Lemon Cream-Filled Cookies

These are nice, simple cookies, perfect for serving at a tea or brunch. They take a little more time than drop cookies but are fairly straightforward and simple to make. My niece Lauren made these for my dad's birthday party last weekend, using my recipe below. She made the dough herself, rolled out the dough, cut out the shapes, baked them, cooled them, made the filling and she and Shyla put them together.

Usually I don't have the time to make sandwich cookies. The chilling, rolling out, baking, cooling and sandwiching together are great for a weekend project but not so much during the week when I get home late from work. The thing with any kind of sandwich cookies is the importance of uniformity. The dough has to be rolled out to just the right thickness. Too thick and you'll get a bulky cookie when you sandwich the halves together. Too thin and they'll break apart easily, not to mention they brown too fast when you bake them. You can't have a thin half and a thick half either - looks weird. Plus each one has to be the same size and shape in order to put together neatly. If you like the homey touch, then it doesn't really matter if the cookie halves are mismatched. But (you guessed it), I'm a bit anal about stuff like that so I prefer to use a cookie cutter to get uniform shapes and sizes for my sandwich cookies.

The filling is important too. If it's too liquidy, the filling will run out the sides of the sandwich cookie or leak out when you bite into it, making a mess. If it's too hard, it ruins the texture contrast with the cookie halves or won't be soft enough to hold the two sandwich halves together.

This recipe is from a Mrs. Fields cookie book. You can use any size and shape cookie cutter to cut the cookies. I like to use small ones for more dainty-looking cookies. Normally I use a scallop-shaped cookie cutter to make these prettier but I had Lauren use a plain circle this time around just to keep things simple.

Cookies
¾ cup salted butter, softened
½ cup confectioners’ sugar
2 teaspoons pure lemon extract
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
¼ cup cornstarch

Filling
¼ cup salted butter, softened
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
1 tablespoon heavy cream
juice of 1 freshly squeezed lemon (about 2 tablespoons)
grated zest of 1 lemon (2-3 teaspoons)

To make the cookie dough
1. In a medium bowl, cream butter with an electric mixer set at medium speed. Add sugar, and beat until smooth, scraping down sides of bowl as needed.
2. Add lemon extract, and beat until light and fluffy. Then add flour and cornstarch; blend at low speed until thoroughly combined.
3. Gather dough into 2 balls of equal size and flatten into disks. Wrap the disks tightly in plastic wrap or a plastic bag. Refrigerate for 1 hour.
To make the filling:
4. In a small bowl, beat butter with mixer until fluffy. Gradually add sugar while continuing to beat. Add cream, lemon juice and lemon zest. Mix until thoroughly blended and set aside. To harden filling quickly, refrigerate for 15-20 minutes.
5. At this point, preheat oven to 325˚F.
6. Using a floured rolling pin, roll the chilled cookie dough on a floured board to a ¼” thickness. Cut circles of dough on ungreased cookie sheets, ½” apart. Continue rolling out and cutting dough scraps until all dough is used.
7. Bake for 15-17 minutes, or until edges begin to brown. Immediately transfer cookies with a spatula to a cool, flat surface.
8. When cookies are completely cool, spread a cookie with 1 teaspoon of the lemon cream. Place another cookie on top of the filling to make a sandwich. Complete entire batch.

Pancit Palabok - a Filipino noodle dish

My mom is an awesome cook – one of those people who don’t use a recipe and just cook by taste. For as long as I can remember, she was always cooking, seemingly effortlessly. She did NOT pass those abilities onto me. I can bake but I can’t cook. Trust me, there’s a difference. The few times I’ve attempted “real cooking” – well, let’s just say my worst baking failures are probably still better than my best cooking efforts.

Cooking is more of an art and there’s much more room for ad hoc creativity and going by how something tastes. Baking is more of a science and is more exact in its ingredients and instructions. Most chefs, amateur and professional, prefer one over the other and are better at one over the other, even if they can do both. I’m on the baking side and always will be. I can create all sorts of desserts and pastries but can barely boil water for the pasta to go with the canned jar of sauce from the grocery store. Those frozen dinners you can microwave are a staple in my freezer.

This is a picture of a traditional Filipino dish called Pancit Palabok – it’s a noodle dish with sauce, hard-boiled eggs, shrimp, a little chicken, green onions and a bunch of other “stuff” (says the non-cook). I’ve tried to get my mom to write down the recipe for the tastebook I’m creating for my nieces but while she’s made this dish for years and can probably make it in her sleep, she doesn’t have a recipe for it. She just knows how to make it. That’s a cook. Whereas I have reams of dessert cookbooks and pore over recipes, making notes, refining them and writing them out to document them. That’s a baker or a pastry chef. A world of difference. Fortunately for my nieces, my sister, Corin, inherited Mom’s cooking genes so she can make the traditional Filipino food. Although she doesn’t really use recipes either. Argh.

