a whisk and a spoon

Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Iced, Spiced Hermits

What’s hiding inside the cookie tin? Hermits! These Iced, Spiced Hermits are old fashioned, chewy molasses-spice cookies with raisins (or another dried fruit), baked as a log and then sliced up. You can actually hide them away because they’re good keepers, but if people know they’re in the tin, they’ll disappear fast. I brought them to my college’s NYC alum holiday party, and there weren’t any left to bring back home. Very satisfying.

I made the hermits a couple of years ago as well (the below photo). Both times I soaked the raisins in a bit of rum for a few hours before making the dough and set aside the strained-off booze to use in the glaze drizzle. Both times I also added festive sprinkles…who knew a hermit could be so charming?

If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan, get it and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Devil’s Thumbprints

Regardless of what Devil’s Thumbprints actually are, the name alone sounds like a pretty good potential Halloween recipe to me. Turns out they’re brownie-like chocolate thumbprint cookies, filled with jam, more chocolate, or whatever you like. The devil on my shoulder told me to chose more chocolate. I made the dough/batter the day before baking the cookies and they held shape pretty well. I have some dark chocolate buttons that are basically the same size as the cookies’ indentations so I just popped a button into the center of each cookie while they were still hot from the oven. The buttons melted right into the divots, and there was no fussing around with melting and spooning on chopped chocolate. Instead, I was able to fuss around with yellow googly eyes.

I made these thumbprints two years ago for Halloween as well. That time around, I gave them white chocolate-cream cheese bellies and cherry jam blood. I also rolled the unbaked cookies in granulated sugar instead of the turbinado I used this time, and I liked that finer sugar better, as the coarser turbinado made kind of a hard crust on the outside.

If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan, get it and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Peanut-Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies, Paris Style

Peanut-Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies, Paris Style are like PB cookies at fashion week. (BTW, what’s with hyphenating peanut butter in the title…shouldn’t that hyphen go elsewhere? Maybe “Peanut Butter-Chocolate Chip Cookies, Paris-Style” would be better.) All the stuff that would normally be within a dough is on full display on the outside of these cookies. The cookie itself is made from a more or less blank slate chewy PB dough, but the dough balls get rolled in chopped nuts before baking, and after baking, they are smeared and sprinkled with all kinds of good things. There’s homemade peanut praline spread gluing down more chopped peanuts and chocolate bits. Peanut praline dust and fleur de sel are sprinkled all over the the place. Even though making peanut praline sounds like a pain, it’s easier to do than true brittle, and makes these very special. Dorie turns hers into large cookies, but I made mine a bit more petite, at about 2.5 tablespoons each. Everyone I shared these with liked them, and I did, too, although they were a little messier to eat than a cookie that wasn’t turned inside-out.

If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan, get it and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Coffee-Anise Stars

Are we all in full holiday baking mode yet? I have so many new things I want to try: babka (of course!), a chocolate-rosemary roulade, two different sticky toffee puddings, a mint-chocolate cake, a gingerbread layer cake, a rum raisin bundt, some baked apple thing and approximately ten thousand cookies. I don’t know how many I’ll actually wind up getting to, but I can tick one of those cookies off the list with these Coffee-Anise Stars.

These crisp roll-out cookies are gingerbread-adjacent, flavored with molasses, cinnamon, espresso powder and ground star anise. The anise is the “star” of the show here, but if you aren’t a fan of that licorice thing, you can certainly swap it out for any other warm spice that’s nice, or go full-gingerbread with a blend. I bet you can even cut them out into trees or snowmen or little dudes, and they will still work. Haha. I wanted to give my stars a coffee glaze, so instead of Dorie’s egg white-based one, I mixed a tiny bit of soft butter, powdered sugar and coffee till I had a coat-able consistency. These are a nice spicy bite with coffee, natch.

If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan, get it and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!