Tag: sugar

Categories
Cakes The Book

202. Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting p.726


The recipe courtesy of The Ulterior Epicure

Sometimes the stars just don’t align, and the baking Gods abandon you for a day. I’ve learned a lot about cooking and baking through this project, and I’ve gotten to a point where I rarely make the boneheaded mistakes that plagued my early experiments, but there’s always room to regress. Today’s flub up was ignoring the instruction to “butter and flour cake pans, knocking out excess flour”. Every single baked good in the book calls for this step, and it’s become such a familiar phrase that I think I literally didn’t see it when reading the recipe. Sure something felt wrong while I poured the cake batter into the pans, but I was working on three other things at the time and didn’t give it much thought. The finished product suffered as a result, but I’m going to rate it anyway.

This is a pretty straightforward cake, but it does have quite a few ingredients. Beyond the basic cake stuff (flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt, vegetable oil, eggs, sugar) the cake mixes in a healthy dose of grated carrot, cinnamon, crushed pineapple, sweetened flaked coconut, walnuts, and raisins. The raisins were optional, and I opted against. The cakes are split into two 9 inch round cake pans and banked for ~40 minutes. Once cooled they’re stacked and frosted with whipped cream cheese, butter, vanilla, and icing sugar.

The Good: The cake tasted great. It had excellent carrot flavour and the cream cheese frosting wasn’t too sweet or too heavy, and set the cake off nicely. I like walnuts in a carrot cake, and this one was no exception. The frosting had a great texture, going on easily, and holding its shape quite well, as you’ll read below the underlying cake had some serious structural issues, but if I had to try to ice something with the texture of a jello salad again, this would be a pretty good frosting option.

The Bad: My main issues with the cake were with the enormous almost goupy crumb of the cake, and its total lack of structural integrity. The recipe describes it as an unusually moist cake, but I think my mishaps turned a moist cake into a barely solid cake. Without the butter and flour in the pans, the cakes stuck. The first cake I tried to unmould fell to pieces, with the baked-on bits staying firmly in the pan, and most of the extremely moist and soft innards flying through the cooling rack I was trying to unmould onto. I tried to free up the bottoms, but the cake was just tearing while it was still warm. Instead of cooling the cakes on racks, I left them in their pans, and was able to get an offset spatula in to free them up once they’d cooled. This probably means that the cakes steamed as they cooled, instead of crisping up on the outside. I can’t know how the cooling in the pan affected the texture of the cake, or how the rough extraction from their pans affected the overall integrity of the cake. As it was, the cake was nearly impossible to cut, it was as malleable as an angel food cake, and the slices crumbled as I tried to serve them. Even chilled the next day getting a piece out as a whole was a challenge. The soft and goopy frosting added more to the structural integrity than the cake itself. The pineapple was added to this dish to make it extra moist, and it did its job. At least with my mixed up cooking instructions that extra moisture probably made a bad situation worse. More importantly, it didn’t taste all that good. I don’t think carrot and pineapple are a natural pairing, and I just found it out of place.

The Verdict: A lot of what went wrong with this cake was totally my fault, but things like the over-large crumb, and not so nice addition of pineapple were certainly problems with the recipe. Looking beyond the serious textural issues, the cake did taste very good. It wasn’t my absolute favorite carrot cake, but it did a good job of delivering carrot flavour in a cream cheese icing package. I suspect that baking this in a 13×9 pan instead of trying to make it a layered cake would make the textural issues much less important, and it would be just as delicious. The cake that I produced was not fit to serve to guests, and the cake I made is the cake I have to rate, but I think I’m going to give this recipe another chance in the next couple of months, and I might decide to revise the rating upwards then.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

198. Currant Tea Scones p.598

The recipe

Scones are serious business. Done right, they’re transcendent, rich, with just a hint of sweetness and a striated flaky texture. A scone should be substantial, but not dense. Unfortunately they’re often done very very poorly. Starbucks gets my vote for worst mass market scone. Their oversized scones are dense enough to sink, and so dry you can’t get through a bite without a sip of coffee. The few times I’ve eaten them I’ve ended up with an Elmer’s school glue paste in my mouth, and a boulder in my stomach. This scone philosophy may work for Starbucks’ bottom line, but it has no place in my kitchen.

