Wicked Good Cookies for Boston

Here in the Boston area, we're overwhelmingly relieved that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is finally in custody.

Here's a cookie recipe I put together after the bombing to cheer myself up. It features ingredients inspired by the city I love. Make yourself a batch, or keep on scrolling to the end of the post to get your own dozen cookies straight from the corn-free kitchen. All profits from your $20 purchase will benefit One Fund Boston, a charity set up to help the victims.

Ingredients:

Cookies:
3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 cup dried kidney beans (in honor of Boston baked beans)
1 1/2 locally farmed grass-fed butter, melted
1 cup New England maple sugar
1 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3 eggs, locally and humanely farmed

Frosting:
2 teaspoons local, pastured milk
1 1/2 teaspoons local, pastured butter
1/2 cup maple sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons potato starch (You can't make New England clam chowdah without potatoes. Incidentally, you also can't make corn-free frosting with confectioners' sugar, so the starch adds that powdery quality to the granulated sugar.)

Directions:

1. Grab a friend and a glass of home brew and put the Red Sox game on.
2. Preheat the oven to 350. Line the cookie sheets with parchment paper.
3. Divide the dried beans in half, and put the first half in a food processor until they're finely ground, then add the rest. After about one minute, the mixture should become powdery.
4. Pour your newly made bean flour into a large bowl with the all-purpose flour and stir until gently mixed, then sift together into another bowl. This will mix them together well, and any too-large beans pieces won't make it through the sifter.
5. Beat the butter until it's creamy. Gradually add the maple sugar, then vanilla, eggs, and flour mixture.
6. Pour plenty of flour onto a flat surface to keep your batter from sticking to itself, and roll it out until it's about 1/4 inch thick. Cut out whatever cookie shapes you like and bake for about 10 minutes, until the edges are golden brown.
7. While the cookies are in the oven, start on your frosting. Mix together milk, butter, sugar, and starch. Mixture should be thick enough that decorations won't run. Add sugar and starch as needed until you arrive at the right consistency.
8. When cookies come out of the oven, let them cool completely before frosting.

Pumpkin Walnut Cookies

If you're like me, you don't keep a lot of perishables like milk, eggs, and butter around because they end up going bad before you get a chance to use them. This can really cramp your style if you decide to bake a spontaneous batch of cookies and don't want to go to the store. Luckily there are some fantastic recipes out there for vegan baked goods. You can buy the ingredients for this batch and forget about them for months.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

1/2 cup rice flour

1/4 cup tapioca starch

1 1/3 cups rolled oats

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 dash salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1 cup sugar

2/3 cups maple syrup

2/3 cup organic canola oil

2 tablespoons molasses

1 can organic pumpkin

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup chopped walnutes

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350.

2. In a medium sized bowl, mix together flours, starch, oats, baking soda, salt, and spices.

3. In a large bowl, mix together sugar, maple syrup, oil, molasses, pumpkin, and vanilla.

4. Add dry ingredients to wet in three batches, stirring or beating in between batches.

4. Fold in walnuts.

5. Drop by tablespoon onto greased cookie sheets and flatten.
6. Back 16 minutes and set on a wire rack to cool.

Chocolate Cheesecake Coconut Thumbprint Cookies

You know the feeling. An image on a magazine cover that you pass by at a newsstand. A scrap of conversation overheard on the train. A piece of song lyric you didn't quite process as you changed the channels on the radio. These things can haunt us until we track them down and find out what they truly meant.

For me, it was a picture on Pinterest, that most useless and time-wasting of all social networking sites, little more than a random collage of images, really. We can never hope to sift through ALL of that information and still get anything done, but we try anyway. A lot of us food bloggers do it under the guise of "but this is productive! I have to see what all the other food bloggers are posting! Oh look, those shoes sure are sparkly."

Usually I don't give much thought to images I see on Pinterest. If there's something I find particularly interesting, I'll save it and make a mental note to try the recipe sometime, but I usually forget.

Not with the cheesecake thumbprint cookies though. I just couldn't. My co-workers can vouch for the fact that I haven't been able to shut up about them all week. Cheesecake! In thumbprint cookies! It's brilliant! Why didn't I think of it before?

It was when I found myself actually looking forward to Christmas so that I could make dozens of them and force-feed them to everyone I know that I realized something had to be done. Another glance at the original picture that started it all, though still tantalizing, was actually a little bit boring. The cheesecake was pretty much the same color as the cookie part, and whoever had made these, culinary genius though they clearly are, had foregone the best part of the traditional thumbprint cookie: the coconut coating! These problems had to be solved before any more time was lost. Add "color contrast" to the list of chocolate's many, many uses.

