Trifecta! Cookie Perfection!

Quick! What's your favorite kind of cookie? Is it a golden, bumpy, chocolate studded masterpiece? Crumbly cross-hatched peanut butter? Virtuous oatmeal cookie with raisins and a punch of cinnamon? I'm here to announce that you don't have to choose. Problem solved! 

I present to you Three Cookies in One, a Trifecta of cookie perfection. It's every good thing held together with a little bit of dough. Perfect, right?! What's even better is you can mix your dough, bake one pan of cookies to kill the craving, then save the rest to bake later. I usually put the mixing bowl full of dough right in the fridge, then try to muscle it out with a scoop. I've broken a scoop or two this way and bent some of my spoons. Oh the horror!

This time, I scraped the dough out into a shallow container, snapped on the lid, and the next day,  the dough popped right out of the container in a perfect slab of dough. AHA! I cut it into squares with my bench scraper (of course a knife will do the trick) and roughly formed the squares into balls. Into the oven and voila! The revelation was so exciting I just had to share.

When I described my discovery to my friend Ashley, she looked at me like I was insane, confessing she eats the dough raw. We all have our weaknesses. Happy Cooking!

Three Cookies in One (aka Trifecta Cookies)

• 1 stick butter (1/2 cup), slightly softened
• 1 cup peanut butter
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
• 3/4 teaspoon coarse salt
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup PB powder*
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon baking soda 
• 3 cups rolled oats
• 1 cup dark chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup raisins or dried cherries
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts or peanuts

HEAT the oven to 350. CREAM the butter and peanut butter together and mix in the sugars and salt. MIX well and add the eggs, vanilla, PB powder, cinnamon and baking soda, mixing to incorporate. ADD the oats, chocolate chips, raisins, and walnuts and stir to blend. DROP teaspoonfuls of the dough onto parchment-lined baking sheets about 2 inches apart. BAKE for 10 minutes until golden (for a chewier cookie) or 12 minutes for crunchy cookies. COOL on the sheets before storing in an airtight container.

Counter Intelligence tip! Scrape your dough out into a shallow container with a snug-fitting lid and press it into an even layer. Snap on the lid and chill it overnight or up to 3 days. Turn the slab of dough out onto a cutting board and cut into small squares (looking for about 48 cookies total). Shape the dough squares into balls and bake as above. (If the dough is still cold--Louisiana kitchens tend to warm the dough quickly!--the cookies may need an extra minute or two).

Makes about 4 dozen

World Peace Cookies

If you only ever make one cookie recipe for the rest of your life, let this be it. This recipe comes from Dorie Greenspan, a chef and cookbook author who wrote several of our family's favorite cookbooks (if you need a good all-purpose baking cookbook, you can't go wrong with her Baking From My Home to Yours). Dorie calls these "world peace" cookies because she claims that they're so good that they could inspire world peace. I think she's right. 

These cookies are soft cocoa-y, full of chunks of bittersweet chocolate. They're a little salty, which sets off the chocolate and makes them even more addictive. They come together really quickly, plus they're slice and bake so you don't even have to spend time rolling them out. The dough freezes well, so you can make a double batch and save half in the freezer for when you have an urgent chocolate craving and you want to have warm, melty cookies in less than 15 minutes. 

World Peace Cookies

• 1 1/4 cup flour 
• 1/3 cup cocoa powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 stick plus 3 Tablespoons of butter at room temperature
• 2/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 5 oz. bittersweet chocolate, chopped

Mix up the flour, cocoa, and baking soda in a mixing bowl. Sift it if it's lumpy. 

Cream the butter in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment until it starts to get fluffy. Add the sugars, the salt, and the vanilla and continue beating it until it's light and fluffy, about 2 minutes more.

Turn off the mixer and add the flour mixture to the butter and sugar. Cover the bowl of the mixer with a kitchen towel to keep the flour from flying all over the place. Mix it until the flour is just incorporated. Then add the chopped up chocolate and mix a little more until it's all combined. The dough might be a little crumbly. This is okay. 

