Resolved

Don’t worry, lentil fans. This year’s recipe will be along shortly, but in the meantime I wanted to put up this recipe, since I had it ready to go.

In keeping with my custom of not sabotaging my coworker’s New Year’s resolutions no matter how fervently I personally reject the practice, my Sunday baking in January always focuses on whole grains, less sugar, and lower fat than the other 10 months of the year. (I repeat the process in May in case of pre-summer beach dieting.). These digestive biscuits are my first such offering for 2013, but they’re also one of my favorites year-round, thanks to their lovely crunchy-crumbly texture and not-too-sweet full-bodied wheatiness, to say nothing of how hard they ping my lifelong Anglophilia.

In addition to being perfect both for healthier eating plans and Doctor Who marathons, these are wonderfully low-effort, since the dough comes together beautifully in the food processor and is so easy to work with that the rolling and cutting process is quick and painless. If you want to be a bit more indulgent, you have the option of spreading them with a very thin coating of melted chocolate, but they’re pretty addictive plain with a cup of tea. Since they’re technically a cookie but really fall somewhere between a cookie and a whole wheat cracker, they also work quite well on a cheese plate, if you want to be a bit more sophisticated.

Digestive Biscuits
(Adapted from King Arthur Flour, The Baking Sheet Newsletter, Dec 1991)
Makes 4-5 dozen cookies

½ cup old fashioned rolled oats
1 cup white whole wheat flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¾ teaspoon sea salt
¾ cup confectioner’s sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature but not soft, in half-tablespoon-sized pieces
¼ cup low-fat milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

4-6 ounces milk or semi-sweet chocolate, chopped and melted (optional)

In a food processor, grind the oats until fine but not completely powdered, leaving some small bits of oat. Add the flours, baking powder, salt and sugar, and pulse a few times to combine. Scatter the butter pieces over the dry ingredients and pulse again until the mixture resembles rough cornmeal, with no large bits of butter visible. Mix the milk and vanilla together and pour through the processor’s feed tube while pulsing again, continuing to process until a homogenous dough forms and starts clumping around the blade.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured silicone mat or piece of parchment and roll to a thickness of approximately 1/8 inch, but no less (thinner cookies will burn too easily). Chill the dough for about 10 minutes to firm it back up before cutting.

Preheat oven to 350F and line 2-3 baking sheets with parchment paper.

Cut the rolled dough with 1 ½ to 2 inch round cookie cutters, transferring the rounds to the lined sheets. Re-roll as many times as necessary to use up the dough, chilling the dough again between rollings if the cookies become too soft to pick up easily.

Prick the cookies well with a fork and bake until pale gold all over but not too dark around the edges, 15-20 minutes. Cool completely on racks. If desired, the bottom of the cooled cookies can be spread with a thin layer of melted chocolate and marked decoratively, then left until the chocolate sets back up.

Unfrosted biscuits keep very well in airtight containers for a couple of weeks, while chocolate-covered cookies should be eaten within a few days, before the chocolate blooms.

Notes:

There’s no reason you couldn’t make these vegan with the use of vegan margarine or vegetarian shortening and a non-dairy milk, although in that case you’ll probably need to chill longer and more often, since the dough will be quicker to soften too much.

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Fruity Oaty Bars

So yeah, summer happened.

Between my baby brother’s wedding, numerous trips, out-of-town visitors, weeks of ungodly and unrelenting heat, and general life, I blinked and it was September. It was an unusually busy summer, topped only by last year’s, with the graduation and internship and job hunt and cross-country move AGAIN, but even in an average year I seem to be prone to blogging lulls during these months. Not sure why, really. Maybe the sunshine scrambles my brain.

Anyway, to make up for the lapse, here are the best oatmeal bar cookies ever. No, really. Really and truly. I know I’ve made rhubarb and oat cookies before, but as good as those were, these are a mile beyond that, and I have about a dozen testimonials to back that claim up.

The underlying cookie recipe is from my second-favorite bakery in Seattle. There’s no shame in second-favorite status either, because as good as Macrina is, there’s no way it could hope to compete with the bakery of a pastry chef who won the Coupe du Monde de Boulangerie. If you’ve never considered that the words “croissant” and “orgasmic” could belong together, you’ve either never been to Paris or never been to Bakery Nouveau. Seriously, this place is so good that I’m actually a little glad I didn’t visit it until just weeks before we moved away, because there is no way my student budget could have sustained the number of trips I would have wanted to make there, and there would have been much heartbreak.