My recipe just lumps the chocolate right in with the cheesecake filling, but if you've got the patience and the steady hands, I'd recommend adding the chocolate separately to each individual cookie for an even prettier and just as tasty finished product.

The idea was to have a marble pattern, but I gave up after this one.

Cookie ingredients:

3 sticks grass-fed butter
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract (beware of the fake stuff they try to pass off!)
7 ounces organic unsweetened coconut flakes
3 1/2 cups unbleached flour
1 free range egg

Cheesecake Ingredients:

1 free range egg white
4 ounces grass-fed cream cheese
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup organic chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Cream butter and sugar together in the largest bowl, then add the vanilla.
3. Slowly stir flour into the butter and sugar mixture.
4. Roll the dough into a flat disk, wrap in plastic, and chill for 30 minutes.
5. Roll dough into 1/4 inch balls, dip in egg wash, and roll in coconut.
6. Place balls on an ungreased cookie sheet, pressing the center with your thumb to make a well.
7. Place in the oven for 10 minutes.
8. While dough is cooking, make your cream cheese filling. Heat chocolate chips in the microwave for about     a minute and a half, until well melted.
9. Mix together cream cheese, sugar, and egg white until well blended and about the consistency of cake batter, then stir in chocolate.
10. Pull cookies out of the oven and with a small spoon, carefully add cheesecake mix the center. Bake for an additional 10-15 minutes, until coconut is golden brown, and fork stuck in the cheesecake comes out clean.

Top 5 Tricks for Healthy Christmas Cookies

Sometimes I think Ebenezer Scrooge has been sorely misrepresented.  I mean, the poor guy just wanted to be left alone; is that so much to ask?

This time of year, it's cold and dark and all the stores are not only over-crowded but playing absolutely terrible music, and everyone is rubbing in your face how happy they supposedly are because some old fat guy who's been stalking their children is going to sneak into their house in the middle of the night.  I don't know about you, but if I look at the holiday season from a certain angle, the whole idea really seems to fall apart at the seams.

And that's when I start to bake cookies.  Around the time I start to feel my heart shrinking to two sizes too small, I do the one thing that never fails to get me at least passably close to "in the Christmas spirit."

Experimenting with lots of different recipes for Christmas cookies is something I've done for a few years now, but this time around I challenged myself to make them as corn-free and minimally processed as I could.  I won't write all the recipes I used here, but I'll give you five ingredients- any or all of which can be used in whatever cookie recipes you already know and love to make them much healthier and- I think- much tastier too!

5. Local eggs.
I say "local" because that's really the easiest guarantee that other claims made on the package actually mean what they seem like they should mean.  Eggs from a small farm are going to be more nutritious because the hens who laid them had a more diverse diet than conventionally raised hens.  And I'm pretty sure most small farmers don't inject their eggs with hormones the way those from a certain well-known large-scale chicken farming operation have been known to do.  

4. Taza chocolate.
Any minimally processed chocolate will do, but this is my favorite brand, partly because it's made right here in Somerville, and partly because it's delicious.  It's available to purchase online if you don't live in the area, and it's all vegan.  I also like the variety that's available.  I use the 87% dark chocolate bars as baking chocolate to flavor batter.  There are also flavors like cinnamon, orange, and ginger available, which you can use in lieu of chocolate chips to put your own unique spin on old favorites. (Like my chocolatey peanut butter cookie recipe in the corn-free cookbook.)

3. Maple syrup.
Maple syrup is less processed than the white sugar you find in the baking aisle, and rumored to contain actual nutrients!  If you're worried about the consequences of replacing a solid with a liquid, I found this helpful fact sheet on the right sugar: maple syrup ratio.  I also used some actual maple sugar in crystal form, which lends the cookies a subtly robust flavor, but I'm not sure whether the further processing destroys any of the nutrition.

2. Grass-fed butter.
The butter I used in these particular cookies was from Vermont Creamery.  Just looking at this butter, the color, the texture, you can tell it's different from the stuff you buy at the supermarket.  The benefits of choosing grass-fed- to your health as well as that of the environment, the cows, and arguably the economy- can be found, among other places, in my post What's So Bad About Corn? from earlier this year.

