filled with whatever you like.

Let me repeat and emphasize this point: the puff pastry hamantaschen are baked without filling. You add the filling later. Baking the shells before filling means that you can use fillings that can’t be baked,  like pastry cream with fresh fruit on top or chocolate mousse (to see how pretty puff pastry shells can look filled with mousse or topped with fruit, take a look at Pastry Pals post about vols-au-vent filled with chocolate chantilly  or passion fruit curd and pinepple).

You could also go with a savory filling. For example, for an appetizer, you could fill the cases with mushrooms in cream sauce.

There are two approaches to making the puff pastry cases. You can use one layer of puff pastry or, for a higher, more elegant case, you can use two layers of puff pastry. With the one layer approach, the center triangle is marked before baking and then, after the pastry case is baked, the triangle is cut out with a knife. With the two layer approach, the bottom triangle of puff pastry dough is the base, and the cut out triangle frame of dough on the top is the rim.

If you go with the single layer approach, you can get 2 1/2 dozen hamantaschen out of a box of puff pastry. You can fill the triangles with different flavors of jam for a very easy and quick batch of hamantaschen.

Han Solo Cup and Chewie Wookie Cookie

I was very amused by this t-shirt of Han Solo and Chewie as a Solo cup and cookie. So, I equipped a Solo cup with a cardboard Solo Blaster and made some Wookie Cookies. Actually, the cookies are just my favorite Pesach cookies with some white and dark chocolate chips used to make eyes, a nose and some teeth.

Rose Cookies for Princess Leia

I made Darth Vader hamantaschen, so I thought I would also make cookies that referenced Princess Leia. Actually, these cookies just allude to her famous cinnamon bun hairdo.

You don’t have to flavor these with cinnamon and raisin (although they are delicious that way, too). Basically, this is a rich sour cream rugelach-type pastry dough that is rolled up with meringue. The meringue can be vanilla or chocolate. Optional add ins include raisins, nuts and chopped chocolate.

The inspiration for these cookies was a cryptic e-mail from my sister. She sent a picture of these cookies with no description or comment. When prompted for an explanation, she offered only this: (1) Levana made them; (2) they are filled with meringue mixed with chocolate pudding mix; (3) they are called “foam cookies” in Israel; and (4) a recipe would eventually be forthcoming.

I wasn’t holding my breath waiting for the recipe because it is my understanding that Levana is a “little bit of this and that” and “throw it in a bowl”  kind of cook (“shitarayn”, in Yiddish). So, I did a little bit of research and found that even though Levana calls these Foam Cookies (“Oogiyot Ketzef” in Hebrew?), they are also known as Rose Cookies. In Israel, that would be “Oogiyot Shoshanim.” The recipe comes originally from Eastern Europe and they are also known as Russian Rose Cookies (also see this) or Ukrainian Rose Cookies (Pechivo Troyandiy). I even found a version called Finnish Cookies (Финские Булочки).

(Brief digression: I think that yeast dough versions of this cookie, basically individually baked cinnamon buns or schnecken, are also called shoshanim or roses. Take a look for example at Zucker Bakery’s Chocolate Roses or Tatte Bakery’s Halvah Roses).

I went with the recipe from Pretty Baking in Israel, because that recipe had a filling that called for pudding mix. I didn’t like that filling so much (the problem, admittedly, might have been my KFP pudding mix), so I made the recipe again with a different filling. I also changed the dough a little bit, increasing the sugar to the amount suggested in a very similar recipe on Tastebook for Savta Tova’s Cookies.