So my point is that the basic oat bar recipe is, if not Bakery Nouveau good, still really freaking good, because the Macrina people know what they’re doing. The bottom layer is a fantastically buttery and almondy shortbread, and the oat streusel on top is just generous and crumbly enough without being ridiculously chunky or going pasty. The watermelon-pink middle layer is all my doing, a tangy-perfumy blend of rhubarb and quince jam which — I realized when making it — ends up being almost tropical and rather reminiscent of guava.

If you happened to both have the foresight to freeze some rhubarb back when it was flooding the farmers markets and have a source for quince jam, you can make this recipe as-is. If one or both of those is not an option, don’t despair. This cookie can be made with any kind of good-quality jam, and it will still be well worth the effort.

Rhubarb-Quince Oat Bars
(Adapted from Macrina Bakery and Cafe Cookbook)
Makes 24-32 bars

For the almond shortbread:
3 tablespoons ground almonds
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
3/4 teaspoons almond extract
3/4 teaspoons vanilla extract
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted

For the filling:
1/4 cup granulated sugar
4 cups (around 1 pound) rhubarb, in 1/2 inch slices
1 pinch salt
1 1/2 cups quince jam

For the streusel:
1 1/4 cups light brown sugar
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 1/4 cups rolled oats
1 pinch salt
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, in 1/4 inch pieces

Toast the ground almonds in a small nonstick pan until just starting to brown and give off a warm nutty aroma. Combine the toasted almonds with the sugar and flour in a large bowl. Stir the two extracts into the melted butter, then pour the mixture over the dry ingredients and mix to create a sandy dough.

Line a quarter sheet pan with foil or parchment paper, leaving enough overhang on all sides to be able to lift the finished bars out of the pan. With your fingertips, gently press the almond dough in an even layer covering the bottom and halfway up the sides of the pan. Chill for half an hour while preparing the filling.

In a medium saucepan, combine the rhubarb, sugar, and salt. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, then lower heat and cook until the rhubarb is soft and falling apart, 10 minutes or so. Remove from the heat and stir in the quince jam.

Preheat the oven to 325. Remove the bottom layer from the fridge, top with a sheet of parchment paper, weigh it down with pie weights or dried beans to prevent puffing, and bake until light gold all over and slightly brown at the edges. Remove the top layer of parchment and the weights, and let cool a bit on a wire rack.

In another bowl, mix together the brown sugar, flour, oats and salt. Using a pastry cutter or your fingers, work in the butter until a crumbly mixture forms. Spread the filling over the almond layer, then sprinkle the oat streusel over the top, completely covering the filling.

Bake the bars on the middle rack for 35 minutes or until the top is a dark golden brown and some of the filling is bubbling around the edges. Cool completely, then use the foil or parchment lining to lift the slab onto a flat surface. Using a large knife or a pizza cutter, slice into thin bars.

Notes:

Since they’re quite rich, I like to make eight vertical slices and four horizontal ones, for a total of 32 bars, but you can be more generous if you like.  If either amount ends up being too much for your needs, leftover bars freeze very well, wrapped tightly in plastic and foil or tucked into a freezer-safe bag.

If you want to make your life a little easier, albeit less interesting, just spread the almond layer with 2-3 cups of your favorite jam, perked up with the juice of half a lemon.

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Breakfast on the Run and on the Cheap

You’d think I’d have more time on my hands now that I’m a student, but if the past two weeks are any indication, you’d be wrong.  I’d forgotten how students don’t really have down time, how you’re constantly shuttling between campus and off-campus, and how all off-campus time is time that could and ideally should be devoted to studying.  I’m not complaining; this is what I wanted, and it’s also going to be over sooner than I think.  It does two things simultaneously, though.  Contrary to my usual breakfast-denying norm, it makes me actually want to have breakfast before morning classes so I can have the energy to think my way through to lunch, and it also cuts the amount of time I have available for fixing and having breakfast.

This means dealing with the problem of the easy-to-grab, on-the-go breakfast I haven’t had to face since my 45-minute commute days.  In those days, it was usually a fancy cereal bar and a latte from the Starbucks on the ground floor of my office building, but I’m also on a student budget now, and more creative and frugal thinking is required here.  What can I make that’s inexpensive, nutritious, portable, and forgiving of being forgotten on the countertop in my rush to catch the bus?

