Mocha Shortbread Cookies

It has been one heck of a month.  Thank you for sticking with me.  Between the jaunt between two houses (painting and decorating one, cleaning and de-cluttering the other), getting the mister out of cardiac rehab (can you say Cranky?), and my brand new LG washer exploding with a bang (trapping clothes inside the drum), I haven’t had a lot of time to bake.  But let's face it, when a girl needs a cookie, a girl needs a cookie and this combination of mocha and chocolate (not to mention one bowl/one pan ease), I swear, is the only thing keeping me sane.  It’s a Martha Stewart recipe straight out of her Cookies book and she gets a big thumbs up on this one.  These cookies are delicious and can be tossed together in a flash.  Baking them in a cake pan makes for a nicely shaped shortbread, easily removed without a bit of trouble.  The taste is densely chocolaty with a nice touch of mocha.  These cookies very well may keep me out of therapy.

Mocha Shortbread Wedges

1/2 cup plus 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1/4 cup unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder

2 teaspoons espresso powder

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar, plus more for sprinkling
Pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 350°F.  Line an 8″ round cake or spring form pan with parchment paper. (Who has time for parchment?  I used Pam.) Sift together flour, cocoa powder, and salt.  Stir in espresso.

With an electric mixer with the paddle attachment, beat butter on medium speed until pale and creamy.  Add confectioners’ sugar and beat well.  Add flour mixture and beat on low speed until well combined.

Pat dough evenly into pan.  Bake 20 minutes, or until puffed at the edges.  Remove from oven, and let sit 5 minutes, then cut into 8 wedges.  Let cool completely on a rack.

  Sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar just before serving.

Cookies can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature to up to 1 week.

Cooling in the pan.

This post is linked to:

Totally Tasty Tuesdays

What's Cooking Wednesday

Wild Wednesday

Foodie Friday

Sunday's Best Party

Sweets for a Saturday

Themed Baker's Sunday

Fortune Cookies

I’m still in the recovery stage from last month’s holiday when another is in the offing.  No, I’m not talking St. Valentine’s Day -- I haven’t even begun to think about that -- I’m talking Chinese New Year.  Don’t celebrate?  Well, honestly, neither do I, but I’m all for any excuse to eat Chinese food, even when it’s more American than Chinese.

I’m talking about the dessert aspect of the meal, specifically the fortune cookie.  I turned to Martha Stewart for this recipe featured in Martha Stewart's Cookies: The Very Best Treats to Bake and to Share (Martha Stewart Living Magazine).

If you have this book (and if you don’t, buy it!), a word of warning about the recipe -- the taste was wonderful (even though I used light instead of heavy cream), and the batter is very easy to work with, BUT the directions were not good at all.

Martha suggests folding the cookie in half, pinching it closed, and then putting your two index fingers into either end and sliding your thumbs toward the middle. What?!  No! That is a lot of work for nothing, and time is of the essence here, you only have 10 seconds before the cookie hardens. The best way to make a fortune cookie is to indeed fold it in half, but then just bend it over a glass. You can see how beautifully mine came out in doing so.

Also, she suggested greasing a cookie sheet. Again, no. Use a Silpat Non-Stick Silicone Baking Liner, 11.75-Inch by 8.25-Inch, it is much easier to get the cookie off of it than a greased sheet. I tried the greased sheet, parchment paper, and a Silpat, and the later worked the best, the parchment second best, and the greased sheet not well at all.

She also doesn't mention something that will definitely determine a pretty cookie and that is that when you take the cookie off of the sheet and put it onto your clean kitchen towel, flip it over. With her instructions, the rough bottom of the cookie becomes the exterior; with my suggestion the smooth side becomes the exterior.

The cooking time is also wrong. Her suggestion of 8 minutes (turning the pan at four) yields a dark, overdone cookie.  I found that 6 minutes worked out perfectly. You need to test this with your own oven, but this worked best for me.

Making these small changes will help in making these fun cookies. It takes practice, so plan on trashing the first three or so, but after that you'll be a whiz, will have fun doing it, and will dazzle your friends!

Awk! The first one.  Obviously something went SERIOUSLY wrong.

My second try.  Not as horribly awful as the first one, but still not what it should be.

Martha's recipe.

This post is linked to:

Seasonal Sunday

Totally Tasty Tuesdays

Tasty Tuesday

What's Cooking Wednesday

& Foodie Friday

Cookie #2 Chocolate Thumbprint Cookies

Today's holiday recipe is the Chocolate Thumbprint Cookie, a new one I tried from Martha's Cookie book.  As you can see it makes a very pretty cookie, and it's very easy to do. I don't particularly enjoy rolling dough into little balls myself, so found this a bit tedious, but I suffer for my art.

The chocolate topping is equally easy, and a cinch to neatly apply to the top of the cookie.  I was all prepared with my pastry bag, ready to pipe it onto the top, but ended up just letting it roll off the end of a teaspoon, with very nice results.

The recipe claims to make 4-1/2 dozen, and perhaps it does, but as I said, the whole ball rolling thing is a bit tedious, so I probably made them bigger than they should have been and, consequently, ended up with a little over three dozen.

The chocolate topping is SUPERB! There was some left over since I didn't make the correct amount of cookies (I encourage this) and can be eaten with pleasure directly from the warming pan, or would make an excellent side dish on days when things aren't going so well and you want to hide in your room with a chocolaty treat.  I refrigerated the remainder of mine and now have a sort of loose fudge hidden in the depths of the fridge (see above reason).

I give this cookie an "A" for ease (despite the whole aforementioned ball-rolling tedium), and another "A" for attractiveness, but for the work involved, I think the flavor is only a "B."  For all of the effort, it just didn't have the taste I was hoping for, i.e. the buttery richness that I like in a shortbread cookie (which is essentially what this is).  The chocolate topping is excellent in taste, texture, and ease of application, but in my book it doesn't make this cookie a 100% winner.  A cookie fanatic, I tend to be a harsh critic, so do try these for yourself and let me know what you think.  I will make these again, but perhaps using my own shortbread dough recipe.

If you can't read it in the photo, you can find the recipe here on Martha Stewart’s website (although the recipe is doubled in her COOKIES book).

This post is linked to Tuesdays at the Table.

Martha's Snickerdoodles

A must in the creation of a theme-type of cookbook like Martha Stewart's COOKIES is to be certain to include old favorites along with new recipes, and Martha has done just that.  Today I felt like something simple and homey, so chose Snickerdoodles.  My grandmother used to always make these during the holidays so just the smell of them baking reminds me of Christmas.

What cookie reminds you of Christmas?

This is linked to Cookbook Sundays.