Eccentric Flower:200912/Bakery

I suppose if I cooked more often I could become a really good cook. But the thing about cooking is that I feel an obligation to eat my mistakes, and when I'm living with someone who was born a better cook than I will ever hope to be, who seldom ever makes a mistake (she's made two dishes I considered inedible in the entire time I've known her), I don't really have much incentive to do so. Once in a while I cook and I try to stay well within my narrow comfort zone. It's safer for dinner that way.

But with cookies and other sweet things, the nice thing is that usually when you make a mistake, it'a a pretty good mistake. It's an edible mistake.

I made five kinds of cookies/sweets this weekend and only one of them turned out exactly the way I planned it to (because I've made the recipe about a thousand times). But none of the others are unsalvageable.

Because some of you, for whatever demented reason, have noted in the past that you enjoy reading my recipe adventures, I have put the recipes in my unusual and distinctive style for your reading pleasure. This makes them somewhat less usable as recipes, but I'm sure you can deal with that.

All five of these recipes are nostalgic to one degree or another (although the last one is peculiar). I didn't realize I was invoking specific associations until I saw the list of what I was planning. On the other hand, that's the way food is where I grew up. A particular dish is never just that dish.

1. Dad's Bourbon Balls

(Robert, stop snickering, or you'll be punished.) Actually it wouldn't startle me to learn my dad had bourbon balls. His liver was certainly awash in it. Nonetheless, this recipe is one of my fond memories of him, and I take those wherever I can get them.

This is the recipe I've made a thousand times. The version I use, and which he used, is from River Road Recipes, the Junior League cookbook of Baton Rouge which has gone through over seventy printings since 1959 (unchanged) and well over a million copies. Reading this cookbook is like being in a kitchen with your grandmother, who has all the newfangled conveniences - why, she even has an electric can opener! However, one newfangled convenience which certainly was not in a 1959 kitchen was a food processor - which amazes me, because I am not at all sure how anyone could reasonably be expected to make this recipe without it.

You can make this recipe with walnuts or pecans. I tend to use walnuts, especially when two of the other recipes from the same session contain pecans.

60 vanilla wafers
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 cup confectioner's sugar
1 cup finely chopped walnuts or pecans (see procedure)
3 tablespoons white corn syrup
1/4 cup bourbon
confectioner's sugar, sifted, for rolling

HARDWARE: Food processor, plate or dish with rim, patience

Count out sixty intact vanilla wafers - yes, really - and put them in the food processor. Sixty is slightly less than a box. That's why you count. If you happen to have vanilla wafer crumbs lying around it's supposed to be two and a half cups, but who has those? I've always counted sixty and sixty it is.

If the nuts are halves or are coarsely chopped, measure out a bit more than a cup of them - say, about a cup and a quarter - and put them into the processor with the wafers. If they're already quite finely chopped, you can just measure a cup of them, but I mean really finely chopped (see next step).

Process the wafers and nuts until you have coarse crumbs. The nut crumbs should not be appreciably coarser than the cookie crumbs.

Add the cocoa and sugar and process until the mixture is of uniform color again.

Add the corn syrup and the bourbon and process until the dough is uniform and "cleans the bowl" by itself, forming a big, somewhat glossy lump on the processor blade.

Now the rough part. Pull up a chair. Sift confectioner's sugar onto some sort of rimmed plate or cookie sheet (the rim will help avoid messes). I use a dinner plate with a raised rim and I sift on enough to thickly cover the whole plate. You can always go back for more.

If you're doing this alone, try to roll the dough into balls with one hand and roll them in the powdered sugar with the other hand. This keeps powdered sugar out of the dough mass and also prevents formation of what Alton Brown calls "club hand." Or get a friend and do it assembly line style. However you do it, you want to pinch off and loosely form balls about 3/4 inch in diameter, then roll them in the powdered sugar to coat. Bigger is fine if you like but these are strong candies and a 1" ball is just too much for some people.

