Custard yo-yos with roasted rhubarb icing

Lately, I've been the lucky recipient of several batches of homemade biscuits. Just before leaving for holidays I was presented with some of Elizabeth's amazing shortbread. On arrival in Hobart, a jar of assorted Ottolenghi was waiting for me by my bed. Back in Sydney, the postman delivered a batch of biscotti sent at great expense and with much love from afar, and last weekend, my friend from Canberra came to stay bearing cinnamon meringue stars. So I hope the ones I made for Christmas gifts inspired the same warm feelings.

I made a few different sorts (including these and these) but the custard yo-yos with roasted rhubarb icing were the undisputed stars of the show: a creamy pink fruity filling sandwiched by two perfectly pale yellow cookies. The secret ingredient is custard powder, but if you don't have it, cornflour (cornstarch) will do just as well though your biscuits will be a little less yellow. The pastel palette is part of the appeal I think so if you can find custard powder (it should be readily available in any supermarket), it's worth the sub-$2 investment for the child-like delight those nursery colours inspire. I'll definitely be making them again. Next time, all for myself.

Compost cookies

I didn't make it to the east coast on this latest trip to the US, but I transported myself there in a California kitchen by making Christina Tosi's famous compost cookies. Tosi is chef and owner of Milk Bar, Momofuku's bakery offshoot in New York City (and now scattered all over the country... and Canada). Her creations include crack pie - which is as advertised - and these similarly addictive cookies.

Potato chips, butterscotch, pretzels, graham crackers, oats, ground coffee... more is more here - sweet, salty, chewy, crunchy... These have it all. The name is deceptive, implying something just thrown together without much thought but there's a science to these, a precision that speaks to the process Tosi goes through to create. She's an alchemist, engineering quite possibly the perfect cookie. They don't look like much but believe me, they're memorable, and appeal to adults and kids alike. They're especially fun to make with kids as they get to crush up potato chips and pretzels, and sample all the sweet stuff along the way - shout out to Linus, my able apprentice, and his mum for the beautiful photos.

Forgotten cookies

Some things are worth making just for the name alone. Or in this case if you're travelling north to work with a colleague who's gluten-free and you need something sweet to power both of you through two days of script meetings. I was tossing up between lime polenta cake (made in a bar tin) or little lemon polenta cakes (small, stackable) when I remembered forgotten cookies. This recipe, from Chicago chef Sarah Gruneberg infuses beaten egg whites with sugar, cardamom and vanilla and winds through sour cherries, dark chocolate and toasted pecans. The dough - such as it is without flour or even, miraculously, dairy - is dolloped into spoonfuls onto a baking tray, sprinkled with sea salt, baked for five minutes and left in the oven overnight. In the morning, you're rewarded with little boulders of meringue. Crisp on the outside, with a chewy, marshmallow-like interior containing crunch, combining sweet and sour... once tried, never forgotten.

Chocolate sour cherry cookies

My oldest friend came to visit last weekend. We've known each other since we were babies, both of us brought up by mothers who were not only good cooks but instilled in us the idea of food as something to be shared - something to welcome, something to celebrate, to comfort, to say thank you. To this end, I made a batch of my favourite cookies for her arrival and she turned up with a tin of her own. Hers were delicious but I don't have the recipe for those (yet!) so here's what I made - the Bourke St Bakery's chocolate sour cherry cookies.

Sour cherries are a little hard to find (if you live in Brisbane, I got mine at the amazing The Source Bulk Foods store in West End on a recent visit) and when you do, they're expensive, but you could easily substitute a good quality dried cranberry as the two are quite similar in texture and taste. Chewy and rich and studded with plump pockets of fruit, these are my regular indulgence if I'm passing the original Surry Hills bakery in Bourke St. But really, you can't beat homemade. We took our cookie smorgasbord to the park with the papers and ate them in the warm winter sun. They spoke volumes.

Roasted almond thumbprints

I hung out with an eight year old on Friday night. I had several half-empty jars of jam in the fridge. We made thumbprints. What's not to like about cooking in which you're required to stick your thumb into a soft mound of dough? What's not to like about filling each little crater with different shades of sweet, sticky jam? What's not to like about something you can make quickly and not have to wait too long to eat? The appeal, really, is universal.

