Zimtsterne recipe

 The last blog post on Zimtsterne prompted a request for this recipe, so here it is.

Cookie dough:

250 g sugar

250 g almond flour

5 tsp cinnamon

52 g egg whites

5 tsp lemon juice

Icing:

250 g powdered sugar

25 g egg whites

1 tsp lemon juice

To make the cookie dough:

Whisk the almond flour, sugar and cinnamon together.  Place this in the bowl of a stand mixer fit with the paddle attachment.  Add the egg whites and lemon juice and mix on medium speed until the dough is thoroughly combined.

Remove the dough and roll it out between layers of parchment or plastic wrap.  This should be rolled out to between 3/8" and 1/2".  Now let this sit while you prepare the icing.

To make the icing:

Set up the stand mixer with the paddle attachment again and a clean bowl.  Add the powdered sugar and start the mixer on low speed.  While the paddle is turning, add the egg whites and lemon juice.  After that addition, turn up the mixer to medium and let it run for approximately 3 minutes.  You can add extra egg white or extra powdered sugar if you feel you need to adjust the icing viscosity.  The icing should be quite thick.

Now spread a relatively thin later of icing to the rolled out cookie dough with an offset spatula.  I like to make the icing about 1/8 of an inch thick or less, but I don't worry too much if it is not perfect.

Now cut out the shapes you want to use.  Traditionally these cookies are cut as stars.  Dipping the cookie cutter in water first will help it help it cleanly cut the dough and frosting.

Place the cut cookies in the freezer for at least 2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 350 F.  Set up a baking sheet with parchment or a Silpat.  Take the cookies straight from the freezer to the oven.  Bake them for 10 minutes.  The icing should be just beginning to discolor.  Let them cool completely once they are removed from the oven.

There you go.  I hope you enjoy giving them a try!!

Zimtsterne

 

Today we're talking about a festive cookie for the holidays:  Zimtsterne.

Zimtsterne, or cinnamon stars, are frosted German cookies that are made with almond flour and have lots of cinnamon.  And the recipe that I use to make these is particularly fascinating because these cookies are baked with the frosting already on them.  Let me tell you how they are made.

Almond flour, sugar, and a significant amount of cinnamon are sifted together.  Then egg whites and lemon juice are added.  Once this is mixed, you have a very dense cookie dough.  Roll it out to between 3/8" and 1/2" thick, and the dough is ready to be frosted.  That's right, the dough is frosted even before it is cut into stars.

The frosting is very simple.  Powdered sugar, lemon juice and egg whites are mixed together and what you get is a very very thick frosting that is so thick you'll wonder how easy it will be to spread on the cookie dough that is already rolled out.  But it does spread.  And if you need to adjust the frosting's viscosity, you can add a little extra egg white, or conversely, if it's too thin, you can add extra powdered sugar.

This frosting is spread across the rolled out cookie dough.  Then you pull out your star-shaped cookie cutter and make lots of little stars.  These are popped into the freezer for a couple hours.  Then into the oven they go for only 10 minutes.

They bake up beautifully.  The aroma is wonderful.  The frosting holds it position on the cookie and cooks along with the dough.  The frosting never runs in the heat.  When they come out and have finished cooling, you have a dense chewy cookie with that layer of sweetness on top.  The combination of cinnamon and lemon is intoxicating.  

Trust me --  these are really good!  And how many cookies can you name that are actually baked pre-frosted?

These are fun cookies for the holidays.  

Have a great Thanksgiving week, everyone!    

Artisanal

Artisanal:  (of a product, especially food or drink) made in a traditional or non-mechanized way.

As time passes and eventually I produce larger quantities and fulfill more orders, I will always have one thing in mind.  And that is this:  everything will always be done in a way that hearkens to the spirit of "artisanship".  

It means producing foods in small batches.  It means producing foods with more human hands and less mechanization.  It means subtle differences in the same foods from one day to the next.  

Someone once told me they thought that the reason homemade foods are better than those that are mass-produced are the tiny imperfections and inconsistencies within a food that result from the the way the food is prepared, mixed, baked, or cooked, by hand in a home kitchen.  I think there is a lot of validity to that idea.

Whatever it is that makes homemade foods better, though, can only result from actually making it the way homemade foods are made.  At least that's what I think.  

I like the idea of a shop with lots of normal mixers instead of big commercial/industrial-sized mixers.  I can seem them all humming away mixing numerous small batches of many foods and people buzzing about checking on them one by one.

I don't even like the idea of doubling a recipe.  Doubling a recipe does not always yield the same result as two separate single batches.  I can discuss more on that later as I've done many tests of that premise.

For me, though, the idea of making food traditionally in small batches with lots of human intervention is what I will always prefer.  Certainly that means that if I were to open up a shop, my overhead costs from the extra staffing required would not be in the best business-tradition, but it would be certainly in the best homemade tradition.  And that's the kind of food I want to make.

Eggnog

I have added something to the menu that I have been wanting to add for a long long time.

Eggnog.

