Archive for the ‘Cookies’ Category

Last weekend we were at my Mom’s - a chance to bake that I wouldn’t miss for the world! I asked Avi what he felt like eating, and as expected, he said “something salty”. I knew that my Mom would most definitely prefer a salty pastry as well, and so I went for it (Can you imagine how hard it is for a sweet tooth like me to be surrounded with people that sweets aren’t their favorite food?).

I remembered that a few weeks ago, I saw on Maya’s Romanian food blog, a picture of these beautiful salty cookies, that are very common in Romania. They reminded me of the same cookies that my Grandma used to make back then, and so I thought it would be a great opportunity to try them. I took the recipe from a Romanian food site, since on Maya’s post they were a part of a very big dinner she made for her birthday (Happy belated birthday, Maya!!), and a small part of the recipes weren’t there, including the one of these salty goodies.

It’s sooo easy to make them - no long kneading, no egg separating, almost nothing. 5-6 minutes and you got yourselves a beautiful dough that goes into the refrigerator for a while. Then all you need to do is roll it out and shape the cookies. Their taste is great! I really recommend using a cheese that has a strong taste - that will enrich the taste of the cookies. Unfortunately I didn’t have nigella, so I used sesame, but nigella would have taken these cookies even higher.

Romanian salty cookies / A Romanian website
Makes about 80 cookies of the size seen in the photos

Ingredients:
For the dough:
300 gr all-purpose flour
200 gr semi-hard cheese (yellow or white) with emphasized flavor
200 gr butter, soft
100 ml sour cream
2 eggs
salt

For finishing touches:
1 egg, beaten
sesame / nigella / caraway

Directions:
1. Knead all the dough ingredients just until a uniform dough is formed. Refrigerate for 90 mins, or overnight.
2. Preheat the oven to 356F.
3. Take out the dough of the refrigerator, roll it out to 0.2 inch width, brush with the beaten egg, and scatter sesame or nigella or caraway. Cut the dough into stripes with the length and width you prefer.
4. Arrange the cookies on a pan lined with baking sheet.
5. Bake for 12-15 mins or until golden.

עוגיות מלוחות רומניות / אתר אוכל רומני
עבור כ - 80 עוגיות בגודל הנראה בצילומים

רכיבים:
לבצק:
300 גרם קמח
200 גרם גבינה חצי קשה צהובה או מלוחה בעלת טעם מודגש (השתמשתי בקשקבל)
200 גרם חמאה רכה
100 מ”ל שמנת חמוצה
2 ביצים
מלח

להברשה ופיזור:
1 ביצה, טרופה
שומשום / קצח / קימל

הכנה:
1. לשים את כל רכיבי הבצק רק עד לקבלת בצק אחיד. מקררים למשך שעה וחצי או למשך לילה במקרר.
2. מחממים תנור ל - 180 מעלות.
3. מוציאים את הבצק מהמקרר ומרדדים אותו לעובי חצי ס”מ, מורחים בביצה, מפזרים שומשום או קצח או קימל וחותכים רצועות בעובי ובאורך הרצויים.
4. מסדרים את רצועות הבצק על תבנית התנור מרופדת בנייר אפיה.
5. אופים כ-12-15 דקות, או שעד העוגיות מזהיבות.

These cookies have been on my “to do” list for quite a while, since I’ve first seen them on Cherrapeno, a wonderful food blog written by Nicisme. Actually, I’ve already told you about her in the post where I made the marvelous white chocolate and cranberries cookies. Pecan pie is my all time favorite dessert, and I’m absolutely mad about its cookie version. Last weekend, as I was searching my mind what dessert to prepare, they suddenly hit me. I was so gonna make them!

It was great fun making them, it was Friday night, we were at my Mom’s, and for a change we prepared the dinner as well as the dessert, so it was a really fun cooking evening together. The cookies are real easy to make and just by the smell of the dough you can already know that they’re gonna be great. And indeed they came out fantastic, eventhough I used 1 cup of whole wheat flour and 1 cup all purpose flour, because I ran out of it after 1 cup. That’s also the reason of their darker color. The brown sugar made them really soft and gave them that melt in your mouth texture that I’m a sucker for in cookies, and the filling was simply excellent! Also the quantities of the recipe were exact, the filling was just enough for all the cookies and there were no remains - a thing that in my book turns a good recipe into a great one.

So yeah, these cookies can’t win a beauty contest, but their taste makes up for their lack in looks, I can assure you. Thanks Nicisme, for yet another great recipe!