You'll probably want to sift some of the spare powdered sugar over the balls as you put them into whatever container you're storing them in. They soak up the sugar and get sticky. But resist the temptation to keep doing this over and over. I pour the leftover rolling sugar over them when I'm done, give them a shake, and that's it. They'll get pretty sticky regardless, and many layers of sugar on the outside don't do them any favors. If you refrigerate them overnight, they'll get less sticky to handle.

Makes at least 3 dozen, depending on how big you made them.

These are far better the next day - or the next week. I would store them in the refrigerator.

WARNING: You may have noticed that these goodies are not cooked. Therefore they really do contain a healthy shot of bourbon. Be careful when serving them to minors, designated drivers, or the abstemious.

2. Amy Brown's Culinary Genius Christmas Pudding Cookies

When Blake clued me into this recipe, I knew I had to make it. I will not try to tell the whole story of the recipe, because it's not mine and Amy tells it better than I do.

This is a "start two days ahead" recipe, but don't panic. The first day, just make the rum raisins (which takes two minutes). The second day, make the dough. You can then make the cookies much later that day, or you can make them the third day. But don't skip the resting period for the dough.

You'll notice my procedure's not quite the same as Amy's. This is the way life works. Pick the one you like; hers is at the link above.

These make a surprisingly mild, not overly sweet shortbread cookie that is very nice with hot tea. However, if you do not like raisins, with or without rum, this is not a recipe for you.

1/2 cup dark rum
1 cup raisins

1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
1/4 cup confectioner's sugar
1/2 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest (1 lemon - see comments below)
1 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup slivered almonds
1/2 cup good quality chopped candied citrus peel
1 teaspoon coarse salt

HARDWARE: large cookie sheets, parchment paper, stand mixer highly recommended

The night before making the dough find one of those little plastic containers with a good lid you've got lying around, put the raisins in it, pour the rum over the raisins (it should just barely cover them), close it up, and leave it on your kitchen counter - not in the fridge - overnight. If you have cats who are as weird as mine, put it somewhere they can't get to. (You wouldn't think a cat would be fascinated by rum or raisins.)

Zest the lemon - that is, shave off the yellow bits of the peel without getting any of the white pith underneath. I use a Microplane grater. It makes very fine zest. I used the zest of one largish lemon and it was probably somewhat more than 1/2 teaspoon and I don't care. Wash the lemon first, eh? Supermarket lemons are sprayed with all kinds of stuff.

Drain the raisins but reserve the rum.

Make the dough: Chop the butter into rough one tablespoon cubes into your mixer bowl, add the sugar and lemon zest, mix on medium speed until creamy and smooth. It didn't take the two minutes for me that Amy said, but this will depend on your mixer. Add "two tablespoons plus one teaspoon" of the rum (that's seven teaspoons), and mix again to combine. Try to scrape down the sides of the bowl and mixer beater(s). With the mixer on low so flour doesn't fly everywhere, add the flour in several small doses, incorporating each before adding the next. Add the salt. Beat another two minutes to combine.

Add the raisins, citrus peel (please do try to find the good stuff if you can - the kind that appears in little white tubs every year at Christmas in your supermarket is horrible) and almonds, stirring them into the dough by hand. This is easier said than done. The dough will be a sticky, uncooperative, rambunctious mess. Do not despair. Just get them reasonably well combined.

Divide the dough in half and roll each half into a log about 1 and 1/2 inches diameter. If you know the Alton Brown method of pushing waxed paper against a dough roll to gradually and smoothly compress it into a long log, I suggest you use it. Otherwise, do your best, bearing in mind that you're going to have to get the waxed paper or plastic wrap off it tomorrow. Refrigerate the dough for at least three hours, or overnight.

On baking day preheat your oven to 325.

Slice the dough into rounds about 1/4 inch thick. I did this with a bench knife and got more like compressed semicircles. Because of all the large objects, this dough is hard to cut cleanly. Maybe next time I'll use a cheesewire. Anyway, it won't matter unless you are determined to have round cookies.