This recipe has a much happier take on the classic British treat. Here you make a quick dough by working butter into a mixture of flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt, then gently mixing in half-and-half until a sticky dough forms. You stir in currents which have been plumped in just a couple of tablespoons of hot brewed tea, form the dough into a disk, score it, brush it with half-and-half, then sprinkle it with sugar and bake.

The Good: The scones came out with pretty much the texture I was hoping for, tender-chewy cake stacked in airy layers. The cream and sugar brushing gave a nice gloss to the upper sides, and the bottoms were just barely golden. All in all a pretty darn good scone.

The Bad: I’m quite picky about scones, so while the results were generally good, there was room for improvement. First, they were a little too dry, substituting full fat cream for half-and-half might have taken care of that. Second, I like currants as much or more than the next guy, but half as many would have been plenty. Third, I wasn’t a huge fan of the bake, and then cut, plan with these. I prefer to bake scones separately, because the sweet and shiny outer layer is the best part. This cut-a-disk-up-like-a-cake strategy messes up the surface to volume ratio. Fourth, I thought going in that soaking the currants in tea might add a tea flavour to the scones, but it really did nothing at all. There’s nothing wrong with not-tea-flavoured scones, but the plumping in tea step was a bit of a waste of time. If there’s no way to get the tea above the threshold of human perception I’d just use hot water instead. Finally, this recipe is for an unusually small batch. It makes just 4 scones. That’s about breakfast for two. If I’m going to go to the trouble of making scones I’d like to count on some leftovers, so I’d plan on doubling or tripling the recipe.

The Verdict: Overall this is a solid scone recipe. It’s not my ideal, but I think scones are largely a matter of personal taste. It comes fairly close to what I’m looking for in a scone, and it’s a good basis for further experimentation.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

195. Pan-Seared Filet Mignon with Merlot Sauce p.428

Here’s the recipe for the Merlot sauce part of this dish,

This is the second time I’ve made this dish. The first was almost two years ago, when I made it for my dining companion’s birthday dinner. Part of her birthday present was that the steak would be just for her, not for The Project too. That meant I could just cook and serve without the awkward photo session in the kitchen that dishes for The Project require, and I didn’t have to be taking mental notes for a future blog post (but of course I couldn’t help myself). That first time this steak was absolutely fantastic, and I was looking forward to making it again to count it towards The Project.

In this dish filet-mignon is browned in a skillet, then finished in the oven, and served topped with a red wine sauce. The Merlot sauce starts by making a caramel, then dissolving vinegar in the boiling sugar. In another pan onions are softened in butter, and wine, veal stock or demi glace, are added and simmered. The mixture is seasoned, and the solids are strained out. The liquid is added to the caramel, and heated until it’s dissolved. The steaks are served drizzled with the sauce.

The Good: It’s filet mignon with a buttery wine and veal demi-glace sauce, it’s fantastic, if you have any love in your heart for red meat, you will like this dish. The caramel is the surprising part of the sauce, adding sweetness, but also a depth which compliments the browned meat. Filet mignon is all about the so-tender-it-shouldn’t-be-possible texture, and a rich sauce really enhances that. Since it’s a lean cut of meat, the buttery sauce doesn’t put it over the top. Demi-glace is a wonderful wonderful thing, everything it touches just gets better, enhancing flavours, smoothing textures, and bringing the whole sauce together.

The Bad: While the dish was delicious, the technique could have been improved. The steaks are seared in the pan, then roasted to finish cooking through. This builds up a good deal of delicious, wonderful, splendid, magical fond on the bottom of the pan. These browned bits are usually deglazed and used as part of a pan sauce, but this recipe commits the nearly unforgivable sin of just throwing all that goodness out. It also doesn’t ask for any juices that run from the steaks as they rest to be poured into the sauce. That’s just silly. By skipping these steps the sauce can be completely made in advance, which is convenient, but you end up throwing away what could have been the most flavorful part of the dish.

I made a mistake with these steaks and trusted my meat thermometer over my eyes and finger test. I was paranoid about over cooking the steaks (filet mignon overcooks quickly), so I took them out sooner than I should and counted on carryover to finish the job. I radically miscalculated and ended up serving them quite rare. I take my steak rare, and it was a little underdone for me, my dining companion prefers the medium side of medium rare, and it was just not going to happen for her. We were already sitting, and she didn’t want to wait to put it back in the oven, so she nuked it instead. A little part of me dies every time that happens, but it’s a good incentive to get the steaks right the first time.