As a rule, the thicker the filling in the thumbprint, the better - the homemade raspberry jam I had was a stunning colour but its runny consistency meant it leaked into the cracks of the cookies, which though delicious, was somewhat less visually enticing. Particuarly successful was lemon curd - a puckering pop of bright, sour sweet against the nutty, buttery base of the cookie. Vegans, if you're feeling hard done by reading this, skip the lemon curd, stick to the jam and check out my friend Elizabeth's recipe for an egg and butter-free version. They're delicious. The ones I made also use nuts - in the form of roasted almonds - which make them slightly more labour-intensive than your basic butter/sugar/flour/egg thumbprint, but I would argue more subtle and satisfying. The cookie tastes of almond rather than sugar, so you're able to appreciate the jam more, and importantly, the combination of the two. Like someone with small thumbs and someone big enough to use an oven. Together, they make one great cookie.

Speculaas

Is it possible for a cookie to be seasonal? After making speculaas last weekend I'd be inclined to argue yes. When it's cold outside, you can't do much better than brown sugar, butter and cinnamon. There's something warming about all of those things, especially when baked into a sweet with an unpronouceable name (your best chance at getting it right is by trying to say it while eating one) and served with your hot beverage of choice.

The darkness comes from the brown sugar and spices (as much mixed spice as cinnamon) and is bolstered by rye flour and almond meal. This is a cookie for blissful hibernation. A winter warmer, designed for dunking.

Swedish coconut cookies

My work/life balance has been seriously out of whack these last weeks which is no doubt why I'm on my second cold of the year and it's only halfway through April. So Anna Brones' and Johanna Kindvall's lovely new book Fika arrived in my mailbox at the perfect time.

Fika (pronounced fee-ka) is the Swedish expression for coffee break. It's not just about the coffee but the little something you have with it. And respect for the ritual. The idea is to stop, to savour, sit still. And so, on Sunday, I did. There are so many recipes from the book I'm looking forward to making, but I just happened to have everything for this one on hand. Chewy, sweet and fragrant with toasted coconut, these are the Scandinavian version of the classic coconut macaroon. They're gluten-free, made only with coconut, butter, sugar, eggs and a pinch of salt. Everyday ingredients for an everyday ritual. I'm going to make it one.

Chocolate spice cookies

There's a lot to be said for simple. Margherita pizza. Good-quality vanilla ice-cream. A plain croissant, fresh out of the oven, with a cup of black coffee. Less is more. And then there's Yotam Ottolenghi, the Israeli-born, London-based chef du jour whose recipes read like an encyclopedia of ingredients. Crazy combinations in odd quantities that echo cultures but aren't conventional, layering tastes, traditions, techniques... More is more. It shouldn't work at all but it does. Case in point: these chocolate spice cookies. 

On my last visit to Hobart, one of my Tasmanian friends presented me with a jar of homemade cookies (is there any better gift?). She's a brilliant baker, and everything in that jar looked incredible but my eye immediately went to these - dark, mysterious, intriguing... They were plump, polka-dotted, glistening with glaze and garnished with gold. Like no other cookie I'd ever seen. I took my first bite and a million flavours exploded at once - bittersweet chocolate, bright citrus, warm spices... Together, they were spectacular. I immediately went home and researched the recipe because I knew they wouldn't last long. Last week, I made them as gifts for friends who'd cheered me up after a crappy day. There's something about these you feel compelled to share.

Graham crackers

In January this year, I did a road trip with a friend down Highway One, on the west coast of the US. The starting point for our trip was San Francisco and before leaving, we stocked up on snacks at the Ferry Plaza Farmers market down at the waterfront. In addition to the many stands outside selling the most amazing fresh produce (and Blue Bottle coffee), there were permanent stores inside just as incredible - cheeses, meats, and bakeries galore... which is how I found myself at Miette, a San Francisco institution, surrounded by delicate pastries, decadent cakes and countless other dazzling sugary treats. My fellow road-tripper Christina, a New Yorker, but frequent visitor to San Fran and Miette, pointed at a downright homely looking cookie - brown, flat, and round. That, she pronounced emphatically. That is what you want. I looked around at the other more obviously enticing choices - pretty pastel macarons, chocolate sablés glittering with salt crystals, elaborate multi-layer cakes - then at Christina's face, which said trust me and I ordered the graham crackers. I'm so glad I did.  

I'd read about graham crackers for years. They were always in American recipes as the biscuit base of a cheesecake, or in children's books as an after school snack. What were they, I wondered? Like a milk arrowroot? A gingernut? A shredded wheatmeal? Or maybe they were savoury, as the name cracker seemed to imply, like a Vita-Wheat or a Salada. (It occurs to me as I write this how oddly-named every country's traditional biscuits/cookies are) It turns out there is no Australian equivalent. 

Graham crackers are basically buttery, honey-flavoured cookies made with wholemeal flour. As noted, they're nothing to look at, but their homeliness is their greatest strength. There's something incredibly comforting about this unassuming cookie. They're warm (honey! brown sugar!) and delicious and easy to make, the sort of everyday cookie you can rely on. You know what else is everyday? The sunset. I saw plenty of those that trip, as I ate my way through that box of graham crackers. And both were spectacular.