Another Red Velvet Cake

Red Velvet Cake - More from Magnolia Bakery cookbook - September 19, 2009

My nieces came up for the weekend for my dad’s 70th birthday party. In what’s now becoming our tradition, they stay with me for a night and the rest of the time, they spend at my parents’ house. On “my” night, we get takeout from Krung Thai, my favorite Thai restaurant, and I make dessert. This night’s dessert was red velvet cake. I tried the recipe from the More From Magnolia Bakery cookbook. It turned out pretty well but I confess I like Diane’s recipe better. I also made the Creamy Vanilla Frosting that was in the Magnolia cookbook and it was good but I still prefer cream cheese frosting with red velvet cake. Overall, I’m not a big fan of frosting. Most frostings and icings are too sweet and I’m more about the cake than the frosting. I’d rather have just a tiny bit of frosting, only enough to hold the cake layers together. Some of my friends are the opposite and would rather have a ton of frosting than cake (shudder). I need to hang out more with those people because we’d never let a slice of cake go to waste – I can eat the cake and they can eat the frosting.

I don’t make layer cakes that often because it’s time consuming – not so much the mixing and baking part but the waiting for the cake layers to cool enough to frost. You always want cake layers to be completely cool or else your frosting will melt. I do have some cake recipes where you’re supposed to let the frosting melt over the warm cake – yum. It’s also almost inevitable that the outer edges of the cake layers are a tad dry in the time it took to get the center baked enough to take out. I tend to underbake my cakes just a trifle to avoid this but then sometimes the center comes out gummy. I know people recommend the Magi-Cake strips but they’ve only been marginally successful to me and sometimes not really worth the bother. But layer cakes do make a nice presentation and are very photogenic.

Going back to red velvet

I combine my love of baking with my love of reading when I read culinary mysteries. Some notable authors of the genre are: Virginia Rich, Diane Mott Davidson, and Joanne Fluke. I love a good mystery and when the books are based on characters who bake or cook for a living with recipes sprinkled throughout the chapters - well, what's not to love?

This is a picture of red velvet cookies whose recipe is from The Carrot Cake Murder by Joanne Fluke, who writes the Hannah Swensen mystery series. Normally I don't try a lot of the recipes in the books but I was going through my red velvet cake obsession at the time that I read this book so I had to try the cookie version. Am I glad I did. These are to-die-for cookies. Essentially they're chocolate cookies with red food coloring just as red velvet cake is chocolate cake with red food coloring. Like the cake, these cookies are frosted with cream cheese frosting. My nieces love these cookies and they're perfect for Christmas and Valentine's Day because of their color. The only drawback is because they're frosted, you can't stack them or package them for mailing. They don't spread much and stay nice and thick. This is one of the few cookies I'm actually very careful to time in the oven. Due to their color, you can't tell when they're done by appearance alone and you don't want to overbake these. They're perfect just slightly underbaked as they're nice and fudgy. The cream cheese frosting provides a nice contrast to cut the richness of the cookie with the sweetness of the frosting.

Red Velvet Cookies

2 ounces unsweetened baking chocolate
½ cup (1 stick) butter at room temperature
2/3 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1/3 cup granulated sugar
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 large egg
1 tablespoon red food coloring
¾ cup sour cream
2 cups flour (pack it down in the cup when you measure it)
1 cup (6 ounces) semisweet chocolate chips

1. Line your cookie sheets with parchment paper. Spray the parchment paper with nonstick cooking spray. Melt chocolate and let cool.
2. Combine the butter, brown sugar and granulated sugar together in the bowl of an electric mixer. Beat them on medium speed until they’re smooth. This should take less than a minute.
3. Add the baking soda and salt, and resume beating on medium again for another minute, or until they’re incorporated. Add the egg and beat on medium speed until the batter is smooth. Add the red food coloring and mix for about 30 seconds.
4. Shut off the mixer and scrape down the bowl. Then add the melted chocolate and mix again for another minute on medium speed. Shut off the mixer and scrape down the bowl again. At low speed, mix in half the flour. When the flour is incorporated, mix in the sour cream.
5. Scrape down the bowl again and add the rest of the flour. Beat until the flour is fully incorporated. Remove the bowl from the mixer and give it a stir with a spoon. Mix in the chocolate chips by hand.
6. Use a teaspoon to spoon the dough onto the parchment-lined cookie sheets, 12 cookies to a standard-sized sheet. Bake the cookies at 375˚F for 9 to 11 minutes, or until they rise and become firm. Slide the parchment from the cookie sheets and onto a wire rack. Let the cookies cool on the rack.