The Verdict: These were delicious steaks, no question, I’d recommend them to anyone. I think there are a few tweaks that should be made, and it’s certainly not an inexpensive way to do dinner, but if you’re looking for an impressive but not overwhelming dish for a special occasion this is a pretty darn good way to go. The final taste is certainly 5 mushroom worthy, but the travesty of the wasted fond means that I can’t give it full marks.

Categories
Frozen Desserts and Sweet Sauces The Book

190. Strawberry Cheesecake Ice Cream p.855


The recipe

This is ice cream for the lazy, if you have an ice cream maker you can get this cheesecake version will only take up about 20 minutes of your time. There’s also less decision making to do. For regular ice cream you make a custard and heat it until it just coats a spoon, about 170 degrees. This can be a bit of a trick if you’re rotten with a thermometer, or don’t know what nappé is supposed to look like. This ice cream does away with all that, it’s just chopped strawberries, cream cheese, sugar, milk, lemon juice, a pinch of salt, which go for a spin in the blender. You then stir in heavy cream, and chill the whole mixture. Once it’s cold you add it to the ice cream maker, churn it, then pop it in the freezer for a couple of hours to firm up.

The Good: This ice cream tastes like strawberry cheesecake, only colder. The cream cheese added richness and tang to the ice cream, and accounted for a whole lot of the flavour. The strawberries were very present, but just like in strawberry cheesecake they didn’t taste much like strawberries anymore. I’m not sure why that is, but I find that through some alchemy they stop tasting like strawberries and start tasting like strawberry cheesecake somewhere along the way. That is in no way a bad thing, strawberries are great, but so is strawberry cheesecake.

The Bad: This ice cream tastes like strawberry cheesecake, only colder. My dining companion isn’t into strawberry cheesecake, or strawberry desserts in general, I had a lot of this stuff to go through alone. The texture was also a bit off. It was very thick, probably from the cream cheese, and set up quite firmly. I would have preferred a creamier, more yielding ice cream.

I skipped the chilling step after the ingredients are blended together, and went straight to the freezing step. The point of chilling the base is to help it freeze as quickly as possible when it goes into the ice cream maker. Faster freezing means smaller ice crystals, means a smoother creamier texture. It’s possible that my issues with the texture were a result of my shortcut, but I don’t think so. The mouth feel was good, it wasn’t gritty or grainy as ice creams that weren’t frozen quickly enough can get, so I suspect the texture is due to an excess of cream cheese.

The Verdict: It’s ice cream, it tasted good. On an objective – is this something you would eat again?, level the answer is absolutely yes. But, there are only so many ice cream making opportunities in life, and I think my time could be better spent.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

189. Shrimp in Adobo Sauce p.322

I can’t find a recipe for this one online.

Anyone following The Project for any length of time knows that I have a bit of a smoked pepper fetish. I get a little weak in the knees when I see the words “ancho chiles” in a recipe. You start this recipe by searing and soaking anchos, then puréeing them with garlic, onion, oregano, and dash of water. The paste is then fried and thinned with white wine, white vinegar, sugar, and salt. It’s simmered until it’s quite thick, and shrimp are mixed in and cooked. You serve the dish with rice, avocados, and cilantro.

The Good: I’m a sucker for spicy seafood dishes, and this was a lovely way of doing it. It tasted like an actual Mexican dish, and very little like the pathetic excuse for Mexican food you can find in Montreal (with a very few exceptions). I’m an enormous fan of adobo sauces like this because they combine heat, smoky depth, acid, sweetness, and aromatics in one cohesive sauce. It hits all the buttons there are to hit, and leaves me very very satisfied.

The Bad: I’m getting pickier about my adobo sauces, and while this was generally good, I’ve had and made better. My main issue was that there was too much ancho flavour, without enough else to balance it. The smokiness of anchos is wonderful, but it can be overwhelming if it’s too concentrated. I also object to the use of white vinegar, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s a missed opportunity, lemon or lime juice would have added another dimension, and white wine vinegar could have been a nice choice too. Similarly, white sugar is just fine, but honey, molasses, or brown sugar could have been more interesting.

