Monday, January 2, 2012

the babbo cookie jar

I always plan to do holiday baking. But i never do. So when I started this project and saw there were six cookie recipes, I figured I had the perfect chance to get it done. I made all six in one day.

It required:

A pound and a half of butter

Eleven cups of flour

Four cups of sugar

A dozen eggs

Six cups of walnuts

Only five ounces of chocolate. Weird.

Anyway, it took all day, but here are brief reviews of the six cookies we ended up with in the deal:

Walnut shortbreads:
I had made these before, when I made the maple-mascarpone cheesecake. They were worth making again.

Bittersweet chocolate cookies: I sort of flubbed on these. As the name sort of back-handedly implies, if you're really paying attention, you're supposed to use bittersweet chocolate. I had a bar of unsweetened Scharffenberger open, and wasn't paying attention that it was, well, unsweetened. There was plenty of sugar in the cookie, so the unsweetened chocolate worked fine. Loved these.

Amaretti: These are sort of like macarons without the filling.

Polenta shortbread: Definitely interesting. Not sure I got the texture right. I had some olive oil gelato in the freezer, left over from a dessert that will be posted soon, and these went well with that. The corn cookie has promise.

Fig and walnut biscotti: I've never made biscotti before, and this one is a little weird. With all the fig in the dough, it never really dried out on the second bake. I thought I did something wrong, but that's just how its supposed to be. This seemed to be everyone's fave, which is cool, because the yield on this was about twice that of everything else.

Mascarpone thumbprints:
Loved these, but they needed to be eaten fast. They didn't stay fresh very long.

Verdict: I would make them all again. But I might have to dig into Babbo pastry chef Gina DePalma's cookbook and make some of her other cookies first.

Up next: Why it has been so long since I posted.