Tag Archives: dessert recipes
Recipe: Gram’s Ginger Cookies
One from the archives – something I make nearly every year at this time.
For the holidays, an old recipe – my grandmother’s. Not quite gingerbread, not quite ginger snaps, these cookies are ultra thin, crisp and addictive. She used to make them out of the bridge-party heart, club, diamond, and spade cookie cutters even at Christmas, but if this mystifies you as it does me, use a traditional gingerbread man cookie cutter.
The molasses give these an especially old-fashioned taste. I’ve seen no evidence of Brer Rabbit molasses around NYC, but other brands will do just as well. (more…)
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Tagged cookies, dessert, dessert recipes, Southern food
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The Copycat Chef: Toffee Macadamia Nut Cookies
This recipe came about after I ate a particularly memorable cookie made with toffee chips and macadamia nuts a long time ago at City Bakery, where they have the most amazing chocolate chip cookies. The recipe is easy – it’s basically a riff on the classic Nestle Tollhouse recipe, which you can alter to include all kinds of things instead of just chocolate chips. The hardest part is finding the key ingredient, Skor bars, crazy popular in the ’80s but now limited to just a few drugstores. I found some at CVS. (more…)
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Recipe: Mom's Pie Crust, Food Processor Version
I gave my mom a food processor for Christmas last year, but I couldn’t really sell her on the whole food processor idea until I showed her how to use it to make pie crust. This time consuming mother-daughter holiday project, which usually involves two blunt dinner knives, a can of Crisco, billowing clouds of flour, and a generous pinch of cursing, could be much easier if we just made the dough in the food processor.
Fast forward to this summer, when the beloved writer Nora Ephron died and her NYT obit listed the things she once wrote that she would miss most out of life:
“Taking a bath
Coming over the bridge to Manhattan
Pie.”
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BBQ Treat: Cookie Burgers
My friend Jib Girl served this clever passed dessert/hors d’oeuvre at a recent barbecue and was the envy of all the other cooks at the party. They may look like sliders, but they’re actually cookies assembled to look like mini hamburgers. Since they’re assembled from store-bought cookies and ingredients, they’re easy to make en masse for a crowd. Think of them as a very kid-friendly summer BBQ contribution.
Photo: Daniela Denaro
Be forewarned: Make this recipe once, and you may be asked to bring them to every party going forward. (more…)
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Old-Fashioned Christmas Cookies
Like the wartime song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” some holiday classics remind us of a time when the basics were harder to come by. So it was with my grandmother’s Christmas cookies, the recipe for which dates back to about 1900. By the time the Depression was over and people could actually afford to buy the butter and sugar to make cookies, she said, along came the war, and butter and sugar were rationed.
Which may be one reason these cookies are best left to shine as is, with just sprinkles or nothing at all on top. Before it became the fashion to ice Christmas cookies elaborately à la Martha, they were less cakey and ultra thin, so as to showcase the crisp, delicious cookie itself – and how fortunate it is to have access to plain old butter and sugar. (more…)
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Recipe: Peaches and Bacon Sundae
This being a thrifty summer, there are a lot of recipes going around for pickling and canning. But what if you read one of those recipes and think, grasshopper-like, I want to eat that right now, not in January? This is what happened with Amanda Hesser’s recipe for brandied peaches.
Greenmarket peaches are so good right now that at first I never even made it to the recipe stage. Raw sliced peaches topped with crisp bacon make a great breakfast dish. The last bit of fat from the bacon oozes into the peaches, creating a wonderful smoky-salty-sweet taste. They were even better with syrup drizzled on top—not the fancy New England maple kind, but the kind of syrup you find in the South, Aunt Jemima. You’re going for Georgia flavor here. (more…)
Gram’s Ginger Cookies
For the holidays, an old recipe – my grandmother’s. Not quite gingerbread, not quite ginger snaps, these cookies are ultra thin, crisp and addictive. She used to make them out of the bridge-party heart, club, diamond, and spade cookie cutters even at Christmas, but if this mystifies you as it does me, use a traditional gingerbread man cookie cutter.
The molasses give these an especially old-fashioned taste. I’ve seen no evidence of Brer Rabbit molasses around NYC, but other brands will do just as well.
Gram’s Ginger Cookies
1 cup Brer Rabbit Molasses
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup melted unsalted butter
1 egg, beaten
pinch of baking soda
pinch of salt
3 tablespoons ginger
4 – 4 1/2 cups flour, plus more for dusting
Beat molasses until light, then beat in sugar, butter, egg, and dry ingredients. Add just enough flour to roll. Refrigerate dough for at least 2 hours.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Dust a rolling pin and pastry cloth with plenty of flour and start to roll out a ball of dough. When it flattens into a good sized disc, pick it up and swish the underside in more flour from the pastry cloth, then move it back to center. Roll until extremely thin and cut with cookie cutters.
Bake each batch for just under 6 minutes, until the cookie edges just begin to brown. Makes about 4 dozen cookies.