Pecan Pie Cookies / Adapted by Nicisme from Land O’ Lakes
Makes about 45 medium sized cookies

For the cookies:
1 cup packed soft brown sugar
3/4 cup (170 gr) unsalted butter, softened
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour (it’s possible to substitute 1 cup with whole wheat flour)
1 tsp baking powder

Pecan Filling:
1 cup chopped pecans
1/2 cup soft brown sugar
1/4 cup double cream (heavy whipping)
1 tsp vanilla extract

Directions:
1. Heat the oven to 350°F.
2. In a large mixing bowl, beat the brown sugar, butter, egg and vanilla extract together until creamy.
3. Beat in the flour and baking powder until well mixed.
4. Shape the dough into 1 1/4-inch balls. Place 2 inches apart onto ungreased cookie sheets. Make an indentation in each cookie with your thumb; rotate thumb to hollow out slightly.
5. Combine all the filling ingredients in small bowl; fill each cookie with 1 rounded teaspoon of filling.
6. Bake for 8 to 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool for 1 minute before removing from cookie sheets.
7. The cookies can be made ahead and frozen for up to 3 months.

עוגיות פאי פקאן / עיבוד של Nicisme למתכון מ - Land O’ Lakes
עבור כ-45 עוגיות בגודל בינוני

רכיבים:
לעוגיות:
1 כוס דחוסה סוכר חום כהה
170 גרם חמאה, רכה
1 ביצה
1 כפית תמצית וניל
2 כוסות קמח (ניתן להחליף כוס אחת בקמח מלא)
1 כפית אבקת אפיה

למלית הפקאן:
1 כוס אגוזי פקאן קצוצים גס
1/2 כוס סוכר חום כהה
1/4 כוס (60 מ”ל) שמנת מתוקה
1 כפית תמצית וניל

הכנה:
1. מחממים תנור ל - 175 מעלות.
2. מקציפים את הסוכר והחמאה עד לקבלת תערובת קרמית.
3. מערבבים פנימה קמח ואבקת אפיה עד לקבלת תערובת אחידה.
4. יוצרים כדורים מהבצק, מניחים על תבנית מרופדת בנייר אפיה ויוצרים גומה במרכז כל עוגיה בעזרת האגודל.
5. מערבבים את כל חומרי המלית בקערה קטנה. ממלאים כל עוגיה במלית (אני יצרתי עוגיות בגודל כדור פלאפל קטן, ולכן נדרשה לי 1/2 כפית מלית לכל אחת).
6. אופים 8-12 דקות, או עד שהעוגיות משחימות קלות (או קשות, תלוי איך אתם אוהבים את זה )
7. ניתן לשמור במקפיא עד 3 חודשים.

Last post I wrote about the cookie game we’ve played on Purim at the Israeli food forum I’m a member of, and I told you about the gift I sent. And now you just have to see the absolutely awesome gift I’ve got!
First of all it was from Sivan (she was the one that gave me the wonderful recipe of the yeast cake), a very talented friend of mine from the forum, whom I admire since I’ve entered this wonderful world of baking. She had a big role in my starting to bake. On my first days on the forum, I’d watch her magnificent photo gallery of all the mouth watering creations she prepared and I always thought “Man, how I’d love to taste those, and I’d give anything to be able to make beautiful things as she does”. Now, a year later, I still drool on the wonderful things she makes, and she has been a role model for me ever since.

I was sooo happy to find out that she was the one that sent me the gift!! Can you imagine, I can finally get to taste Sivan’s goodies! And they were everything I imagined, and more! She sent me:
- Wonderful macarons! It was the first time she made them ever, and look how perfect they are!
- Dreamy alfajores! They were perfect - the dough simply melted in my mouth.
- Wonderful flat cookies with pistachios - as soon as Avi laid his hands on them, he didn’t leave them alone, he absolutely fell in love with them!
- Great filo wrapped nuts cookies.
- Very rich chocolate cookies.

Dear Sivan, we enjoyed your cookies all week long, they were all absolutely perfect! We really want to thank you a lot for the wonderful wonderful gift!

I think the thing that I love the most about baking is seeing someone enjoying what I’ve made. Nothing comes even remotely close to this satisfying feeling, not even solving a really frustrating bug at work. I really love my job, and there are times that I think I’ll enjoy doing it forever, but lately I’ve come to think that baking is something that I like even better. That’s why I love sharing the stuff I bake so much.

Each Purim, we have this great custom of exchanging food related gifts with each other (in Hebrew it’s called “Mishloah Manot”). Usually the gifts contain cookies, Haman Ears and all sorts of goodies one can think of. Usually I make them for our families, but this year I decided to play “The Cookies Game” - it’s a game organized by a food forum I participate in. You need to prepare your gift, containing various sorts of cookies, and the game’s manager sends you a name and address to send it to, but doesn’t give away the forum nick name of the person you’re sending it to.

