A Recipe

Nancy’s Homemade Lemon Cookies with Floral Marshmallow Filling

Ingredients for ~18 sandwich cookies

4	Lemons, zested and juiced (~3/4 c zest – unpacked;  250 ml juice, divided)
½ c.	Confectioners’ sugar, sifted
½ t. + ½ t.	Rosewater or orange blossom water (better)
¼ c. +½ T (1 ½ t)	Honey
1 c.	Vegetable shortening
½ c.	Granulated sugar
1 t.	Vanilla extract
1 t.	Lemon extract or culinary lemon oil
¾ t.	Baking soda
1 t.	Granulated salt
2 1/2 c.	A-P flour
2 large	Albumen (egg white)
1 c.	Granulated sugar
1 c.	water

What to Do

1. Place 1 c. shortening in stand mixer and use paddle attachment to soften with ½ c. confectioners’ sugar, mixing until creamy, scraping bowl as needed.  Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition and scraping bowl.  Fold in zest, 50 ml lemon juice, lemon extract or oil and vanilla extract.  Scrape bowl.
2. Sift together flour, baking soda, and salt.
3. Add flour mixture all at once to shortening mixture and mix just until combined.  Use a silicone or rubber spatula to scrape the bottom of the bowl to mix in anything that isn’t mixed in by the mixer.  Place plastic wrap directly on the surface of the cookie batter and chill in fridge for one hour to overnight.
4. Preheat oven to 375° degrees.
5. Cover baking sheets with silicone liners or parchment paper.
6. Remove cookie batter from fridge and stir to loosen.
7. Drop cookie batter by tablespoonfuls (I use a 1 T. scoop) onto prepared cookie sheets, about twelve per sheet.  They will spread a little.
8. Bake cookies 12-14 minutes, until cookies gain a touch of color around their edges and bottoms.
9. Cool cookies on baking sheets for five minutes, then remove to cool completely on racks.
10. Beat 2 large albumen and ¼ t. tartaric acid in stand mixer on medium until foamy.  Begin beating on high just as the syrup (next step) comes to a boil.
11. Heat 1 c. granulated sugar and 1 c. water over high heat until it reaches soft ball stage (240° degrees).  Stream the hot sugar syrup slowly down the side of the bowl in the stand mixer as it beats the albumen on high, avoiding the whisk.  Keep whipping until the marshmallow becomes glossy.  Whisk in rose water or orange blossom water gently, by hand. 
12. Pair up cookies, spread 1-1½ T marshmallow on half of the cookies, then sandwich with remaining half. 
13. Cookies will keep, in an airtight container, for about a week. 
14. Enjoy with a hot beverage (black tea is appropriate, as the tannins in the tea cuts the sweetness of the marshmallow, and the scent of rose or orange blossom is entrancing).

Pecan Frangipane Pie

I followed a recipe for a pecan pie that utilizes frangipane in place of the goopy non-custard that usually fills pecan pies. It was delicious. I made a couple minor adjustments to the recipe found in Allison Roman’s book, Sweet Enough. I added a teaspoon of almond extract to the filling and, as expected, I decreased the amount of sugar by about a quarter cup. To top it, I whipped some cream sweetened with maple syrup, as I had maple syrup remaining from making the pie.

The crust had, essentially, too much butter, so that when taking it out of the oven, I could easily see the pool of melted butter in which the pie sat. I lifted it right away, then set it onto a cooling rack in the pan for fifteen minutes. After that, I used a can of beans to lift the center out of the ring. I let it cool there, where it was surrounded by air. Then I shifted it onto one of the dinner plates that were purchased for me by my friend, Tom, a young printmaker, while I was in architecture school.
I had a conversation via text with Kat, who suggested that since the “extra” butter didn’t do the tart/pie any harm, to just use the second half as I had been planning. The only potential problem with that is that the other thing I wanted to use it for is a tart that is supposed to be fairly dry, so the extra butter might actually negatively effect the outcome, because there’s nowhere for the extra butter to drain. Maybe I’ll make up another crust to use for the savory, and then use the other half of this pastry for another sweet dessert.
That will entail finding another recipe that, hopefully, doesn’t use quite as much butter. Or I can try substituting shortening for some of the butter. Dunno…

Sunday Thoughts, Plus Recipes for Sweets

I was reading an issue of the New England Journal of Medicine this morning. The first article I read was a case study of a 55-year-old woman who presented with joint pain and aching bones. She had been a cigarette smoker for decades, although I don’t understand the phrase they used to describe how much she smoked. She was described as having a “29-pack-year smoking history.” When I read that to Peter, he said that that’s actually not a very frequent smoking habit, about a pack and a half per month. That changed my reaction, which, initially, was smokers kind of test Fate on a regular basis, don’t they? But I guess what it really indicated was that this person developed non-small cell lung carcinoma through a relatively small dose. In other words, she was not a chain-smoker, though she had smoked for decades at the time she sought medical help for her symptom. I guess it was fortunate(?) that her symptoms pointed specifically to the type of cancer she had because the symptoms were not in her lungs, but in her joints and bones (though I suppose one with a medical background may be more inclined to look for systemic illness). She commenced chemotherapy, but died within months, nonetheless.
I looked at a photo and x-ray images taken of a kid who’d swallowed a US quarter. Strangely, it was oriented vertically, trapped in his trachea with its plane perpendicular to the kid’s tongue. I don’t know how anyone, even a 14-year-old boy, swallows a quarter, not a coin of inconsequential size, “accidentally.” After it was removed, it left damaged mucus membrane.