1. Pecan meal.
As with all the other ingredients on this list, pecan meal adds a rich flavor and texture to the cookies, and this one made the number one slot because of how ridiculously healthy it is.  Replacing a highly processed grain with a minimally processed nut?  It doesn't get much better than that!  You can order it and other tasty treats from Sunnlyand Farms.  One note on pecan meal, however:  The texture isn't exactly the same as that of all-purpose flour, and when I tried to use it by itself the cookies just didn't hold together, instead flattening out and melting into each other.  I suggest using half pecan meal and half whole wheat flour.

Have other baking tips you'd like to share?  Leave them in the comments.  Happy holidays, everyone!

The Return of Dessert

Despite temperatures in the eighties making for less-than-ideal baking conditions, I had a wonderful time Tuesday afternoon putting together some corn-free chocolate chip cookies.  To my surprise and delight, it actually isn’t hard at all, given the time, resources and willingness to research all the ingredients and go to a few different places for them.
 

First stop was Copley Square Farmers Market.  The second biggest farmers market I’ve ever been to (the first being on 14th Street in Manhattan, but everything’s bigger and louder and flashier in Manhattan), it takes full advantage of its location, where there’s both scenery and plenty of foot traffic.   

John Copley, who arranged the lesser-known Boston Corn Party.

I lucked out with Stillman’s at the Turkey Farm, based in Hardwick.  Theirs was the only booth I saw offering eggs from free-roaming chickens.  Stillman's also wins the prize for providing the most literal half-dozen eggs I’ve ever bought; the woman got out a pair of scissors and cut a carton containing a dozen eggs in half right before my eyes.

I was frustrated in my search for butter, however.  No one had brought any to the market, but, encouraged by finding the eggs, there was no way I was going to give up on the idea of eating a fresh-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookie before the day was over. 

So the next logical stop was Whole Foods.  If I couldn’t find grass fed butter here, there was always the option of looking up a vegan recipe, but I have yet to master the texture issue with vegan cookies, and besides, you usually need to substitute something like applesauce, and that would mean I’d have to look around for applesauce that didn’t have ascorbic acid and...luckily, the dairy section offered Organic Valley brand pasture-fed butter, saving me a whole bunch of trouble.  

Now all that was left were the chocolate chips.  All the other ingredients can pretty much be taken at face value, and were already in the pantry at home.  I was a little worried about the chips though.  Do they normally have dairy ingredients in them?  I’ve been eating them for more than two decades.  How do I not know this already?

Whole Foods doesn’t carry Toll House, of course, and I almost scrapped the whole project right there.  How can I be expected to bake cookies if the chocolate chips don’t come in that comforting yellow bag we all grew up with?  It’s downright un-American!

Nonetheless, I screwed up all my courage and read the ingredients list on the Whole Foods brand chocolate chips (which come in an unfortunate blue bag).  With a huge sigh of relief, I realized the cookies were going to happen after all.  Nothing in these chips but pure cane sugar, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, and pure vanilla extract.

But wait. Right next to these, in a green bag, were vegan chocolate chips.  What could possibly be on the above list that isn’t vegan?

The ingredients in the vegan chips were: evaporated cane juice, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, ground vanilla beans.

…

Am I missing something here?  Technicalities in the processing of the sugar and the vanilla, but nothing else is different…right?

I opted for the vegan chips just to be on the safe side. They don’t come with a recipe on the back, by the way.  What is that marketing team thinking?  Thanks to the internet, I was able to get my hands and the good old time-tested Toll House recipe, which is reproduced below, with corn-free adjustments in italics.

Ingredients:

·        2 ¼ cups flour (unbleached if you don’t like chlorine in your food)

·        1 teaspoon baking soda

·        1 teaspoon salt

·        1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened (The package should specify grass fed and finished, or, better yet, pastured.  "Organic" can still mean that the cow has a very unpleasant life on a factory farm eating an unnatural diet of government-subsidized corn.)

·        ¾ cup granulated sugar

·        ¾ cup packed brown sugar

·        1 teaspoon vanilla extract

·        2 large eggs (Even free-roaming hens are often fed at least some corn.  The only way to be sure is to get the eggs straight from the farmer, and ask what he or she feeds the animals.)

·        1 12-ounce package chocolate chips (Check the ingredients list and make sure there are no animal products or corn-derived sweeteners from our growing glossary)

·        1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Preheat over to 375.

Combine flour, baking soda and salt in a small bowl.  Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla in large mixer bowl until creamy.  Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Gradually beat in flour mixture.  Stir in chocolate chips and nuts.  Drop by rounded tablespoons onto ungreased baking sheets.

Bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown.  Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.  

And voila!

They ended up tasting great.  It's back to the farmers market on Tuesday.  Maybe next time I'll have a recipe for something a little more nutritious.