Cookie Recipes in Beta: Spicy Pineapple Hazelnut Thumbprints and Gooey Tangy Lemon Squares

[ursamajor]

noghri: "With 36 hours to go, our %#@% oven is still broken."
Me: "What do you need us to bring to the party?"
noghri: "... baked goods?"

This is how hyounpark and I walk into a party: arms laden with all of our large baking dishes and tupperware, stuffed with two kinds of egg rolls, cheesy garlic bread, everybody's favorite chocolate toffee cookies, and two experimental sweet bakes: spicy pineapple hazelnut thumbprints and gooey tangy lemon squares. Oh, and the container for the egg roll dipping sauce stuffed into my purse. Tetris for food transportation!

Cris: "I had the feeling we'd need extra room on the dining table when Steve was that non-specific in his reply to you about what to bring."
Me: "In fairness, I did miss Jewmas baking again this year!"

And I did! Pretty much every December 24 since 2003, with few exceptions, I've rolled up my sleeves and pulled together three to five different types of cookies, cakes, and other baked goods to bring to the big annual party of friends; this particular party was a good excuse to go overboard on what I'd missed - and test a few new recipes in the process :)

Spicy Pineapple Hazelnut Thumbprints

The Spicy Pineapple Linzer Cookies at Té Company in the West Village are some of my favorites. I first heard about them while paging through an issue of Saveur, promptly put them on my list to try on my next jaunt down to the city, and fell in love with my first bite. Spicy, tangy, smooth, nutty, slightly herbal; elegant - and unexpected.

I love sandwich cookies, but I am not patient enough to deal with the process of making them. When I'm baking for me and H, it's simple drop cookies or bars all the way. (It would probably help if I actually owned a simple set of biscuit cutters. I'll get around to picking some up at some point.) And Ribeiro's recipe calls for more planning ahead than I usually allow. So I took the bones of his flavors - pineapple, rosemary, hazelnuts, lime, and yuzu kosho - and simplified a bit. Turned the linzer cookie base into a hazelnut thumbprint. Used storebought pineapple jam and melted it with the TJ's Yuzu Hot Sauce I had in the fridge.

Ingredients

4 oz butter (1 American stick), room temperature
4 oz powdered sugar (1/2 cup)
1 egg
1 pound hazelnut flour
1 1/2 teaspoons dried rosemary, divided
1/4 cup pineapple jam
4 teaspoons Trader Joe's yuzu hot sauce, or substitute proper yuzu kosho if you have it on hand, or make your own yuzu kosho.

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Prepare two baking sheets with parchment.


2. In a small pot, warm the pineapple jam, then stir in the yuzu kosho and 1 teaspoon of rosemary. When blended, remove from heat and let cool. (Pop it in the fridge if it doesn't appear to be re-setting.)


3. In a large bowl, blend the butter and powdered sugar until combined. Mix the egg fully in, then add the hazelnut flour, rosemary, and salt, and blend until combined.


4. Scoop tablespoons of dough onto the cookie sheets about 1" apart. Make indentations in the center of each cookie for the jam, and spoon 1/2 teaspoon of the jam mixture into each.


5. If you're baking both sheets at the same time, bake for 8-9 minutes, then rotate top to bottom and back to front and bake for another 8-9 minutes. If you're baking one sheet at a time, set a rack in the center of your oven and bake for 16-18 minutes. Watch the bottoms for overbrowning.


6. Cool cookies on their sheets for 5-10 minutes, then transfer to racks to finish cooling.

Notes

- Verdict: BIG hit. Multiple requests for this recipe.
- I think I want to make the jam a little more spicy; might try increasing the proportion of yuzu kosho to pineapple jam.
- If you have fresh rosemary on hand, you can steep the jam with it instead of using dried.
- If I were to try to make these gluten-free and/or pesadik, I'd need to really research the powdered sugar/cross-contamination issue. Most powdered sugar in the US includes a little bit of corn starch, which is okay for the gluten issue AFAICT (though this does mean for them to be kosher for Passover, I'd better seek out the KFP powdered sugar that uses potato starch), but cross-contamination if the sugar is made in the same factory as, say, flour, would be a problem.
- If I were to try to make these dairy-free, I'd probably start with a 1:1 coconut oil swap for the butter.
- If egg allergy, I'd probably go with a flax egg, since the texture is already so nut-centric.

