206. Stained-Glass Teardrops (p. 681) (Gourmet, unbound, December 2002)

This post is my first contribution to what I think is a really wonderful project. In the wake of the shuttering of Gourmet Magazine a couple of months ago, a few food bloggers--Olga from Sassy Radish, Maggie from Pithy and Cleaver, and Jennifer from In Jennie's Kitchen--decided to launch a collaborative project to keep Gourmet's spirit alive. It's called Gourmet, unbound, and the concept is pretty simple: each month they will publish a roundup of posts from food blogs about recipes that appeared in an issue of Gourmet from that month in any of the six decades of the magazine's run. So, the inaugural roundup this month will feature recipes that were published in any of the magazine's sixty or so December issues.

For my first Gourmet, unbound post, I chose this recipe for Stained-Glass Teardrops that appeared in the December 2002 issue. Actually, these cookies are doing double duty as my contribution to Gourmet, unbound, as well as my contribution to the bakery table at my church's Christmas fair. I chose them because they are festive, seasonal and attractive, all traits that I hope will make them good sellers.

The idea of these cookies is to roll out the dough nice and thin and cut out shapes -- as indicated by the title of this recipe, The Book intends for teardrop shapes -- and then to cut out a smaller shape in the center of the cookie and fill it with crushed hard candy. As the cookies bake, the candy melts and liquefies. As it cools, the candy hardens and forms a colored "stained-glass" window in the center of the cookie. It's a neat little bit of kitchen alchemy.

I made the cookie dough a day in advance. First, I whisked together some all-purpose flour and salt in a bowl. Then I put a stick-and-a-half of softened butter and some granulated sugar in my Kitchen Aid stand mixer. I beat it until it was light and fluffy and then beat in an egg and some vanilla extract. I slowed the mixer and added the flour and salt bit by bit. Interestingly, there's no leavening agent like baking powder or baking soda in this recipe, so, the resulting cookie is very flat and dense. There's also not a whole lot of moisture in this dough, and it gave the Kitchen Aid a real workout. No way a handheld mixer could manage this dough. Once the dough was all mixed, I divided it into three pieces, flattened them into five-inch disks, wrapped them in plastic and put them in the refrigerator to chill overnight (The Book says to chill for at least two hours.)

The next morning, I got ready to make the cookies. First, I unwrapped some sour balls and divided them by color (red, green, yellow and orange) into small zip-top bags. Then, I got some of my frustrations out by smashing the candy to bits with a rolling pin. I put my candy dust aside and moved on to cookie making in earnest.

I took one of the dough disks out of the refrigerator and put it between two pieces of wax paper and rolled it out to about a ten-inch circle. I couldn't find any teardrop cookie cutters like the ones called for in The Book, so I used a three-inch circle cookie cutter to make the outer cut. I placed the round cookies on a Silpat-lined cookie sheet and made the smaller cutouts in the centers of the cookies. I found some Christmas-themed mini cookie cutters at the grocery store, so I used them to cut a Christmas tree, candy cane, gingerbred man or bell out of each cookie. I filled each cutout with some of the candy dust: green for the Christmas trees (duh!), red for the candy canes (ditto), yellow for the bells and orange for the gingerbread men (close enough, right?).

While these cookies were easy enough to make, they were still very time consuming because of equipment limitations. You absolutely have to make these cookies on a silicone baking sheet liner like a Silpat, otherwise, you'd never get the melted candy off the baking sheet. You also have to allow the cookies to cool completely before removing them from the Silpat to allow the melted candy to harden. I only have one Silpat (those things are expensive!), so between cooking and cooling, it took about a half-hour per batch, and with four batches, that's a half a day right there.

The finished cookies were really very pretty, or at least most of them were. Some of the cookies browed too quickly and were a little more "golden" than I would have liked. I also put a little bit too much crushed candy in some of the cookies and it either bubbled over the top of the cookie or seeped underneath, giving less-than-attractive results. But the ones that came out right really did look like little stained glass windows. The Book suggests that these cookies would make lovely Christmas tree ornaments, and I'm sure that they would, but, we've been down that road before, and I'm not going there again. The flavor of the cookies, though, was just ... meh. The sugar-cookie base was tasty enough, but nothing to write home about, and the cookie and hard candy tastes and textures don't really compliment each other all that well. In all, I'm glad I made them to have learned a new technique, but I don't think that I'll make them again any time soon.

Date Cooked: November 28 & 29, 2009

Degree of Difficulty: Medium (time consuming without two Silpats)

Rating: Appearance A-; Flavor B-

81. Gingerbread Snowflakes (p. 680)

This is the first of three cookie posts. And with Christmas right around the corner, it seems like just about everyone is in a cookie-making mood.

