Baking Style by Lisa Yockelson
Author:Lisa Yockelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2012-10-07T16:00:00+00:00
the perfect “side-dish” cookie
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seriously seeking chewy and plump
Patience. Perseverance. Persistence.
* * *
Call it what you will, but I exhibited all of those qualities when faced with the proposition of working out an almond macaroon dough that displays the following characteristics: chewy, rounded and puffed rather than flat when baked, somewhat dense, full of deep almond flavor.
As life would have it, I wasn’t really finished buying marzipan (my marzipan escapade in the almond essence essay and the accompanying recipe for a noble marzipan cake and the little almond cakes on pages 39 through 42 will convince you of that), though I thought that I would be giving it a rest for a little while. Oh no. A plump cookie with all of the traits noted perplexed me many nights when, in the peace and quiet, I would stir up yet another dough.
When dozens of cookies came out all wrong (edit to add: “wrong” by my chosen standards, but delicious nonetheless)—over the on-again, off-again time frame of nine months—it appeared as if I were chasing a cookie that would never happen in reality, only in a daydreamlike baking scenario. Not one surfaced as the cookie. Yet. There were flat, caramelized almond cookies (interesting) and grainy cookies (swollen, gritty); and cookies far too airy and lightweight of almond flavor, or leaden. Batch after batch made me weary, and my own usual tenacity became annoying. Boxes and cans of almond paste seemed to taunt me as I opened the cabinet door to pull the item for another sweet thing.
Until I baked an almond pound cake.
Making such a cake, using the usual butter cake ingredients, made me rethink texture based on the way sugar and eggs work in a dough or batter. I rearranged the sweetening agents in my cookie recipe to include both granulated and confectioners’ sugar so that the cookie dough balls might bake into a chewier texture, and seriously—by that word I mean “assiduously“—measured the egg whites to arrive at just the right moisture content in the dough. I baked off a round of cookies: foiled again. Then, the goddess of the hearth must have felt sorry for me and “caused” an inadvertent stroke of benevolent baking luck. I mixed another round of dough and, distracted by an overflowing gutter in a tropical storm–force rain, I threw the dough into the refrigerator until I returned three hours later to form and bake off the cookies. The rest in the refrigerator gave the dough better structure and allowed the maximum amount of egg and egg white to be used (the measurement ended up to be 1 large egg white plus 1 tablespoon to each 8 ounces of almond paste). Just the right oven temperature maintained the shape of the cookies, allowed a nice puff, and kept the centers moist.
The cookies, delightful with coffee or tea, keep nicely in a tin for several days, as the natural oil present in the nut-based product works in conjunction with the two types of sugar to prevent drying.
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