Place the cookies an inch apart on baking sheets which have been lined with parchment paper, and bake for twenty minutes or "until pale golden." The cookies are not intended to get very brown. I recommend, especially if you are baking two sheets at once, to exchange and flip them halfway through. That is, the sheet on top should be moved to the bottom with the side that was to the front of the oven now facing the back, and vice versa.

These cookies can come off the sheets immediately when you take them out, but if you move them to a cooling rack, be very careful - the cookies are exceedingly fragile until they're fully cooled and may fall apart as you try to lift them.

Makes at least two dozen. I got thirty.

3. My Sister's Heartbreaking Well-Iced Sugar Cookies

Several days before the baking extravaganza I knew that I wanted to make my sister's Christmas sugar cookies. My sister, who is an excellent cook and baker (see, the gene skipped me), makes tons of different kinds of cookies and foods every year, but the one I always unabashedly eat more than my fair share of is her sugar cookies - soft in the middle, crispy outside, with a hard-setting and faintly almondy icing.

So I pestered her for the recipe. When I finally got her (which means, when I picked up the phone and called her, because I can't get my family to recognize that email is a superior form of communication), she admitted guiltily that her sugar cookies were the one thing every year she didn't make from scratch. "They're Pillsbury," she said, "from a roll." Broke my heart. I told her so.

Well, fine. I got the icing recipe - the icing was always the special part anyway - and bought some Pillsbury sugar cookie dough. In a roll. But the thing about those Pillsbury cookies is that their line between "underdone" and "too done" is very fine, and I have an oven that's a little wonky. So I browned them a little too much. No, they're not burnt - but they're crunchy. They're not soft in the middle, and that was one of the important parts. Next year I will try again.

Meanwhile, here are not one but two recipes for her icing. Whichever you use, this icing goes on thin and sets fairly hard. You'll need enough horizonal surface area - sheets, racks, wax-papered counter - to let the icing set on the cookies until it's firm enough that you can safely pack the cookies together - a few hours. You supply your favorite sugar cookie, but do not ice cookies until they are fully cool.

Oh yes, and my sister suggests that if you have to pause in the icing process, you cover the icing with a damp cloth, or it will try to harden in the bowl.

Recipe 1:
1 pound sifted powdered sugar
3 tablespoons meringue powder
1 teaspoon almond extract
5 to 7 tablespoons lukewarm water

Re the last ingredient, my sister says: "Depends on the consistency you want - if you make it thin you can dip the cookies. I usually make it thick and set some aside and add more water and make a thin batch too. Makes better decorating if you are planning on using pastry bags and piping designs."

Combine all ingredients and beat until the icing loses its sheen. Separate into batches, add coloring, etc, as you like.

"If you don't want to buy meringue powder, I have made the following icing and it tastes just as good if not better. The only problem with the one below is that it doesn't keep as long. If you are making your cookies more than a week ahead of time or giving as gifts, go with the meringue powder."

Recipe 2:
3 large egg whites
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
2 cups confectioner's sugar
1 teaspoon almond extract

Combine egg whites and cream of tartar. Beat until frothy. Gradually add sugar, beating after each addition until fully incorporated.

4. Not My Mother's Seven-Layer Cookies

My mother has a collection of battered, well-used recipe cards accumulated from many years of transmission, all typed carefully from whatever source she got the recipe from originally (which is usually a mystery). I know the age of most of them because once upon a time my father had the weirdest thing, a cursive typewriter - that is, it was designed to type letters in a typeface that almost looked like it could be cursive if you squinted hard. Many of the recipe cards were typed on that typewriter, which means they dated back to when my mother and father were married - and that was a long time ago.

One of those recipe cards is for "seven layer cookies," which are a sort of 1950's home ec recipe that has to be seen to be believed. Unfortunately I didn't get in touch with my mom in time. I found another recipe online, and it was not quite what I remembered. Not bad, but not what I remembered. And the recipe was kind of defective. So bearing in mind that it can use some improvement, here's what I got. If I ever manage to improve this - or get my mom's and compare - I will keep you posted.