Normally, it seems that people only drink eggnog during the winter holidays.  But I love it all year long.  However, I don't really care for the eggnog you find at the grocery store.  Most people I know agree with me that it's too "gloopy".  Is that a word?  Well, it is now because I'm using it.  By gloopy, I mean it's too thick, the texture's not quite right, and the flavor always seems a little artificial to me.

For my eggnog, I heat up the mixture of egg yolks, sugar, cream, milk, salt and vanilla to between 175 and 180 F.  Then it chills for a long time.  As is chills, it gets better.  And when I pour it into a glass and dust it with nutmeg, I can almost taste it even before I bring the glass to my lips.  

Eggnog really is amazing when it's cooked and chilled just right.  At least I think so.  I think most people either love it or hate it.  And that's OK.  Everyone has different tastes.

It's on the menu, and I will put it on a weekly offering sometime very soon, in time for Christmas.

Butterscotch pecan cookies

It's a breezy chilly grey day here in Kansas City.  I keep thinking about going out to rake leaves.  After the last rain from a couple days ago, it seems all of a sudden everything is turning colors and leaves are dropping in bunches from the trees.  But the breezes are strong today and leaves are being blown everywhere.  So I think I'd better wait until the weather changes a bit in a few days.  

That means I'm inside today, and I'm watching movies and making food.  A new cookie has just been added to the menu and I'm making a batch today.  These are butterscotch pecan cookies.

Roasted chopped pecans, butterscotch chips, vanilla, butter, brown sugar -- these are some of the ingredients which combine to make a wonderful complex flavor.  I shape these into a rough rectangle and cut off slices for baking.  The aroma that floats through the house as the baking nears completion is warm and inviting.  

I like to crumble these over French vanilla ice cream.  Sometimes I dip them in cocoa or milk.  If you leave a plate of these out on the table, they will disappear quickly.    

This weekend I will also be making a batch of a special pasta salad and taking photos in order to add it to the menu.   The same thing will happen with eggnog, or I hope so, at least.  I have ordered cups and lids that I think will work well and they have just arrived.  If they perform as I hope they will, then eggnog goes on the menu.  And eggnog cookies with a whipped eggnog frosting are coming soon.  And also zimtsterne cookies.

Enjoy some good food today.  And have a great week, everyone!

Chocolate chippers

Is is possible that there is someone on the planet who does NOT love chocolate chip cookies?  I don't think so.

There are multiple chocolate chip cookies on the menu already, and I've just added another one.   Each of these varieties has something different and wonderful that makes it unique.  The factors which make them unique might be the variety of chocolates in them, or the types of flours used, or the size of either the cookie or the chocolate chips and chunks, whether or not there are nuts, etc., etc., etc.

The point is this -- there are so many ways you can vary a chocolate chip cookie because they are such a simply delicious cookie no matter how you make them.

Cookies, in general, lend themselves well to the idea of multiple varieties.  Sometimes I make snickerdoodles with lemon zest in them and then call them lemony snickets (yes, like the books).  Or molasses cookies with lemon in them.  Or shortbread with hazelnuts, or almonds, or cashews.  Sometimes I'll cook sugar cookies really thin and then sandwich them with dark chocolate ganache.  

The possibilities are endless and wondrous.  I guess that's true for all food, but some foods more than others, I think.  

The new cookies are on the menu as "chocolate chippers" and I hope you will give them a try.  Perhaps sometime I'll do a week with only chocolate chip cookies offered, and you can sample several types side by side.

Have a great week everyone.  It's a beautiful autumn!

Baking time tests

I've been making a lot of cookies lately.  Cookies are always fun to make.  They don't really take a lot of time.  The dough can usually be refrigerated and baked later.  Many doughs do well in the freezer for a month.  That means I can bake three cookies for a late-night snack and do that again and again throughout the month.  And, really, who doesn't love cookies?

When I'm testing a new cookie or tweaking a recipe I already use (cookie or any other baked good), I'm very detailed about baking times.  I keep an oven thermometer hanging from the cooking racks in my oven so that I always know that my oven thermostat is working properly.  And this means that temperature is never an issue.  But time can be an issue.

Some cookies when baked just 30 seconds more than usual are dramatically different.  That little bit of extra time can really dry them out, or over-crisp them, or over-brown them, etc.  If the dough has been chilled, then you have to think about how much extra time you need for that cookie to come out just right.  Same thing goes for frozen doughs.

When I am working on a new cookie, I will chill the dough, and then over the course of 3 or 4 days, I will cook a small portion of that dough every day, and I will vary the baking times, baking only couple cookies at time.  In this way, I can see how the aging of the dough affects the cookie, I can test many different baking times, and I can experiment with portion sizes as well.  And I can do this all with one batch of dough.  An extra perk:  I have fresh cookies to sample every day.

Well, since I've been making a lot of cookies lately, my fridge has often had more than one tray of dough sitting wrapped inside it.  And each day I've been pre-heating that oven multiple times as I test out different baking protocols for new cookies.  It takes a lot of time to work through all the possibilities, and for a person like me who is sometimes impatient, that can be a challenge.  But in the end I'm always glad I was detailed in the baking trials.  Once I document the results and decide on cooking times and portions, etc., it means that every time I make that recipe, I know exactly what I can expect to pull out of the oven.

OK, time to make another batch.