Category Archives: baking

Pine nut cook­ies, or pig­noli cook­ies as my Ital­ian (say it like an Irish-American, “Eye-talyan”) friends might call them, are some­thing I have always wanted to try. Martha Stew­art pub­lished a recipe that looked do-able, so I gave it a go the other day. The ver­dict? What a pain in the ass for a tasty cookie. I did not fol­low the recipe in terms of the size of the lit­tle balls of cookie dough, and then I over­baked the first batch, as you can see in the back. The sec­ond batch, while still over­sized, came out right, and they were awfully good, but I don’t think I’d make the recipe again. Why? Sev­eral rea­sons– first, I had to buy marzi­pan, and now I have a half a tube I didn’t use in the recipe that I have to find a use for. Sec­ond, this dough is sooooo sticky. I got out the can of olive oil Pam and sprayed my hands over and over again while I was rolling the balls of dough in the pine nuts, and when it was over, there was dough every­where, and I had to scrub my Pam can. Finally? I am sure this is the ne plus ultra of pig­noli cookie recipes, but I’d rather have a macaroon.

Lemon Rose­mary Corn­meal Short­bread. Mmm. You need to make this one. Look at the greasy parch­ment paper! This is a recipe I adapted from Fine Cooking’s 2005 Hol­i­day Bak­ing issue. I love Fine Cook­ing. I have never had a recipe go wrong, and they are usu­ally pretty fuss-free. And when they are fussy, it’s always worth it. This recipe came to me as a hybrid with a rose­mary but­ter cookie recipe I saw in a Martha cookie porn pub­li­ca­tion from a few years ago, so I thought I would try to com­bine all the fla­vors. It worked, and these will now be a part of the rota­tion of cook­ies I will actu­ally bake.

Lemon Rose­mary Corn­meal Short­bread Bars
Adapted from Fine Cook­ing Hol­i­day Bak­ing 2005, orig­i­nal recipe by Abi­gail John­son Dodge

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (King Arthur Flour if you can get it)
1 cup finely ground yel­low corn­meal (I used Goya’s, which is also labeled “masa harina”)
1/2 tea­spoon kosher salt
1 1/2 cups soft­ened unsalted but­ter
1 3/4 cups pow­dered sugar
Zest of 1 lemon (love my Microplane zester)
Juice of one lemon, strained for seeds
Nee­dles of 2–3 rose­mary branches, washed and finely chopped.

Heat oven to 325F. Grease a 9 x 13 bak­ing pan– I use Pyrex. Line the bot­tom of the pan with parch­ment. (I just stuffed an over­sized piece of parch­ment I couldn’t be both­ered to trim in there, and it over­hung the sides. The edge pieces were not so nice, but I could lift the cook­ies out of the pan alto­gether, for trans­fer­ring to the cut­ting board for cutting.)

In a medium bowl, whisk the flour, corn­meal, and salt. In a large bowl, cream the but­ter, sugar, lemon zest and rose­mary until light and creamy, 3–4 min­utes. It should look like the fluffi­est frost­ing you’ve ever had. Scrape the bowl, adding the flour mix­ture in two batches on low speed. The dough will look moist and clumpy.

Trans­fer the dough to the pan. With a rub­ber spat­ula sprayed with veg­etable or olive oil, smoothe the bat­ter into the cor­ners of the pan, try­ing for an even thick­ness. If you like, use a long knife or bench scraper to mark the dough into 1 x 2 1/2 inch bars. (I didn’t bother.) Bake until the top looks dry and golden brown, 35–40 minutes.

Trans­fer the pan to a rack. Imme­di­ately use your knife or bench scraper (I used a bench scraper) to cut your short­bread– if you don’t do it while it’s warm, it will be too crumbly later.) Let the bars cool in the pan before remov­ing them with a small spatula.

Note: The rose­mary fla­vor is more pro­nounced after spend­ing a night, wrapped in plas­tic wrap, in a tin or tup­per­ware container.

Oh.My.Goodness. These are awfully good. You need to make them. Now. These are a vari­a­tion on the Brownie Thins recipe pub­lished in December’s Bon Appetit, and avail­able at Epi­cu­ri­ous. The vari­a­tions aren’t enough to re-write the whole recipe, so I will just note instead that instead of doing the plas­tic wrap trick to flat­ten the sticky sticky cookie dough, I just sprayed the back of a serv­ing spoon with olive oil cook­ing spray every third cookie, and used the back of the spoon to flat­ten the dough balls. The other thing is this– I don’t have any chopped pis­ta­chios and am not that wild about them any­way, so I used cashew pieces instead. And finally, evil genius that I try to be, after the cook­ies were cool­ing on their rack, I driz­zled them with dulce de leche sauce I had in the pantry, because really, a brownie is good, but a caramel cashew tur­tle brownie is bet­ter. I baked these on sil­pat lin­ers, and you should know that the cook­ies are very frag­ile– I would actu­ally spray my lin­ers with cook­ing spray for extra detach­ing power next time. And, I used a very thin metal cookie spat­ula to detach the cook­ies, because my reg­u­lar non­stick one was mak­ing me break the cook­ies. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go back to my cook­ies and milk for breakfast.