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So Not Your Grandmother’s Oatmeal Cookie

Brown Butter Coconut Oatmeal Cookies

While driving home through a particularly nasty thunderstorm yesterday afternoon, I had a good long think about what I wanted to do for Sunday Night Cookie Blogging. I really wanted a simple cookie, without any chocolate after last week’s brownie blitz, and with a strong butterscotch flavor.

On getting home, I rummaged through the cupboards for more candidates in the pantry elimination, and, noticing the unopened tub of old-fashioned oats, remembered the recipe for crisp oatmeal cookies I’d been meaning to try from Cook’s Illustrated several months back. Digging the magazine out of the pile on top of the microwave, I was pleased to see that the coconut variation conveniently called for exactly the amount of sweetened coconut I had left. The decision practically made itself.

While the recipe sounded great, I didn’t think it would have quite the butterscotch depth I was craving, so I decided to really amp things up by browning the butter first. Because I also prefer smaller cookies, I cut the size of the cookies in half.

The resulting cookie not just met but exceeded all my expectations, and was wildly popular with the coworkers, who snarfed them all up well before lunchtime. It’s unassuming in appearance, but those humble little freckles pack a wallop of noisette intensity, and the texture is shatteringly crisp and light. It’s a very grown-up oatmeal cookie, elementally airy and earthy at the same time, and I’ll absolutely be making it again. Next time, I might make it even more sophisticated by trying the suggestion of sprinkling with flakes of Maldon salt or fleur de sel on top before baking.

Flecks of Toasty Buttery Goodness

In the win-win-win column, it also used up all my remaining coconut and half the oats, but the important thing is that these are spectacularly delicious.

Brown Butter Coconut Oatmeal Cookies
( Adapted from Cook’s Illustrated January/February 2008 )
Makes 5 dozen

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla paste
2 cups rolled oats (old-fashioned, not instant or quick)
1 1/2 cups sweetened coconut

In a small saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter and bring to a simmer. Lower heat as necessary to maintain a vigorous simmer and continue to cook, swirling occasionally, until butter separates into a dark golden liquid layer and a deep brown layer of caramelized milk solids and gives off a nutty aroma. Be careful not to let the solids turn black.

Pour butter into a liquid measuring cup, making sure to get all the delicious brown solids out of the pan. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until it solidifies.

In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In a standing mixer with a paddle attachment, beat butter and sugars until fluffy, scraping down the sides once. Beat in the egg and vanilla. With the mixer running on low, mix in the dry ingredients until just combined. Scrape down again, return to low, and mix in the oats and coconut until uniformly incorporated. Cover the dough and chill until firm enough to roll into balls, at least half an hour.

Preheat oven to 350, and line baking sheets with parchment paper.

Scoop dough by rounded tablespoons (I use a small scoop) and roll into balls. Place balls on sheet 2 inches apart and flatten to 1/2 inch thickness with your fingertips.

Bake until golden, 14-16 minutes. Remove from oven and allow cookies to cool completely on the sheet. Once cool, store in airtight containers to maintain crispness.

Notes:

In case you’re nervous about browning butter and want to have an idea of what it should look like, here’s an expert’s take on it.

If you’re not a coconut fan, you could leave it out and increase the oatmeal to the 2 1/2 cups in the original plain version, although I still urge you to brown the butter.

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Sunday Night Cookie Blogging: Multigrain Anzac Biscuits

I’ve been intrigued by Anzac biscuits for some time, because of their somewhat romantic history and their position as the pseudo-national cookie of Australia and New Zealand, and also because the combination of oats and coconut is always appealing to me. Despite the fascination in principle, I’d never actually tried one, so I decided to give it a go for this week’s Sunday cookie blogging. It was only after tracking down what seemed to be the most-cited recipe on the web that I realized I did not have any plain rolled oats left, after using them up on last week’s rhubarb bars. I did have a multigrain rolled cereal instead – comprising oats, wheat, rye, and barley – which His Lordship likes to have for breakfast on occasion. What the hell, I thought, and decided to give them a try. I also opted to add some ginger.