This is a very sweet recipe. Stickily, cloyingly sweet. Children, college students, and hackers will love it. Many adults, conversely, will find it hard to take. Also, it contains a lot of coconut, and you can't omit the coconut - it's a structural ingredient. So if you don't like coconut, skip this one.

It may not exactly have seven layers, but it does have exactly seven ingredients:

4 ounces unsalted butter (1 stick)
1 and 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs (see comments)
1 (6-ounce) package chocolate chips (see comments)
1 (6-ounce) package butterscotch chips (see comments)
1 and 1/3 cups shredded coconut (see comments - sensing a theme here?)
1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk
1 to 1 and 1/2 cups coarsely chopped pecans

HARDWARE: 9x13 pan, food processor would be nice

Preheat oven to 350.

You know how, in a box of graham crackers, you get three or four individually-wrapped rectangular stacks of graham crackers? One of those stacks should make about the right amount of crumbs.

The recipe I got says to melt the butter right in the baking pan and then sprinkle the crumbs over that. You can try that if you like. Maybe it will give you better results than what I got, but I doubt if it will. What I did was make the crumbs in the food processor and pour melted butter into those, then combine to form an extremely loose not-quite-dough, like you'd do to make a graham cracker pie crust. I then patted this slowly and carefully into a thin crust over the entire bottom of the 9x13 pan (and yes, it is enough).

Even so, it didn't matter. When the bars were cut and lifted out of the pan, no matter how carefully, half the crumbs were left in the pan. They had no cohesion whatsoever.

However you do it, once you've got the crumbs/butter in the 9x13 pan, scatter the chocolate chips and the butterscotch chips over it. Have you ever seen a six-ounce package of chocolate chips? Neither have I. And six ounces of each makes a very thin layer. I'd start with a cup of each (eight ounces) and maybe even a bit more, and strew those until you have a single even but thorough layer of interspersed-chocolate-and-buttersotch chips covering the crumb layer.

You may certainly feel free to make this with presweetened plastic coconut, which is the kind you find in blue plastic bags in the supermarket. I won't tell you no. But it will taste better if you go and find non-presweetened dehydrated flaked or shredded coconut, which a Whole Foods or some place of that ilk will have. Either way, spread this evenly over the chip layer.

Pour the condensed milk over the lot. Try to get it spread out as evenly as you can. You might be able to spread it out after you pour it with a spatula or the back of a spoon, or you might not. You might find it sticks to the spoon and pulls up clumps of coconut and chip with it, like lifting sod. Just sayin'.

Scatter pecans over the top. Halves and large pieces are okay here. Again, if you go with a cup, or even a cup and a half, you might find that the pecan coverage is overly sparse.

Put this pan of sugary strata in the oven and bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Cool thoroughly before even attempting to cut into squares.

5. Experimental Pecan Tassies

This is the odd recipe out. It doesn't invoke specific memories so much as an ideal. Pecan tassies (pronounced "tossies") are a Southern treat which I suspect originated in the Low Country, as most Southern foods containing odd words do. They're sort of like little individual pecan pies. I didn't ever try to make them until I left the South, and I've been trying recipes and variations since then, and they're never quite what I remember/want. I am still trying.

This version is a hybrid: I got the (weird but good) dough for the crust from one source (having already rejected a standard pie-crust dough), and the pecan pie is my standard pecan pie filling, with one variation (which I note below, in case you want to convert it back to a pecan pie again).

These came out pretty good, but they are not very sweet. You get one teeny-tiny hit of sweetness from the filling in the middle, but overall the impression is of a very tender dough and the taste of pecans. Again, this would be a very nice tea cookie. If you like that sort of thing, then this recipe might be worth the labor for you; on the other hand, if you want something that tastes more like pecan pie, then make a pecan pie.