Cream Cheese Frosting

¼ cup butter, softened
4 ounces cream cheese, softened
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups confectioners’ sugar

1. Mix the softened butter with the softened cream cheese and the vanilla until the mixture is smooth.
2. Add the confectioners’ sugar in half-cup increments until the frosting is of proper spreading consistency.


Oh and I did bake tonight after work but it was Petra's Banana Bread recipe that I already posted about. My aunt and uncle are arriving this weekend from Canada for my dad's 70th birthday and this is one of my aunt's favorites so I had to make enough for her to enjoy while she's here and some for her to take home to my cousins back in Winnipeg.

A Random Act of Kindness

Can I say I love my coworkers because they’re an awesome bunch of people? Today, my friend and coworker, Erin, came over and surprised me with a signed copy of The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters. She had been to a book signing/talk by Alice Waters at Berkeley and presented the cookbook to me from the Yahoo! for Good team – talk about a random act of kindness! Erin was also very sweet and told me how appreciated I am – always a nice thing to hear from good people, especially with the mountain of work that had been crushing my spirit lately. Incidences like these and people like Erin never fail to remind me why I am where I am and why I’m grateful for it.

One of my favorite things to do when someone gives me a cookbook as a present is to make something from that cookbook and give it to the giver. To me, that's one of the best things about getting a cookbook. It can literally be the gift that keeps on giving. So, YFG team, you never know what you'll be surprised with in my baking future but it'll be coming your way soon.

No baking tonight as I’m having dinner with another group of current and former coworkers whose company I enjoy. Feeling very blessed indeed.

I can't believe I've gone through most of my baking life and never had red velvet cake until a few years ago. Where have I been?? I LOVE this cake. I first tried it when one of my coworkers, Nathan, had me try a test piece of a red velvet cake he was making for his mom (is that cute or what? I rarely meet guys who bake). When I was in New York a couple of years ago on a foodie trip, I visited every bakery I knew of or could find in Manhattan and came upon the red velvet cake from the Buttercup Bake Shop. It was fabulous!

I also heard of a bakery in New Orleans called Gambino's and people raved about their red velvet cake. I haven't made it to New Orleans yet but I always wanted to try their red velvet cake. Gambino's does ship but it's $70 for a cake! I couldn't bring myself to spring for it (hey, I'm cheap) but I came close to pulling the trigger so many times. Thankfully, I had an awesome boss who, last Christmas, for a holiday gift, he (or rather his exec assistant, Tess) ordered me the red velvet cake from Gambino's. They shipped it to the office and Tess drove it to my house to drop it off as my boss was on vacation. It was terrific. Not sure I would've paid $70 for it but that made the gift even more perfect, lol. I was able to share it with my family as one of our Christmas desserts. The picture of the whole, unsliced cake is the Gambino's one. For those who can't spring $70 for a Gambino's cake either, you can also get a slice of red velvet cake from the California Pizza Kitchen - it's not Gambino's or Buttercup's but it's still pretty good.

After that, I went through a period of trying recipe after recipe for red velvet cake. Most of them were just "okay" but none really came up to snuff. Some were too heavy, some not moist enough, some not "red" enough and some didn't have that much flavor. This past March, I was on a ski trip with my church singles group (ASCSA) and one of my condo mates, Diane, mentioned she had a red velvet cake recipe. Diane later sent me the recipe and yep, that one was the winner (pictured with the big ol' slices already cut out). I don't know how widely I'm allowed to share it so I'm not going to post it here but if anyone wants to try a good red velvet cake recipe, Bobby Flay's recipe on the Food Network is also pretty good.

Ironically, I have the Magnolia Bakery cookbook (they're the same owners as the Buttercup Bake Shop) and they have a red velvet cake recipe in there but I have yet to try it. Hmm, future baking project.

Chocolate Chocolate White Chocolate Cookies

You have to love a recipe that has the word "chocolate" in the title three times. If you’re a chocolate fan like me, you know the importance of good quality chocolate. I’m not talking low-rent grocery store stuff. I’m talking break-the-bank, bust-the-budget high end chocolate – the kind that sounds European because it is European. And I don’t mean “European-style Hershey’s” either. When I was in culinary school, we had one class where we tasted different types of chocolate. Bliss. A class on chocolate tasting. Yeah, it’s as good as it sounds. That’s when I discovered that my favorite eating chocolate is Valrhona milk chocolate. I prefer milk chocolate anyway (see the chocolate chip blog post) and Valrhona is the epitome of creamy, good chocolate. There are other, expensive chocolates like Del Rey and Scharffenberger but I ended up liking Valrhona the best.