The recipe was very quick to prepare and left a minimal mess in my kitchen, since you don’t use the mixer, making it a good candidate for Sunday-night baking. The cookies turned out rather darker brown than I’d expected, but are very crisp and pleasant-tasting. I’m not sure if you really notice the fact that it’s multigrain, but in this context, I think that’s probably a good thing. You might be able to sneak some whole grains into your kid’s diet this way.

Next time, just to see if I can tell the difference, I think I’ll try it with plain oats, use light brown sugar instead of dark, leave out the ginger, and add macadamia nuts, based on one of the other variations I found on my Google trek.

Multigrain Anzac Biscuits
Makes 3 1/2 dozen

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup mixed-grain rolled cereal (or rolled oats)
1 cup dried unsweetened coconut
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 cup unsalted butter
2 tbsp Lyle’s Golden Syrup
1 tsp baking soda
2 tbsp boiling water
Preheat oven to 350 F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.

Combine the flour, cereal, coconut, sugar and ginger in a medium-sized bowl.

In a Pyrex liquid measuring cup, melt the butter and Golden Syrup together in the microwave. Mix the baking soda with the water and add to the butter mixture, then pour the mixture into the dry ingredients and stir until combined.

Scoop tablespoon-sized balls of dough onto the baking sheet, leaving two inches between cookies. Bake for 15 minutes, or until golden brown and firm.

Cool completely on a wire rack, and store in an airtight container.

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Sunday Night Cookie Blogging: Strawberry-Rhubarb Bars

As I mentioned previously, one of my finds at the farmer’s market this weekend was rhubarb, another later-in-life love. I don’t think I ever had it until well into adulthood, but as with cranberries, I fell hard and completely, and when it’s in season, I snatch up all I can and freeze some for the rest of the year. For the inaugural rhubarb recipe of 2006, I decided a bar cookie might be nice, with a sweet-tart layer of rhubarb sandwiched between two buttery layers of cookie dough.

In order to develop this recipe, I combined and modified components from two separate recipes. On the one hand, I had a recipe for a strawberry-rhubarb bar in The All-American Cookie Book, but the oat-and-nut-fortified dough from a raspberry bar recipe in my latest cookbook acquisition, The New Best Recipe by the America’s Test Kitchen chefs, sounded much better than the plain short pastry dough in the original cookie. I decided to combine the two and hope that the combination of the superior elements would result in a superior bar cookie.

The end product of this tinkering was not perfect, because the filling was a bit too loose and the cookies don’t have quite enough structural integrity to cut as cleanly as I’d like. The flavor is great, though, and I like the firm but tender texture and the toasty nuttiness of the dough. Next time, I may fiddle with the amount of thickener, or possibly try a different kind of, or slightly less, jam. With a bit more work, this could go from a very nice but homey cookie to a refined and suitable addition to a springtime tea tray.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Bars
Makes 24 1×2-inch cookies

Filling
1/4 cup granulated sugar
2 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 lb rhubarb, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 10-oz jar (1 1/4 cups) strawberry jam
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Grated zest of one orange

Crust and Streusel Topping
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 cups rolled oats
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup finely chopped walnuts
1 1/2 sticks (12 tablespoons) unsalted butter, slightly softened, cut into 12 pieces

In a heavy, nonreactive saucepan, stir together the sugar, cornstarch and cinnamon until evenly distributed. Stir in the rhubarb, jam and orange zest and bring to a simmer. Cook, stirring frequently, until the rhubarb begins to soften, approx. 6-8 minutes. Set aside to cool.

Place the oven rack in the lower two-thirds position and preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8-inch square baking pan with two strips of parchment paper or nonstick aluminum foil, letting the strips overhang the edges of the pan to serve as a sling for removing the cookies later.

In a mixer, mix the flour, oats, granulated and brown sugar, baking soda, salt and walnuts at low speed for 30 seconds. Add the butter, continuing to mix on low speed until the mixture is well
blended and resembles wet sand.

Press two-thirds of the dough into the bottom of the pan and bake until it starts to brown, about 20-25 minutes. Spread the strawberry-rhubarb filling over the crust and sprinkle the remaining crumb mixture evenly over the filling. Bake until the filling bubbles around the edges and the top is golden brown, approximately 35 minutes, rotating once during baking.

Cool on a wire rack until room temperature, approximately 1 1/2 hours. Remove the cookies from the pan by lifting the edges of the foil or parchment, and cut into squares.

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