Alfajores

I first became aware of dulche de leche a few years ago. It kept popping up on American food blogs - a sweet South American staple which had been appropriated further north as a frosting on cakes, and a flavour of ice-cream. It was paired with bananas in pancakes and muffins, dolloped in thumbprint cookies, oozed out of doughnut holes and molten chocolate desserts, and was purportedly so good, it was eaten straight out of the jar.

The next time I was in the States, I made it my mission to track some down, but I was in Seattle, a town known for many things but not its huge Latino population (or Latino grocery stores).  To cut a long story short, after a great deal of research, I got my hands on two jars (one for me and one for my friend Elizabeth), lugged them all the way back to Australia, only to discover that I could make it myself with nothing more than a tin of condensed milk (readily available in any old supermarket). Well, technically speaking, dulche de leche is made with a few more ingredients, and Smitten Kitchen has a recipe I have no doubt is great if you want to go that route. But just know that the same rich, thick, copper-coloured caramel can be yours with one ingredient, an oven and a bit of time. And once you've got a jar of this stuff, the dessert world is your oyster. It's a quick and easy way to turn something quite standard - like the humble shortbread cookie - into something special.

Alfajores are Argentinian cookies - thick, dark dulche de leche sandwiched between two pale discs of melt-in-your-mouth shortbread. The good news is that the cookies are as easy to make as the caramel. They're lighter than traditional shortbread, a good thing given how rich the filling. I like them with a cup of black coffee to balance the sweetness, but milky coffee drinkers, and drinkers of plain old milk will no doubt revel in the creaminess of that combo. So next time you're in the supermarket, pick up a can of condensed milk. One will yield enough dulche de leche to make these cookies, and leave some leftover for you to experiment with... or just eat straight from the jar. Por qué no?

Wholemeal chocolate chip cookies

You'd think it would be impossible for someone like me, such a devoted devourer of baked goods, to discover anything new about the chocolate chip cookie. But you'd be wrong. For I've recently stumbled across not one but two game-changers. The first is evident in the title of this post: wholemeal flour. Now, I've got nothing against the plain white stuff, as the recipe index of this blog will attest. But wholemeal flour with butter, brown sugar and bittersweet dark chocolate chips is a total revelation, adding a layer of nutty, chewy complexity to a classic cookie combination. So the second revelation: you can freeze cookie dough. Not as one big lump - that would defeat the purpose - but as individually rolled balls, to be taken straight from the freezer, popped on a tray, sprinkled with sea salt and baked to order. 

This means you can have freshly made cookies any time you like. In just sixteen minutes. For unexpected guests. For totally expected cravings. For no reason at all other than to amaze your friends and distract them from the crossword puzzle they insist on enlisting your help in solving even though you are (despite being a writer) totally hopeless at them. A picture tells a thousand words. Say no more.

Ann's biscotti

Certain food I associate with certain people. Chutney, for instance, is my mum's domain. My friend Tammy is famous for her croissants. And my cousin Ann for biscotti. I first had her version of the sweet, dry Italian biscuit on my first trip to the United States, back when I was just twenty-one. When I had an Arts degree with a double major in French, a suitcase full of borrowed winter clothes, and no clue about what direction my life was to take. I didn't know much back then, but I knew I liked those cookies. Previously, the only exposure I'd had to biscotti was the wafer-thin kind found (mostly crushed) in packets in delis where I'd worked. These were the polar opposite - chunky, generous, studded with thick slivers of almond, and perfumed with the aroma of anise seed.

This part of the world with all its mountains and water holds many memories for me. Learning how to make biscotti one rainy winter afternoon - watching hands I know so well make something I love - adds another. I hope sharing the recipe doesn't mean Ann will stop making them for me. I'm priviliged to be on the receiving list at all. It's an exclusive club this biscotti one, comprised of a select few. Some of us with international membership. 

When she bakes them, Ann usually makes a double batch. She's tried tripling the mixture but doesn't recommend it (all works to keep things exclusive). What she does recommend is dunking them in vin santo... or coffee, or tea, as their structure is hardy enough to absorb the liquid without disintegrating into a soggy mess. That's their genius. This cookie doesn't crumble. Not even packed in a suitcase. Lucky me.