You absolutely need mini-muffin pans for this. The kind I have are quite small - each pan makes two dozen. That's about what you want.

Dough:
1/2 pound unsalted butter (2 sticks), room temperature
1/2 pound cream cheese (8-ounce box), room temperature
2 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

Filling:
3 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1 rounded tablespoon flour (don't level it, let it heap a little)
1 and 1/2 cups dark corn syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup pecans (see comment)

Nice-looking pecan halves, for decoration

HARDWARE: Mini-muffin pans; stand mixer recommended

Preheat the oven to 350.

To make the dough, chop the butter and cream cheese into large chunks into the mixing bowl; beat until smooth and well-combined, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl and the paddle at least once. With the mixer at low speed so the flour doesn't go all over, incorporate the flour in small doses, waiting until each is fully incorporated before adding the next. When the flour is fully incorporated, turn up the speed a little for a minute or so until you see that the dough is beginning to form itself into a loose mass. (It will be very crumbly, but will basically cohere together by itself.)

Remove the dough, form it into a ball, and divide it into 48 equal-sized pieces however you see fit. You can pinch off pieces by hand but it will probably be better to get a bench knife and cut it into even partitions. This is a very forgiving dough; while you don't want it to form gluten and get tough, the high fat content pretty much guarantees that won't happen, so you can recombine it and reroll it quite a bit as needed. So do whatever you need to do to portion it out.

Now sit down. This part will take a while. Carefully press each dough portion into its compartment of the mini-muffin pan, trying to get the dough evenly on the bottom and sides of its cup, and ideally extending a little bit above the rim of the cup. Ideally you have enough muffin pans that you can do all four dozen of these at one time. You can then let these sit while you make the filling. (Don't refrigerate them, but don't put them on top of a hot place either.)

For the filling, you'll want a small bowl and a big bowl. In the small bowl, mix the sugar and the flour (you don't need a mixer, a spoon will be fine) until they are well-combined; no clumps of flour please! In the big bowl, beat the three eggs. Again, a fork will do; just well-combined is what we want, not a foam. Stir the sugar/flour into the eggs; mix till well combined. (I find a fork works better than a spoon for all this.) Add the corn syrup and vanilla and stir until the mixture is uniformly brown - no yellow streaks of egg anywhere.

IF YOU ARE MAKING A PECAN PIE INSTEAD: You want your pecans in the form of halves or large chunks, and you want a little more than the cup specified (because when you measure a cup of pecan halves there's a lot of air space, see). Stir those into the filling, and pour this into whatever non-prebaked 9-inch pie shell you have ready (watch out, it will be VERY full); put that on a baking sheet (for spills) and bake for 45 minutes to an hour, or until filling is set ... bearing in mind that if one person in every three doesn't think the pecans on top look a little too toasted, another person in those three won't think the pie is cooked enough.

But back to the tassies. For this we do not want the pecans in large chunks; we want them chopped very fine indeed. A food processor or electric spice grinder would not be amiss. Do this, and mix that into the filling.

Now spoon the filling (pouring does not work well, not even if you move it to a vessel with a spout; trust me on this) into the dough shells. Do not fill the shells completely full. Fill them about halfway - all of them - first. Then go back and top them off. The problem is, counterintuitively, pecans float in this filling. Even little bits of pecans. So no matter how you stir as you go, the first dosage of filling will contain lots of pecans and the second dose will be thinner and mostly syrup. Doing it in two batches is more likely to give everybody a fair shake. Believe it or not, you will have enough filling to fill all 48 - with excess left over.

Go through your bag of pecan halves and find nice-looking halves. Top each tassie with a pecan half. Do not try to press it into the glop. Just float it on top.

Bake for 35 minutes, or until the filling has set firmly and the shells (what you can see of them) have just slightly browned. If baking two pans at once, I recommend the exchange and flip (see the Christmas pudding cookies) midway through the time period.

Makes 4 dozen, which I agree is quite a lot, and if you'd like to do the math to cut that in half, I will not blame you one bit.