I would love to be able to say I’m a total chocolate snob and only ever eat the best. However, I’d rather not lie on my own blog. Truth of the matter is, for most of us, buying high end chocolate to eat is one thing and can occasionally be a great indulgence. Buying high end chocolate to bake with as much as I bake? I might as well take out a second mortgage on my house to be able to afford it. So I’ve learned to adjust my preferences to my paycheck and live within my means when it comes to buying baking ingredients. The trick is to gauge the importance chocolate plays in a recipe. If I’m making brownies, and chocolate is in equal or lesser proportions to sugar, butter, flour and the like, I settle for Hershey’s, Nestle's and Baker’s baking chocolate, especially if it’s unsweetened chocolate. If I’m making something like a flourless chocolate cake or chocolate cookies that have a high proportion of chocolate compared to the rest of the ingredients, I upscale it a bit with Lindt or Valrhona or even Ghirardelli. Fortunately you can find some good chocolate like Valrhona at Trader Joe’s for a somewhat reasonable price. I also scour the sale ads every week, ready to pounce when Lindt and comparable brands go on sale so I can stock up. The point is, buy the best quality chocolate you can afford. It’ll be worth it. This is another instance where I can give someone the same recipe I use but if I use Lindt and they use generic grocery store brand chocolate, their results are going to be different from mine. Quality chocolate will taste creamy and make you roll your eyes to the back of their sockets in ecstasy. Cheap chocolate will taste like chalk and crumble when you bite into it and leave a waxy aftertaste. A calorie is a calorie - which would you rather spend your daily total on?

I made the dough for these cookies this past weekend, shaped them into balls, put them in freezer bags, wrote their name, baking temp and baking time on the bag(s) and put them in my freezer. Best time saver in the world. I don’t have much time these days since that thing called a job gets in my way so I have to maximize my baking time. I make the dough on the weekends and I bake off the cookies during the week when I need them for something. I baked some off last night to bring into work this morning and I’m baking the rest tonight to bring to a coworker dinner tomorrow. Thereby also freeing up my freezer for this coming weekend’s baking efforts.

This recipe is from the Buttercup Bake Shop cookbook. The dough was pretty liquidy, not surprisingly because it has 4 eggs (most recipes only call for 2) and a large amount of melted chocolate. I had to chill the dough first to get it to firm up then shape it into balls, then freeze them, THEN put them in freezer bags and stow them in the freezer. The cookies turned out okay but while they didn’t spread too much, they did still spread and weren’t as thick as I normally prefer my cookies. I didn’t make the dough balls that big though so that could be partially why. It’s also because I don’t have a convection oven which tends to bake cookies fast enough to keep them thick and not spread so much. In any case, the taste was pretty good – a nice, basic chocolate cookie. It's pretty typical of other chocolate chocolate cookies I've made before so they don't really stand out to me.

My coworkers, who serve as willing guinea pigs, bless their hearts, seemed to like them. After baking for my various workplaces for years, I have my own gauge on how successful a recipe is. I get in around 8 am or earlier and will put the cookies out in the communal kitchen on my floor when I first arrive. How fast they disappear is a testament of how much people like them. Successes will usually be gone within an hour. If people really like them, I also get instant messages thanking me - these cookies rated 3 IMs and a personal thank you in the hallway this morning. So-so baked goods last a couple of hours. Failures might make it to lunchtime. And yes, I do have failures often enough. I bring them in anyway because I figure someone will eat them (and they do). If I consider something a total failure, I leave it on a different floor so they’re not associated with me. I have a reputation to protect after all.

Chocolate Chocolate White Chocolate Cookies

¾ cup all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
¾ cup (1 ½ sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1 ½ cups sugar
4 large eggs, at room temperature
4 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons instant espresso powder
4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, melted
12 ounces semisweet chocolate, melted
2 cups vanilla (or white chocolate) chips

1. Preheat oven to 350˚F.
2. In a medium bowl, sift the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.
3. In a large bowl, on the medium speed of an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar until fluffy, about 2 to 3 minutes. Add the eggs, vanilla and espresso, and beat on high speed for about 2 minutes. Turn the mixer to low and mix in the melted chocolates, stopping to scrape the bowl. Resume mixing on low speed and add the dry ingredients, mixing well. Stop the mixer and stir in the vanilla chips.
4. Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets, leaving several inches between for spreading. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Cool the cookies on the sheets for 1 minute, then remove to a rack to cool completely.