a whisk and a spoon

Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Mulled Wine Jammers

Baking with TWD, I’ve made Dorie’s jammers every which way over the years, once even as a galette. No matter the variation in flavor or shape, the formula is the same: a sweet and sandy sablé base is topped with jam and ringed with sweet streusel. Mulled Wine Jammers are the winter holiday edition of the classic fave. A semi-homemade mulled wine filling, made by jazzing up shop-bought cherry jam with red wine, spices and dried fruit, is the star of the show here.

Dorie forms these jammers in the usual round fashion, as cookies baked in a muffin tin…but I remembered seeing Joy the Baker make her own version of the recipe baked as bar cookies a couple of years ago, and I never got that good idea out of my head. I knew I wanted to give it a shot when the recipe finally rolled around for us. (Shall I say I’d been “mulling” it over for some time?) I only wanted to make half a recipe, so I pressed the crust into a 6-inch square pan, and proceeded like normal. Baking them off as bars took out a bit of the fiddly work needed to form them individually, but they are delicious, however you make them!

For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

TWD DC Rewind: Cherry-Nut Chocolate Pinwheels

I pulled what now seems to be my signature move on these Cherry-Nut Chocolate Pinwheels: I baked them on time and then totally didn’t feel like writing a post about them. I guess now I easily have something to post for Rewind week. Please don’t think that means I didn’t like these. Not so– I actually liked them a lot! A cooked down dried cherry and walnut paste is rolled up inside Dorie’s Do-Almost-Anything Chocolate Dough. What’s not to like? They even held their shape (a fear of mine with pinwheels, and slice and bake cookies in general)! I decided to decorate them with the optional white chocolate drizzle, but it sort of hides the spiral of goodies going on. These have kind of a fruit cake vibe, and I think they would make great holiday cookies.

For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Coco-Almond Thumbprints

One candy bar that I would never trade away in my Halloween stash was always the Almond Joy, and these Coco-Almond Thumbprints are pretty much the homemade cookie version. Dorie originally concocted these gluten-free sweets to be a Passover dessert, and you can see (and taste) the resemblance to macaroons. They are so easy to make that they can be a year-round anytime treat: just whiz coconut, almonds, sugar, a pinch of salt if you’d like and egg whites in the food processor. Roll that mix into balls, give ’em the thumbprint press and stick ’em in the oven. Once baked they get a generous spoonful of chocolate ganache to fill their bellies.

These were so good…the cookies stayed chewy like a macaroon and the ganache never set completely firm. I would have been happy to childishly hoard them for myself in the back of my closet (which is where I used to hide my Halloween candy pumpkin so my brother wouldn’t raid it), but some dude who seems to never go to the office anymore was on to the fact that I was baking cookies, so I was forced to share.

For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Pecan-Butterscotch Shortbread

I’ve been working on another recipe testing job for an upcoming cookbook, and my diet over the past two weeks has been largely puff pasty-based. In an effort to get all my nutrients, I did manage to clear some time and an oven rack to squeeze in these Pecan-Butterscotch Shortbreads. These crispy, buttery, brown sugary rounds have bits of toasted pecans and milk chocolate, and a nip of Scotch (or rum because I don’t have any) to boot.

I don’t think I’ve met a Dorie shortbread that I didn’t love, and these are no exception, but the full recipe makes forty cookies. That’s probably thirty more than two people need to be eating in a “normal” week, much less a week of countless other baked goods. Also, these are made in a muffin tin, and there’s no way I’m doing four rounds of baking in the one tin I have. I scaled back the recipe and just made a quarter of the dough to get ten cookies. I also didn’t bother with the rolling and cutting step…I scooped the dough into my muffin tin and gave each cookie a little pat down to flatten and fill the cavities. I took some shortcuts, but I don’t think they hurt anything…in fact, these are so tasty, I’ll probably have an empty cookie tin in no time and wish I’d made more!

For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Torta Sbrisolona

Torta Sbrisolona is a cookie made from crumbs. Its name even means “crumbly cake,” as a streusel-type mix that includes sandy stuff (cornmeal and almond flour) as well as chunky stuff (roughly chopped almonds) is scattered over the bottom of a cake tin. Just a gentle press into the tin is recommended by Dorie, and so I tried to ride the fine line between not compacting the crumbs too much, and having cut pieces that did not totally fall apart. In the end I had just one square that split in half when I cut it and a some errant crumbles. I like the crumbly texture and the bits of almond throughout, and the fact that they aren’t too sweet. I can definitely see these pairing well with cheese, as Dorie notes, although I went with plums and ice cream.

For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Rousquilles

It’s been a while since I’ve filled up the cookie tin, but I found some good keepers in these ring-shaped Rousquilles. Flavored with orange flower water and anise, Rousquilles have their origins in Catalonia. I don’t think I’ve had them before, but the flavor combo was very familiar…they remind me of another biscuit my Sicilian MIL likes to get at the Italian-American bakeries. The dough comes together quickly in the food processor and then gets rolled and cut into Os. While Dorie mentions in her headnote that she’s seem them sold in every size imaginable, here, she keeps them fairly small. A sugar syrup-cooked egg white glaze gets brushed on top of the cookies after baking. Royal icing or a simple powdered sugar glaze would be easier to pull off (especially if you scale back the recipe like I did…I didn’t have enough syrup in my pot to accurately temp it so I had to do it by eye, and it definitely went over, but whatevs) and likely give the same effect. Of the floral waters, orange is my favorite, and I like the licorice flavor of anise seed a lot more now than I used to, so I really enjoyed having these as my coffee treat for the week.

For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!