Linzer Sables - TWD

You say sables -- I say I love Linzer tarts. My love goes back to my student days in Switzerland and Germany and being introduced to Linzer torts. Those lovely hazelnuts and raspberry jam and the interlaced crust -- what's not to like! And Linzer tarts are a great reminder.

If you had to grind nuts for the dough, this recipe would take more effort. A few years ago, I was introduced to buying ground nuts and I generally keep a supply of them in my pantry. I used some ground almonds for this recipe -- although ground hazelnuts would have been my preference. This was definately a shortcut to whip up these cookies.

I want to share another great baking short-cut. I recently bought an add-on for my stand mixer. This is in the form of a flat paddle beater with little wings. What this incredible item provides is scraping the bowl as it turns -- eliminating the need to stop and scrape down the side of the bowl. I found mine on the internet.

Here it is in action.

Here are my maple leaf Linzer sables. Dusted two and the reminder are in the freezer waiting for the holidays. Check out Living the Life for the recipe.

TWD - Got Milk??

Whether home-made cookies or mass produced oreos, cookies taste best when dunked in a glass of milk. Dorie’s peanut butter chocolate chip cookies especially taste good with a nice cold glass of milk.

Cookies and milk almost gone!

Two things about this week’s recipe were different than other chocolate chip cookie recipes I’ve made. You can find the recipe at Proceed with Caution. The first was the proportion of oatmeal and flour – the recipe called for 3 parts old-fashioned oatmeal and one part flour. Other recipes I’ve used have 2-3 cups of flour to one cup of oatmeal. The second was the addition of cinnamon and nutmeg. I’ve never made a chocolate chip or peanut butter cookie recipe with those spices and they are very prominent in the flavor of the final product. The flavor was not unpleasant but not exactly to my liking.

Cookies are so easy to make. The tricks are chilling the dough so they don’t bake so fast and hold together better and slightly under-baking the cookies. If a recipe calls for 15-17 minutes baking, I’ll usually bake them for 15 minutes. You have to know your oven and check that the cookies are nicely browned.

This was the last weekend of summer and I visited friends in Adamant, Vermont. I took a little short cut home – the Essex Ferry across Lake Champlain. It was a fantastic summer day and the sailors were out in force on the lake with the Adirondack Mountains to the west and Green Mountains to the east. Little Bess loved the journey.