I’ve made:
- The wonderful white chocolate and cranberries cookies I’ve posted about a few weeks ago.
- Haman Ears using my white chocolate and Irish Cream dough.
- Nutella filled rolled cookies.
- Coffee and milk chocolate cookies. Neta, a very good friend of ours brought them to me a couple of weeks ago, and I absolutely LOVED them! I asked for the recipe immediately and decided to make them for the gift. I don’t yet recommend the recipe, though, because mine came out a bit different - some of them were great but some of them were really hard. When I asked Neta about it, she said she also gets inconsistent results with this recipe, so until I research it a bit further I don’t recommend it.
- My mom’s and Avi’s all-time favorite cookies - maple pecan cookies wrapped in a serious coat of powdered sugar. I like them better without the powdered sugar, which is a bit too sweet in my opinion. This time I also improved the recipe a bit, cause the dough was really hard to work with because it fell apart all the time. I added 2 Tbsps of milk, and it sorted things out.
- A wonderful and so easy to make cream and dulce de leche cake. Originally it was supposed to be with nutella, but there was too much nutella in the cookies as it was, so I decided to go with something a bit different. The recipe is from Pnina T, a wonderful virtual friend of mine from an Israeli food forum.

I made them all, wrapped them up nicely and safely, and sent them. Of course I made similar things to mine and Avi’s families. Unfortunately, the person I’ve sent it to didn’t contact me since she got it, last Friday. Hope it wasn’t because she hated the cookies

Coffee and chopped chocolate cookies / Adapted by my friend Neta from an Israeli food forum
Makes about 50 medium sized cookies

Ingredients:
100 gr butter, soft
1 1/4 cups dark brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 Tbsp coffee
a pinch of salt
100 gr white/milk chocolate, chopped
1/2 cup pecan nuts, chopped

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 356°F (180°C).
2. Beat butter and sugar together until a light cream is formed. Add the egg and vanilla extract and beat until incorporated.
3. Stir in flour, baking powder, coffee and salt and mix.
4. Fold in the chopped chocolate and nuts.
5. Roll balls of the dough and flatten them with the center of your palm. Place them on a baking tray lined with parchment paper.
6. Bake for about 15 mins, or until golden. Let cool for several mins. on the tray until moving them.

עוגיות קפה ושברי שוקולד / עיבוד של נטע, חברה שלי, מפורום אורט
עבור כ-50 עוגיות בגודל בינוני

רכיבים:
100 גרם חמאה, רכה
1 1/4 כוסות סוכר חום כהה
1 כפית תמצית וניל
1 ביצה, טרופה קלות
1 כוס קמח לבן
1/2 כוס קמח חיטה מלאה
1/2 כפית אבקת אפיה
1 כף נס קפה
קורט מלח
100 גרם שוקולד חלב/לבן, קצוץ גס
1/2 כוס אגוזי פקאן, קצוצים גס

הכנה:
1. מחממים תנור ל - 180 מעלות.
2. מערבלים חמאה וסוכר במיקסר באמצעות וו גיטרה במהירות בינונית עד לקבלת תערובת תפוחה ואורירית. מוסיפים את הביצה ואת תמצית הוניל ומערבבים עד לקבלת תערובת אחידה.
3. מערבבים פנימה קמח, אבקת אפיה, קפה ומלח ומערבבים.
4. מקפלים פנימה שוקולד ואגוזים.
5. מגלגלים כדורים מהבצק, משטחים אותם מעט בעזרת מרכז כף היד, ומניחים אותם על גבי תבנית מרופדת בנייר אפיה.
6. אופים כ - 15 דקות, או עד להזהבה. מניחים להצטנן מספר דקות בתבנית לפני שמעבירים.

Maple pecan cookies / Slightly adapted from Carine Goren’s recipe
Makes about 50 cookies

Ingredients:
200 gr butter, soft
1/4 cup demerara light brown sugar
2 Tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 Tbsp milk
2 cups all-purpose flour
a pinch of salt
200 gr pecan nuts, chopped

powdered sugar, for coating

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 338°F (170°C).
2. Beat butter, sugar, maple syrup, vanilla extract and milk until a light mixture is formed.
3. Add the flour and salt, mix just until a uniform dough is formed, add in the nuts, and mix shortly.
4. Refrigerate for 30 mins.
5. Roll small balls and place on a baking tray lined with parchment paper.
6. Bake about 20 mins, or until golden.
7. When cool, roll the cookies in a bowl with powdered sugar.