While it’s not in any way the recipe’s fault, I decided to get clever and messed this dish up. It annoys me that most recipes call for peeling and deveining shrimp. The 21-25 shrimp called for in this recipe are small enough that eating the vein doesn’t really bother me, getting rid of it is a nice touch, but it’s not strictly necessary like it is with larger shrimp. What really kills me is getting rid of the shells. A huge amount of the flavour in shellfish is in their shells, and throwing it away is just no fun. I usually try to find a way to simmer the shells in some liquid going into the dish to boost the shrimp flavour. In this case I decided that my dining companion and I would just peel our shrimp after cooking. That was incredibly dumb, they were extremely messy, and we ended up losing a lot of the sauce along with the shells.

The Verdict: My love for all things in adobo continues, this wasn’t my favourite example but it worked fairly well, and it’s a good basis to start experimenting from. It took a little while, but no step was too frustrating. The final plate was lovely and colourful, and the cilantro and avocado were excellent compliments to the shrimp. I’ll absolutely make dishes very much like this one again, but I don’t think I’ll be following this recipe letter for letter again.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

184. Katharine Hepburn’s Brownies p.688

The recipe

You know who I have an irrational dislike for? Katharine Hepburn. I know she’s one of the best respected and beloved actresses of all time, and the Oscar winningest lady ever, but she just drives me nuts. Admittedly I haven’t seen much of her work, but one film is all it took. In Bringing Up Baby she plays the lighthearted and carefree Susan Vance who drives the films comedy of errors with her impetuous, irresponsible, behaviour that we’re meant to take as cute and endearing. Every line she delivers just gets on my last nerve. Obviously this is some personal damage of mine, as the rest of the world seems to think it’s a pretty good film. Katharine Hepburn is a lot better in her more dramatic roles, but even there her upper class New-England accent chips away at my soul. I’m also a Star Trek fan, and Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway) who bears a strong resemblance to Katharine Hepburn, seems to have used Hepburn as the model for her character. Janeway has all the weird vocal ticks, the grandiose delivery of her lines, and the obstinate bullheadedness of so many of Hepburn’s characters. I can’t stand Janeway, and it turns out that she’s just a pale imitation of the grating irritation that Ms. Hepburn could bring to the screen. All that to say, I was predisposed to dislike Katharine Hepburn’s brownies, which are apparently her once-secret family recipe.

The recipe starts by melting together butter with 2 ounces of chocolate in a double boiler, then stirring in sugar, eggs and vanilla. A quarter cup of flour and a bit of salt are then barely mixed in. A cup of chopped walnuts and folded into the batter, and everything goes into 325 oven for about 40 minutes.

This is a very simple brownie recipe, unfortunately I thought they were awful. As the recipe promised the brownies were gooey-soft, which some people are really into, but it’s not my ideal texture. There were way too many nuts, which further weakened the integrity of these very soft brownies. They were hard to pick up without risking catastrophic brownie structural failure. My main complaint was that they hardly tasted like chocolate. 2 ounces was just enough to give the brownies a chocolate appearance, without any chocolate taste at all. Really they just tasted like sugar and walnuts.

Unfortunately the gold standard for judging a brownie recipe is the ubiquitous boxed mix. Those boxed brownies are not bad, but any recipe you’re going to make yourself ought to be able to beat the pants off them. Katharine Hepburn’s brownies have conclusively failed that test. If you’re going to make brownies from The Book I’d suggest the Triple-Chocolate Fudge Brownies on page 689. I’ve made them a bunch of times, but haven’t blogged them because I’ve just replaced the three chocolates the recipe calls for with all semi-sweet. They’re seriously fantastic brownies, and they’d just destroy Katharine Hepburn’s mockery of a brownie in a head to head competition.

Interestingly both Teena and Adam have made these brownies and given them grades of A- and A respectively. There are rave reviews for these things all over the internet, but they’re just not for me. These brownies just give me one more thing to dislike about Katharine Hepburn.

Categories
Breakfast and Brunch The Book

177. Baked French Toast p.650


The recipe

The blurb for this recipe suggests that it’s an easy and fuss-free way to make French Toast. I couldn’t disagree more. This looks like a scaled down restaurant recipe to me, and what works for breakfast for hundreds doesn’t necessarily make much sense when serving six. The idea with the recipe is to make a basic French toast batter (eggs, milk, salt) and pour it over buttered slices of bread in a buttered baking dish. You then let the mixture soak into the bread in the fridge for at least an hour. The bread then needs to warm up to room temperature, whereupon it’s sprinkled with sugar and baked in a 450 oven for 20 to 25 minutes. I can make normal people French toast for six and have everything cleaned up in 25 minutes, so what’s the point of this recipe? The Book suggests that you should assemble the dish and let the bread soak overnight, so that it can be popped in the oven while you’re setting the table and squeezing the orange juice (I wonder how many oranges are juiced rhetorically for every real life glass of fresh squeezed orange juice). I guess one advantage of this approach is that all the dishes can be done the night before, and you do have a bit less to do in the morning. But you also have to wake up extra early to take the baking dish out of the fridge and preheat the oven. Making normal French toast requires washing a cutting board, a mixing bowl, and a frying pan. I’m willing to wait until after breakfast to get to those. If I was serving this dish to twenty people this approach would make a lot of sense, but as it is it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