The current issue of Gourmet features an array of stunningly beautiful cookies including some glittering lemon sandwich cookies that I can't wait to make. But the fine folks at Gourmet didn't stop there, the editors and test kitchen cooks went through the archives to compile a web feature of the best cookie recipe from the magazine for each year since 1941. I can't think of a more mouth-watering way to spend a half hour than to scroll through these sixty-plus recipes. Well, it didn't take long for a few intrepid food bloggers to see Gourmet's cookie-of-the-year feature as a challenge. And thus, The 12 Cookies of Christmas: A Gourmet Cookie Extravaganza was born. I'm looking forward to catching up on the efforts of Sandy from At the Baker's Bench and her friends who decided to pick and make their 12 favorite recipes from Gourmet's "best of" collection. (Hat tip to Michelle of What Does Your Body Good? for pointing me to the Extravaganza.)

OK, enough about other people's cookies. I want to talk about my cookies. I volunteered to make some cookies for my church's bake sale. I picked this recipe because I could make the cookies ahead of time, since, according to the Cook's Note, the cookies keep up to three weeks. In theory, this is a pretty easy recipe. The Book says that the start-to-finish time is 2 1/4 hours. But because I tend to make my own problems, and bite off more that I can chew, it took me about eight hours, over the course of three days to make these cookies. My downfall was reading The Book's suggestion of turning the cookies into ornaments and thinking, "That sounds like a good idea!" They came out great, but it took forever to make them.

The cookie dough is pretty easy to make. First, I combined some molasses, brown sugar and spices (ginger, cinnamon, allspice and cloves) in a saucepan and brought it to a boil. Right from the first step, this recipe fills the house with an instant Christmas aroma. Off to a great start! Next I added the baking soda, and like an elementary school science project, the mixture foamed up furiously. (Good thing The Book warned me that was going to happen.) Then I added butter, an egg and the flour and mixed it right in the pan until I had a big ball of cookie dough.

I turned the dough out onto my baking mat and kneaded it for a little while. Then I put half of the dough into the refrigerator while I worked on the other half of the dough. I rolled the dough out nice and thin, and cut out as many snowflakes as I could. I rerolled the leftover dough to cut out more cookies, and then I rerolled it a few more times until I made all of the cookies I could. The Book says to reroll the dough once, presumably because it could get tough if it's rolled too many times. But I took my chances since I didn't want to waste any dough. All of the cookies I tasted were great, so I don't think that the multiple rollings did any harm.

To make the cookies into ornaments, I poked a hole in each cookie with a drinking straw before I put them in the oven. After the cookies cooled, I threaded a thin red or green ribbon through the hole and tied it in a bow. This was very tedious, and about halfway through the four dozen cookies the recipe yielded, I was rethinking the wisdom of making cookie ornaments.

Next came the decoration. This recipe for decorating icing is a sub-recipe to the cookie recipe. It's pretty easy. Just combine a box of confectioner's sugar, powdered egg whites, water, lemon juice and vanilla extract. I didn't know that powdered egg whites existed, but I'm glad that they do, because the egg whites are necessary to give the icing its structure and stiffness, but I'd be nervous about using uncooked egg whites in cookies destined for a church bake sale. I can see it now: "Parishioner sickens dozens of churchgoers with salmonella-laced snowflake cookies. Film at eleven."

I opted for a pretty simple, less-is-more approach to decorating the cookies. There was more than enough icing to completely cover the cookies. But, I decided that because of my limited time, and my limited skills with a pastry bag, I'd keep it basic. Some might disagree, but I actually thought that the cookies were better for it. The cookies, as cookies, were delicious in their own right. Nice and crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside with a really nice mix of holiday spices. Exactly what you'd want in a gingerbread cookie. The icing, on the other hand, while sweet, was pretty blah, even with the lemon juice and vanilla. So, by keeping the decoration to a minimum, the cookies were able to shine whithout being overwhelmed by too much icing.

After the icing hardened, I put each of the cookies in an individual plastic bag fastened with a silver twist-tie. Again, about an hour into this part of the process, I was asking myself exactly why I though that it would be a good idea to do this way. In the end, the cookies were beautiful and delicious, if I do say so myself. I'd make this recipe again, but without all of the unnecessary fuss of making them into ornaments.

Date Cooked: November 30 - December 3, 2008
Degree of Difficulty: Medium (but VERY time consuming)
Rating: B