Chocolate sablés

Last weekend was kind of busy. I had an apartment to clean, a bag to pack, a scene breakdown to write and Christmas cookies to bake for my neighbours. Fortunately, the latter, at least, was no big deal. I'd made the dough weeks ago, rolled them into logs and stashed them in the freezer so all I had to do on the day was slice and bake. Which meant I had just enough time to test for quality control with a cup of tea (and take a photo). Intensely chocolatey from the double hit of Dutch cocoa and 70% chocolate, these are appropriately luxurious for the season of excess. Though I didn't have enough time to try it out, I reckon they'd be brilliant baked a little larger as the "bread" in an ice-cream sandwich with some softened, good-quality vanilla ice-cream. Another weekend. When I return to summer. And Sydney. See you soon.

Rugelach

Every week when I come to write my post I feel like I'm repeating myself. Inevitably at some point I'll have to go back to check if I've used the phrase "these come together in no time" or "this takes no time to prepare" too recently. This week is different. This cookie - while certainly not difficult in any way - is a little bit more complicated than the usual mix-a-batter-and-drop-by-spoonfuls-onto-the-baking-sheet type of affair. There's more of a process involved. But I'm here to tell you it's totally worth it. I had rugelach for the first time at Zabar's (which for my money is every bit as good as any museum by way of cultural experience) in New York, when I was looking for something small and sweet to accompany my mid-morning coffee. I probably didn't know how to pronounce it (and still kind of don't) but just pointed dumbly at one of the little rolled cookies in the display case. Biting into it, I tasted fruit and nuts and jam and some sort of tang in the crumb that beautifully cut through the intense sweetness. It was chewy and sticky and, in its elegant swirl, a thing of great beauty. I was so absorbed in my enjoyment of it all that I almost missed seeing Bill Cunningham (the eternally youthful, 80-something fashion photographer for The New York Times and subject of a great documentary) ride by on his bike. I was not photo-worthy but had he seen the rugelach, he surely would have stopped. But it was too late. I'd eaten it all.

Nutmeg maple butter cookies

So to Christmas.  As I see it you have two choices.  Spend a horrendous couple of days battling stressed-out shoppers in search of over-priced (and inevitably under-appreciated) gifts, or take a couple of hours one evening to bake.  Cookies are fast, easy to make in large quantities and require very little concentration in their preparation – allowing you listen to a podcast, watch TV, or drink a glass of wine at the same time as solving all your present problems.  You can’t do that in the small appliances section of a department store.  

These butter cookies are simple, yet – with the addition of freshly grated nutmeg and golden maple syrup - luxurious.  While you can make them in any shape you like, I think they look especially sweet cut to resemble leaves.  Package them up prettily with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of thought: click here, here or here for some great ideas.  Happy holidays.

Chocolate puddle cookies

So I had some egg whites to use up.  The last few weeks I've been running down my supplies, eating my way through the contents of my freezer, the bulk of which is surplus stock of whatever meals I've made in the last week, or month or (more likely I suspect) months, plural.  In theory I should enjoy - not to mention find convenient - retrieving something delicious that's available to me instantaneously (or at least, in the time it takes to resurrect it in the microwave) but the truth is, I miss cooking.  Food somehow doesn't taste the same when it's prepared with a bing rather than a hiss or a chop or a bubble.  So imagine my excitement when I found, tucked away behind the catering company quantities of chicken soup (prepared for a monster cold that never eventuated) and solid blocks of Bolognese, a little ziplock bag labelled EGGWHITES X 2.  As it happened, just that week, in a bout of serious food blog procrastination to fill the cooking void, I'd come across a recipe for chocolate puddle cookies.  

The name alone was enough to make me look, the accompanying image further encouragement.  Having made them, I now know it was no false advertising.  These cookies are seriously good, their crisp, cracked exterior giving way to a moist, chewy centre.  Miraculously, they manage to have an intense chocolate flavour without the usual heaviness that accompanies such an indulgence because they're made without butter or flour.  Not that I'm averse to either but some people are, so it's good to have a recipe up my sleeve that satisfies their needs without compromising my own sense of identity (as an eater of all good things).    

My freezer is empty now, my little kitchen a hemisphere away.  I won't be cooking for a while but I've got lots of recipes stored up to share in the weeks ahead.  Hopefully it'll be as therapeutic as finding those eggwhites. 
 

Afghans

In the biscuit world, there are the elegant – the macacrons, the madeleines, the sablés… (the French have it all sewn up basically) and then... there are these.  Hailing from New Zealand via Bedrock, these delicious pebbles of chocolaty goodness are fabulously low-rent, containing as they do, a certain secret ingredient: cornflakes!  I can imagine Fred Flintstone throwing down a few on his coffee break at the quarry, but they’re equally appropriate to serve to friends who come over with their fancy cameras (and IT skills) to help you with your blog.  Ironically, the photographs that resulted make these biscuits look as chic as their more high-class relatives.  But so much more approachable.