Butterscotch Cookies

I’ve got all the ingredients on the counter, all stacked up nicely, and I’m thinking to myself “What am I missing??”

Um, camera. Right. Cooking requires pictures, remember?? In particular, a portrait oriented pretty one of the final product for our Pinterest page. You did know we have a Pinterest page, didn’t you?

Not sure if you remember me, but I used to cook here a while ago, until I went totally crazy with school and got so bad at cooking that I barely managed to make cereal for dinner 3 days a week (the other 4 were cheese and crackers). But, I’m done with the 5 classes a semester thing, and I’m now mere months away from a degree, and someone at work asked me to make Butterscotch cookies.

So I found my camera, bought a hand mixer (it’s been a while, my Popeye arms are out of practice) and started cooking!

Butterscotch Cookies

• ¾ c unsalted butter
• 1 ¾ c darkest brown sugar you can find, like Demerara
• 2 tbsp cream
• 1 tbsp vanilla
• ½ tsp sea salt
• 2 eggs
• 2 ¾ c flour
• ½ tsp baking soda

We’re going to do something a little different than the usual old “cream the butter and sugar and then beat in the eggs” with this one. Butterscotch originated as a hard candy of cooked butter and sugar, so that’s where we’re going to start.

Melt the butter in a pot over medium heat, and let it get all foamy and bubbly.

We’re going to *cook* the butter a bit before we add anything to it. After a minute or two the foam will subside (lifting the pot and gently swirling the butter from time to time will help

     

Once you’ve got a nice clear top, swirl the butter every 30 seconds or so until you start to see little brown spots on the bottom of the pan. Remove the pan from the heat and the burner off.

What you’ve just done is made “beurre noisette” or browned butter. It’s called noisette, the French word for hazelnut, because the aroma gets a little nutty as it browns. You know how when you sauté something until it gets that delicious golden brown colour to it? You just did that to butter.

Dump in the brown sugar and the cream and start whisking. I put mine back on the burner as I whisked, and let the residual heat from the burner help melt the sugar as I decided whether or not I wanted to be risky in the next couple steps.

I was considering proceeding as if making a pate a choux like Taneasha did with the cream puffs. Dump the flour into the hot butter mixture and then add the eggs later. But my Popeye arms are out of practice, and I’m not sure my new little hand mixer can deal with that serious a pastry, so I took the safe route, and dumped the almost butterscotch sauce (add more cream, cook it 10 minutes, pour it over ice cream) into a big bowl.

Beat in the vanilla and salt.

Once it’s cool enough that you can hold your hand on the bottom of the bowl, add the eggs one at a time. Cracking them into a measuring cup first lets you pour them in without risking shells and without stopping the mixer.

Same thing with the flour. Measure into a giant cup, stir in the baking soda, and pour bits at a time into the bowl until you have a sticky ball of dough that pulls away from the sides of the bowl, but that relaxes and puddles a bit when it’s left alone.

In a small bowl, mix about

• ¼ c dark brown sugar
• 2 tbsp plain old boring regular sugar
• 1/8 tsp sea salt, if you’re into that kind of thing

Recipe Guy’s sister is all over the salted-caramel trend, but I find most people over do it on the salting part so I generally stay away from it. If you’re not sure you want to go all in, try sprinkling a few grains of salt on top of each cookie after you’ve dipped them. If those work for you, add the salt next time.

Roll tablespoon or so sized balls of dough and dip the top into the sugar-sugar(-salt) mixture.

Bake them at 350 for 11 minutes for cookies that are not browned on the bottom, and have chewy middles. If you want them slightly crisp all the way through, let them go for 13 minutes, but be careful not to let the bottoms get too dark.

The butterscotch flavour is subtle in these; it kind of creeps up on you. It’s a lot more noticeable next to a sip of coffee though. Wow, is it ever! Definitely a breakfast cookie.

What do you think of the salted sweets thing?

Peach Cobbler, Cookies

Because I had peaches.

I spent the day baking today, with the bedroom air conditioner (only air conditioner) on full blast and the bedroom door open, with a fan in the hallway directing the cool air into the kitchen.

What? I wanted to bake.

I made bacon and onion quiche, banana almond muffins, and peach cobbler cookies. 

Yes, peach cobbler in a cookie.

I'm back at turning things that aren't cookies into cookies. And making way too many of them.

Peach Cobbler Cookies

• 3/4 c butter
• 1 1/2 c brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tsp cream
• 2 c flour
• 1/2 c ground almonds (or more flour)
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 1 c chopped peaches

And of course, stuff is missing from the ingredient pic. But it's not the vanilla. Because I forgot to put vanilla into the banana muffins, so I made sure it was on the counter for the cookies.

NOTE: I made a double recipe.

Cream together the very soft butter and brown sugar. I opted for brown sugar in this one to get that slightly caramelized flavour that you get from baking fruit. White sugar would also work, and would result in a lighter, more biscuit like colour, but I wanted caramel, so that's what I did.

Add the egg (I doubled things, remember), vanilla, and cream and beat them all together.

Sift in the flour, baking powder, and nutmeg. Or, just pile them up on top of the wet stuff and give the dry part a bit of a stir before stirring it into the wet.

Add the ground almonds (also called almond flour, but not as finely textured as I think something should be in order to be called "flour") and then fold in the peaches.

I contemplated tossing the peaches with a bit of flour or cornstarch, but ended up just dumping them in as is. I was using fresh peaches though. If you're trying this with canned, I suggest opting for the extra bit of flour.

The dough will be very soft, and feel borderline too soft. Fridge it. After only about 15 minutes, the edges will have firmed up, and since you're dropping this by tablespoon onto parchment paper, the edges are all you need. Just put the bowl back into the fridge while the first batch bakes.

When you're baking on a hot day, leave the preheating of the oven to the last minute.

350 degrees.

Bake for 12 minutes. They'll be golden on the edges, but soft and cakey in the middle.

Soft and cakey with sweet bursts of bright summer flavour.

What are you doing with all of your summer peaches?