Gooey Tangy Lemon Squares

This one came about when I was looking at Smitten Kitchen's Gooey Cinnamon Squares (from her first cookbook, so not on her website, but David Lebovitz has a close adaptation if you don't have the book, though he doesn't use cream of tartar here), and noticed that Deb's talking about cream of tartar as the traditional leavener in snickerdoodle cookies was ringing a bell - who else had been talking about cream of tartar in snickerdoodles recently? Michelle Lopez of Hummingbird High, in their recipe for Tangy Meyer Lemon Sugar Cookies:

"because this is actually based on a snickerdoodle recipe, it uses cream of tartar as a leavener as opposed to baking powder. Cream of tartar is more acidic than baking powder and baking soda, which gives the cookies an added tanginess it wouldn't otherwise have if I'd used baking powder."

And I was already bringing a chocolatey-caramelly dessert and a nutty-spicy one. What if I swapped out the cinnamon in the gooey cinnamon squares and made gooey lemon squares instead? I mean, lemon bars are a thing, this just might be a more over-the-top version, which would suit me just fine.

Ingredients

Cookie Base
1 stick of butter (American, 8 tablespoons/4 oz/113 grams), room temperature, plus more for greasing the pan
1.5 cups flour (210 grams)
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
3/4 cup sugar (150 grams)
1 egg
1/4 cup milk

Soft Gooey Layer
1/4 cup light corn syrup or golden syrup
1/4 cup milk or cream
1 tablespoon vanilla extract (yes, tablespoon)
6 oz (1.5 American sticks) butter, at room temperature
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar (225 grams)
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 egg
1 1/4 cups flour (175 grams)

Tangy Topping
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon citric acid
zest from one lemon

Instructions

1. Preheat your oven to 350F.


2. Line a 9x13 cake pan with parchment (though David Lebovitz used foil, I'd be concerned about the acidic ingredient choices I made interacting badly with the foil), and butter any exposed inner area.


3. Make the cookie base: In a medium bowl, mix together the flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt. In a second bowl (use a stand mixer if you have it), cream together the butter and sugar. Add the egg and milk and beat until combined; then mix the dry ingredients into the wet. Pour base into the prepared pan and spread into an even layer; set aside.


4. WASH YOUR USED DISHES.


5. Make the gooey layer: In a small bowl, whisk together the corn syrup, milk, and [vanilla] extract. In a second bowl/your stand mixer, cream together the butter, sugar, and salt. Add the egg and beat until combined. In a third bowl, measure out the flour. Add 1/3 of the flour to the creamed butter mixture, then mix until just combined. Add 1/2 of the milk mixture to the butter-flour mixture, then mix until just combined. Repeat with the next 1/3 of the flour, then the remaining 1/2 of the milk mixture, then the final 1/3 of the flour. Dollop the gooey layer over the cookie base and gently spread into an even layer, trying to disturb the cookie base as little as possible.


6. Make the tangy topping: In a small bowl (mise bowl is fine), mix the sugar, citric acid, and lemon peel. Sprinkle thickly over the gooey layer in the pan.


7. Bake for 25-30 minutes until the top looks browned a bit. Cool completely on a rack.

Notes

- Verdict: "could be more lemony." I left the gooey layer un-lemoned because I wasn't sure if adding lemon zest to the bar, the topping, *and* the goo would be too much. I'll probably substitute the vanilla extract in the goo with lemon extract next time and see if that makes it sufficiently lemony.
- Michelle also has a recipe for raspberry lemon snickerdoodles, and I like the idea of a raspberry tangy topping that she uses in that recipe. It would also add some great color, and freeze dried raspberries are readily available at Trader Joe's.
- LOL I know I've got a mix of grams and ounces; I usually try to do my recipes by grams for any measurement bigger than a tablespoon, but sometimes I'm coming from a recipe that uses volumes, or one that at least uses weights but measures in ounces.
- Also, there seems to be more general consensus that the US is standardizing on calling 125 grams of AP flour 1 cup of AP flour; I haven't fully converted over yet, as I've been working with Joanne Chang's proportions of 140 g:1 cup for AP Flour for close to a decade now, so yeah, consider this another recommendation to measure some ingredients by weight when baking :)

Comments

[sporky_rat]

Those lemon bars sound amazing.

[ursamajor]

Also, maybe try turning the thumbprints into a slice and bake bar? To make it even easier? I might have to go back to more of a linzer cookie base, or at least something that can be formed into a log, which I know can be harder with 100% nut flour doughs. But.