The greatest crime of this recipe is that it didn’t taste particularly good. There was nothing bad or objectionable about it, but it was very very dull. I always add vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg to my French toast, and I prefer to use a more interesting bread (sourdough is good) than the “soft supermarket Italian” loaf the recipe calls for. I understand that French toast is mostly a vehicle for maple syrup delivery, but that doesn’t mean that it needs to be boring. I should give The Book due credit for calling for whole milk in the recipe, I was sure they’d find a way to integrate heavy cream.

If I had a giant group coming for breakfast I’d consider tripling this recipe, and adding some flavour to it. Beyond spices and different bread I’d increase the called for 1/4 teaspoon of salt to 1/2 teaspoon. As it was it was OK, we ate it, and once it was drowned in maple syrup we enjoyed it, but I’d say this recipe is a definite missed opportunity.

Categories
Cakes The Book

176. Apple Raisin Cake p.704


The recipe

I’m really trying to work on my hosting skills these days. I love to have friends over, and I love to cook for them. Unfortunately that often means that we don’t spend a lot of time together once they arrive. I’m pretty rotten about sharing kitchen space, or involving others in the cooking process. Being territorial about ones kitchen seems like a natural, if not admirable trait. I wish I was the sort of person who could invite a bunch of friends over, give everyone a kitchen job, and just let them do it. Unfortunately, I’m a kitchen control freak, if I do invite someone to cook with me I can’t help but looking over their shoulders and making little “suggestions” which make me feel like a patronizing ass. I’m not a particularly controlling or dominant person in other aspects of my life, but I don’t think I’ll ever play well with others in the kitchen. So, if I want to see my guests, and I can’t share the cooking with them, I’ve got to get better about doing prep work well ahead.

When I made this cake The Boys were over for the day. It’s quite rare that we all get together in one place at one time, so I should have made the most of it. They’ve been very supportive of The Project, and I like to share, or occasionally inflict, recipes from The Book with / on them. I decided to make this cake, and yesterday’s ice cream while they were over. The recipes list the combined active time at 1 hour 10 minutes, but I probably spent two hours at it between prepping and cleaning. Two hours isolated in the kitchen is a fair chunk of the time The Boys were over. Both the cake and the ice cream were good, and I really enjoyed sharing them with my friends, but I should have thought it through and prepared those dishes the night before. I am getting better about kitchen time management, but it’s definitely a work in progress.

The cake is easy to make, you sift together flour, baking soda, and salt in one bowl, then wisk together vegetable oil, eggs, white and brown sugars, cinnamon, nutmeg, dark rum, and vanilla in another. You fold the dry stuff into the wet stuff and gently incorporate diced apples, and raisins. The batter goes into a Bundt pan and bakes.

This was a very soft, moist cake. It was gently spiced, and packed with apples and raisins. When I served it to the boys the afternoon it was baked I wasn’t too impressed. There was nothing wrong with it, but it wasn’t as good as I was hoping. The recipe suggests that it improves with age though, and I’d have to agree. It was much much better by the third day. There was no great change, all the flavours were the same, but it really came together and the texture firmed up a bit. If I baked it again I would choose a firmer apple. The recipe calls for Cortland or Empire, and the blurb ahead suggests that Golden Delicious or Gala will do, but my cortlands melted into the cake, and those other options are evens softer. I would use Granny Smiths both for the bitterness, and the very firm texture. The cake was a little on the sweet side anyway, so a more assertive apple wouldn’t hurt anything.

