#biscuits
Happy Easter, friends!
Made some lovely dairy free Easter cookies with Cosima. She got very good at delicately removing the cookie dough from the stamps and flopping them onto the baking trays, this was a fun activity (and yummy too!)
Used Nigella’s cut out cookie recipe but substituted Flora plant butter. I’ve used coconut oil in the past and preferred it with that, to be honest.
Cosima made gingerbread mini bears. She’s getting quite good at stamping out biscuits and carefully transferring them to the baking tray
Time to procrastibake! So far, I’ve been restrained this week–making Molly Baz’s sour cream and onion biscuits and chocolate chip cookies. (I froze half the dough to have to have something to look forward to.)
The biscuits were pretty easy to make, but I found the dough a tiny bit hard to come together. I added an extra dollop of sour cream to help bind, the predicament being you don’t want your butter to get too soft, but when it’s chill it’s hard to get it into the perfect pea-sized bits you need.
What was easier than expected was folding it in thirds two times to get lamination. Technically the recipe makes 8, but since I wanted to have varying sizes (some as sides, some substantial enough to hold a fried egg) I made 11 wonky biscuits.
They were reallygood. I would say this is not a recipe to last multiple days, however. I think I could’ve baked them for 5 extra minutes and perhaps they would have been sturdier to stand up to re-heating. But my next-day breakkie sando with a fired egg and cheddar was worth the overnight wait.
Moving on, I made chocolate chip cookies, which inadvertently came out as crispy as Tate’s. I’ve become a true believer in adding flaky finishing salt to every baked good (also: have you ever had it on ice cream? A dash of olive oil and citrus zest… heaven is a place on earth.) However, even though we have 7 different types of salt in the house, none of them are flaky finishing salt, so I just went with the closest variety we did have on hand, a fleur de sel.
I tried baking with the salt two ways: six of the cookies had the salt pre-bake, and six were finished with them right out of the oven. I think putting the salt on top pre-bake was a bit better, but I know that’s not the point of finishing salt. It’s a pandemic! Do what you want.
Next week is an olive oil cake, and I’m going to do research for Passover desserts. (I may bake these Tahini Billionaire Bars just for funsies too.)