Lay out a piece of plastic wrap on the counter. Scoop half of the dough onto the plastic wrap and form it into a log that's about an inch and a half in diameter. Wrap it tightly in the plastic wrap and put the log in the fridge. Do the same thing with the other half of the dough (or put them in the freezer if you want to save them for later). Let the dough chill for at least 3 hours. 

When you are almost ready to bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Cut the log of dough into slices that are about half an inch thick. No worries if the slices crumble all over the place. You can just squish them back together. Place the cookies on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and bake for 12 minutes. The cookies won't look completely done, but they'll firm up as they cool.

With thanks to guest blogger Sara Hamilton

Wedding Shortbread

The butter’s perfume still envelopes me even though my bake-a-thon was months ago. Seven pounds of butter, proportionally blended with flour, rice flour, superfine sugar and a hefty pinch of coarse salt, transformed into 400 shortbread cookies. 

Looking at the photos transports me back to the kitchen and the aroma from the dough clinging to my hands, then wafting its sweet scent from the oven. I can hear the laughter and chatter and the playlist provided by my baking partner.

My niece Lauren was getting married and I hesitantly offered to make the cake. Thank goodness she already had that covered! Smart girl knew to leave the cake decorating to the experts. Instead, we decided on cookies. Two per person, wrapped and ribboned, as party favors. 

I commandeered my sister’s Florida kitchen and convinced my daughter Sara to skip the beach and join me in the baking fun. Six hours later, every surface of the kitchen was decorated with delicate cookies.

It took us a while to hit our stride, but before long, we developed a method to our madness. I made the dough, slicing four sticks of cool butter, tossing it with the dry ingredients, then mixing in the KitchenAid mixer on low. It turned from butter and flour into an elegant dough in minutes.

I scraped the dough onto a big sheet of parchment, passed it to Sara, then mixed another batch. Then another, and so on. Sara rolled the dough into balls and dipped them in sugar, then pressed with a custom stamp with a three-letter monogram that the bride had ordered. Then into the oven, set the timer and press ahead. Periodically, Sara would stretch her arms to relieve her burning deltoids. 

We managed numerous math problems, hoping that we had the right equation to get our cookie count finished so we could clock out of the kitchen in time for an airport run. “Don’t forget to account for a burned pan,” Sara taunted. It’s inevitable, the pan of burnt cookies. Miraculously, not a single cookie burned. Our choreography finally measured up.

While we focused on our baking project, we wove in stories and wondered who would be the next to get married. Sara helped with some out-loud editing of my book (so nice having an editor in the family!), and we raised our lemonade glasses to my sister Lisa who is the Shortbread Queen.

Love and laughter in the kitchen, plus a little slapstick comedy made for the perfect way to start the celebration of the big family wedding. Every little flashback to this bake-a-thon puts a smile on my face and I’m surrounded with the sweet fragrance of butter.

Scotch Shortbread

My sister Lisa started the tradition of making shortbread for weddings and she reluctantly shared her secret recipe with me. It originated from Lisa’s friend’s Scottish aunt. This is my interpretation of Aunt Agnes’s classic recipe. This recipe can easily be halved for a quick baking project when the shortbread craving strikes.

Makes about 5 dozen

• 4 cups unbleached flour
• 1 cup rice flour
• 1 cup superfine sugar*
• 1/2 teaspoon coarse salt (I love JQ Dickinson Salt)
• 1 pound cold unsalted butter, cut into thin slices
• Additional sugar for baking the cookies

Combine the flour, rice flour, superfine sugar, and salt in a large mixing bowl (preferably for an electric stand mixer) and toss in the butter slices. Mix on low speed until a dough forms, scraping bowl as needed.

Heat oven to 325. Shape the dough into balls the size of walnuts and dip in sugar. Place the balls about one inch apart on parchment lined baking sheets (do not use dark sheets which will cause the cookies to burn). Press each sugared dough ball with a cookie stamp.

Bake each sheet until cookies are light golden, about 18-20 minutes, rotating the sheets after 10 minutes. Repeat with remaining dough. Cool the cookies on a rack before packaging.

*if superfine sugar is not available, you can make your own. Blend 3/4cup granulated sugar in a blender on high speed for a minute or so, until the sugar is very fine. This will make 1 cup of superfine sugar.

Custom cookie stamps can be ordered from cookiestamp.com