This cake worked best as an opportunistic snack. Since it keeps at room temperature for five days (read a week), it was nice to have it there ready to go. The first night I served it I was thinking of it as a big Bundt spice cake for after dinner. It didn’t really fit that application, it’s much more of an afternoon coffee cake (the rest of the coffee cakes are in the Breakfast and Brunch section, and I don’t understand why it wasn’t grouped with them). I’m not going to rush to make it again, but if it was sitting on the counter I’d certainly cut myself a slice.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

174. Chocolate Sambuca Crinkle Cookies p.671


The recipe

This is a polarizing recipe. If the thought of anise and chocolate together piques your interest, you’ll probably like these cookies. If however that sounds like the worst idea you’ve heard all day, you probably won’t. That may sound trite or obvious, but anise is like that. I don’t know anyone who is neutral on the subject of black licorice. People love it, hate it, or have a complex ambivalence towards it. If a recipe is anise scented, you know right off the bat that that’s going to be a dominant element of the recipe’s flavour.

I’m all for anise, I especially like it in savory cooking, I have a little trouble with those super salty licorice candies the Dutch love, but otherwise anise and I are good. When I first flipped through the cookies section of The Book these ones caught my eye, and I’ve been looking forward to making them ever since. I haven’t done them until now because they needed to be served in the right context. My dining companion and I aren’t huge on desserts, so I usually try to serve them when we have friends over, or to bring them places. It’s hard to bring chocolate-anise cookies to a party or dinner, because you know going in that lots of people are going to hate them. I had to wait until I was making batches and batches of cookies, so that they could be one among many elements of a cookie tray.

The cookie recipe is fairly standard. You sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt, melt bittersweet chocolate and butter in a double boiler, and whisk together eggs, walnuts, Sambuca, and sugar. You then add the chocolate and flour mixtures to the egg mixture and combine. You pop the batter in the fridge for two hours, then roll heaping tablespoons of dough into balls, and toss them in confectioner’s sugar before baking.

The sugar causes the tops to crack, and I was hoping it was going to give the uncracked parts a nice glaze. As you can see a lot of the sugar stayed in white clumps, which I didn’t find too attractive. The insides of the cookies were soft and cakey, studded with walnuts. As predicted chocolate, and anise were the dominant flavours. I used Pernod instead of Sambuca for this recipe (a Book approved substitution), but I should have remembered that Sambuca is much sweeter than Pernod and compensated.

For people who are into anise cookies, these were quite good. They weren’t the most beautiful cookies I’ve ever produced, but the texture was very nice, and the rich chocolate and anise combination was a winner for me. I try to take other people’s opinions into account when rating these recipes, I usually estimate other’s average ratings, and split the difference between their liking and mine. But we have a bimodal distribution here, and the mean is no longer a meaningful statistic, the mode or the median aren’t much help either. Since this is the food blog part of my life, and not the behavioral neurobiology part, I get to violate good statistical practice, and just ignore all those anise haters.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

173. Spice Sugar Cookies p.669

The recipe

My cookie baking bonanza got a little bit confused. I made ginger cookies that didn’t taste much like ginger, and these spice cookies, which are gingerbread in disguise. I kept mixing them up when I told people which cookies where which, it seemed pretty obvious that the crispy cookies which tasted like ginger should have been the ginger crisps, but no. Whatever they’re called, these were among the best gingerbread cookies I’ve ever had.

I’m reading “A History of Food” by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat right now, so my head is filled with culinary fast facts. Apparently ginger is a recent addition to what we now call gingerbread. In French gingerbread is still called pain d’épice, spice bread, and for most of it’s history was made with whatever spices happened to be available, rarely ginger.

The cookies are a little odd in that they’re made with vegetable shortening instead of butter. I expected that to be a big turn-off, but it really worked. The cookies are made by sifting together the dry ingredients, flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and salt, then beating together the shortening and brown sugar, adding an egg and molasses, then gently mixing in the mixture of dry ingredients. The dough then goes into the fridge to chill for an hour, and is rolled into tablespoon balls. The balls are dipped in sugar, and baked sugar side up.

I was really happy with the way these cookies came out, they had a lovely colour, and sparkling sugar topping was very attractive. I liked the way the sugar caused the tops to crack and craze. The shortening really contributed to the texture of the cookies, they were crisp outside, soft inside, and appealingly rich. An acquaintance tried these at a party and said “they’re greasy, I like that”, I can’t think of a better way to put it. Usually greasiness isn’t something I look for in a cookie, but here it really worked. The spice mixture was right on, not overpowering by any means, but delicate and balanced.

These cookies are an absolute keeper. Just looking at the recipe I probably wouldn’t have made these if I wasn’t doing this project, but I’m certainly glad I did.