Note: If you don’t intend to roll the cookies in powdered sugar, add 1/4 cup more sugar (1/2 cup total).

עוגיות מייפל פקאן / עיבוד קל למתכון של קרין גורן
עבור כ - 50 עוגיות

רכיבים:
200 גרם חמאה, רכה
1/4 כוס סוכר חום בהיר, דמררה
2 כפות סירופ מייפל
1 כפית תמצית וניל
2 כפות חלב
2 כוסות קמח
קורט מלח
200 גרם אגוזי פקאן, קצוצים גס

אבקת סוכר, לציפוי

הכנה:
1. מחממים תנור ל - 170 מעלות.
2. מקציפים חמאה, סוכר, סירופ מייפל, תמצית וניל וחלב במיקסר עם וו גיטרה במהירות בינונית עד לקבלת תערובת אורירית.
3. מוסיפים קמח ומלח, ומערבלים מעט, רק לקבלת בצק אחיד. מוסיפים את האגוזים ומערבבים קלות.
4. מקררים את הבצק 30 דקות.
5. מגלגלים כדורים קטנים מהבצק ומניחים על תבנית מרופדת בנייר אפיה.
6. אופים כ - 20 דקות, או עד שהעוגיות מזהיבות.
7. לאחר הצינון, לגלגל באבקת סוכר.
הערה: אם אתם לא מתכוונים לגלגל באבקת סוכר, תוסיפו עוד 1/4 כוס סוכר (כלומר סה”כ 1/2 כוס סוכר).

Nutella and Cream cake / Adapted by Pnina T from Carine Goren’s recipe
I substituted the Nutella with the same amount of dulce de leche
For 1 English Cake mold
 
Ingredients:
2 eggs, beaten
250 ml heavy cream
a pinch of salt
90 gr sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup (140 gr) all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 Tbsp full of Nutella

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 329°F (165°C).
2. Mix cream, salt and sugar until the sugar melts.
3. Add in the eggs and vanilla extract.
4. Sift in flor and baking powder and mix slightly, just until incorporated.
5. Place the mixture into a greased mold.
6. Heat shortly the Nutella or dulce de leche in the microwave, pour it on top of the cake and using a knife, create a marbeled pattern.
7. Bake for about 40 mins, or until golden. 

עוגת שמנת ונוטלה / עיבוד של פנינהט מפורום מתכונים של תפוז למתכון של קרין גורן
אני החלפתי את הנוטלה בריבת חלב
לתבנית אינגליש קייק אחת

רכיבים:
2 ביצים
1 חבילה (250 מ”ל) שמנת מתוקה
קורט מלח
90 גר’ סוכר
1 כפית תמצית וניל
1 כוס (140 גרם) קמח
1 כפית אבקת אפיה
2 כפות גדושות נוטלה

הכנה:
1. מחממים תנור ל - 165 מעלות.
2. מערבבים שמנת, מלח וסוכר ביחד טוב, עד שהסוכר נמס.
3. מוסיפים ביצים טרופות ותמצית וניל.
4. מנפים קמח ואבקת אפיה לתוך המסה ומערבבים עד לקבלת תערובת אחידה.
5. מעבירים את התערובת לתבנית משומנת.
6. מחממים במיקרו את הנוטלה, ויוצקים מעל העוגה. מעבירים סכין ליצירת דוגמת שיש.
7. אופים כ-40 דקות, עד להזהבה.

They have so many names in English - hamentasch, homentash, homentasch, (h)umentash. In Hebrew you should say “Oznei Haman”, which simply means “Haman’s Ears”.

So just before Purim (the Jewish holiday during which we eat these great cookies), I wanted to suggest the new white chocolate and Irish Cream flaky dough I dreamt about a couple of weeks ago. It’s perfect for making Hamantash! I know because I’ve tried

And let me tell you, that Avi never loved Haman Ears before last year, when was the first time I tried making them. He said it was because their dough is usually so thick and tasteless. So the secret is (except having a good dough recipe) simply rolling the dough as thinly as you can, and then the ratio of dough-filling is simply perfect! Since then Avi really loves them. Also, my dear friend Shany, that visited me a couple of days ago, really loved them eventhough she doesn’t normally like Haman Ears as well. So go ahead, give them a try, you won’t regret it! And happy Purim everyone!

These I’m giving away as a Purim present (called Mishloah Manot)

You can find the recipe for the dough, both in English and in Hebrew here.
For shaping the Haman Ears, you need to roll out the dough, cut circles of it (a cup will suit just fine), fill each one with 1/2 tsp of Nutella (in my case ) and form a triangle out of it.