I prepared tarts yesterday evening after playing Mah Jongg with Corinne, Barb, and Corrine’s coworker and friend, Barbara. It was a pleasant way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Barb and Corrine tasted the brownies I’d made last week, and commented that they were quite tasty. All of them had the cookies I baked the evening before. I had flavored the cookies with maple extract, but sweetened them with dark brown sugar, which added molasses. Corrine said they tasted mildly of rum, which makes sense. Rum is made from molasses, after all.

The tarts were a combination of three separate recipes: lemon curd, pastry cream, and rough puff pastry.
The lemon curd was the easiest for me, as I’ve been making lemon curd for many, many years, going on three decades now:

Lemon Curd for Tarts
2 large lemons, washed to remove wax
3 oz. granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 oz. unsalted butter
1/4 t table salt

Zest and juice the lemons. Discard the pith, seeds, membranes.
Melt and cool the butter.
Add zest to sugar, salt, and lemon juice. Stir to dissolve sugar a little bit.
Place all ingredients, including eggs, into a heavy-bottomed nonreactive saucepan and heat over medium heat, whisking constantly, until it thickens and turns opaque. Lower heat to low and continue whisking constantly for another five to ten minutes. Set curd aside to cool.

Pastry Cream for Tarts
1 c whole milk (I used lactase-added)
1 c heavy cream
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 T potato starch
99 g granulated sugar
2 t vanilla extract
1/4 t table salt

Beat eggs thoroughly in a medium-sized bowl. Add sugar and keep beating until eggs lighten slightly.
Pour milk and cream into a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Whisk in potato starch and salt.
Stir over medium heat until mixture begins releasing wisps of steam and thickens slightly, indicating the starch is fully cooked.
Temper eggs by adding one cup of the hot milk-cream mixture, streaming one half cup at a time, while whisking constantly.
Pour egg mixture into saucepan with remaining milk-cream mixture and stir until thickened and smooth. Stir in vanilla extract. Set aside to cool.

Flaky Butter Pastry for Tarts
60-130 ml water (smaller mount for sea level; higher amount for 6200′ altitude, where I live)
1 T granulated sugar
1.25 t table salt
150 g whole wheat flour
150 g a-p flour
225 g butter, cut into small cubes and frozen

Boil 75 ml water, remove from heat, dissolve salt and sugar in it, pour into a heatproof, sealed container, and set aside to cool before placing in fridge to chill until ready to use. Place remaining water in a measuring cup with ice.
Weigh flours into a large bowl. Drop butter cubes into the bowl, and toss to coat. Wearing gloves, flatten butter cubes between thumbs and fingers into small sheets, making sure to continue tossing to coat all the butter pieces. Place covered bowl in freezer for fifteen minutes.
Put your gloves back on.
Dump the flour-butter mixture onto a very lightly floured countertop. Gather into a pile, then make a divot in the middle.
Add the chilled salted and sweetened water to the flour mixture, tossing to distribute liquid without “working” the gluten, thereby reducing gluten development and providing a flakier finished pastry.
Roll pastry, gathering the bits and folding a few times, until it’s a cohesive rough rectangle or circle. Wrap tightly in plastic and chill for 15 minutes in fridge. Make sure curd and pastry cream are cool, or place them in the fridge, too.

Assemble Tarts
oven to 425 F.
Dust countertop with flour.
Remove pastry from fridge and roll out to about 3/32″ thickness, turning over with a bench scraper each time you change rolling orientation to prevent the pastry from sticking to the countertop.
Cut out circles of pastry that will accommodate your baking pan cups. To figure size needed, measure the base of the cup. Add double the depth of the cup, then add a half inch to accommodate shrinkage.
Fit pastry circles into the baking cups in the pan.
Measure about 2 T of pastry cream into each pastry cup, then follow with a 1 T dollop of lemon curd in the center of the cream.
Bake tarts for about 25-30 minutes, until you can discern some of the layers in the pastry when you open the door and peek inside.
Cool tarts in pan on cooling rack completely.
Loosen the tarts with a butter knife and large spoon and store in an airtight container until ready to serve.

Maple Cookies (makes about 30)
1.25 c (scooped and leveled) a-p flour
1 c (scooped and leveled) whole wheat flour
1/2 c unsalted butter
1/2 c vegetable shortening
2/3-3/4 c turbinado or brown sugar
1 t vanilla extract
2 t maple extract
1 large egg
2 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
1 t table salt

Combine flours, baking powder, and baking soda. Set aside.
Soften butter and beat in shortening and sugar, scraping bowl afterwards.
Add egg, extracts, and salt, beating until mixture is smooth and creamy.
Scrape the bowl again.
Add the flour mixture all at once, and mix in, slowly at start to prevent flour from flying everywhere.
Place plastic wrap on surface of pastry and place bowl in fridge.
Chill pastry for 30 minutes, minimum.
Heat oven to 375 F.
Scoop batter by tablespoonfuls on silicone- or parchment-lined baking sheets.
Bake cookies for 12-13 minutes, until lightly browned.
Cool cookies on pans on cooling racks for 5 minutes, then place them directly onto a cooling rack until cooled completely. Store in an airtight container.