Category: Cookies, Biscuits and Slices

Pistachio coffee salted caramel slice

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Three pieces of caramel slice arranged on a blue plate
It’s important to record how and what we eat, as a criterion of social history, reflecting us back at ourselves mouthful by mouthful. For example, when I first wrote about this salted caramel slice thirteen years ago in 2011, I said:

“There are many things in life to be afraid of. But, being a person who tends rapidly towards non-endearingly sweaty anxiety I can say this with confidence: adding salt to your caramel slice — or your caramel anything — should not be on that list of things you fear.”

Which is, in the fullness of hindsight, kind of hilarious. Salted caramel is so utterly normal now to the point of prosaic that it’s easily the default and I’m surprised when the word ‘caramel’ appears without its salted qualifier. It’s like walking in on someone in a state of half-dress — where’s its pants?

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lemon, turmeric, black pepper and white chocolate cookies

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Lemon turmeric cookies with white chocolate drizzled on them

Patience is not an attribute I’m overburdened with, as you’ll be able to corroborate if you ever witness me bashing the crossing light buttons at an intersection and the up or down arrows on an elevator. However, patience demonstrated her rewards to me with these lemon, turmeric, black pepper and white chocolate cookies, which started off fine, blameless, but not quite right on day one — too crisp and crunchy, prompting a back-to-the-drawing-board sigh. By day two they’d relaxed and softened and become exactly what I wanted — tender, yielding, just a little chewy. Though I’m not the most credible ambassador for ongoing acts of patience; in this case — I get it!

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Ginger, lemon, and brown butter kisses

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ginger cookies on a cooling rack

Logic would suggest — dictate, even — that balance is of foremost and utmost importance when considering a recipe’s sweetness; and I’m not here to tell you that’s falsehood and calumny. But sometimes, as Robert Frost suggested, the only way out is through, and the only way to challenge sweetness is to run at it, headlong and dauntless, with more sweetness. This madcap attitude is how I came to create, back in 2011, a pavlova covered in Smarties which was insolently exquisite and appallingly logical (and I notice deep in this ancient blog post that thirteen years later I still haven’t acted upon the notion to create a pavlova with a cream cheese-based topping but I’m writing it down in my notebook; sometimes you have to look to the past to move into the future!) This is also how I came to dip the already molasses-heavy Joe Frogger cookies into skull-achingly sweet white chocolate; and this is how I came to adapt those cookies and sandwich them together with icing to create these ginger, lemon, and brown butter kisses. Sometimes more is not simply more, it’s enough.

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Got lemons? Get 18 lemon recipes.

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I’ve intended to photograph and write about food for the entirety of July thus far and have either been too tired, too busy, too tired from being busy, or not blessed with photography daylight to achieve anything (other than being incredibly grumpy about my lack of blogging). After lugging a spirit-liftingly full bag of lemons back to town with me following my last visit home, it occurred to me that a jaunty interstitial in the form of a round-up of lemon recipes could temporarily countermand this issue. Naturally, it immediately created a new burden of chaotic formatting and link-hunting; after all that I’m not sure if the lemon recipes I’ve gathered are that useful, but they are at least mildly out of the ordinary to anyone expecting a lemon meringue pie here.

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Quadruple Crunch Bars

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Come the hour, come the time where one is compelled to shun righteous and elegant cookies and instead embrace slatternish recipes that involve several fully formed foods in their ingredients list. This happens roughly once every ten days, truth be told, and in this case, I acted upon this tawdry urge. Kind of: halfway through unwrapping individual Werthers Originals and slicing their squat, crystallised bodies into golden shards, I lost all energy to complete the cookie-rolling and waiting part of the transaction and certainly didn’t want to wish it upon anyone else; as such, what began as cookies became these Quadruple Crunch Bars instead; you still have to slice up lollies but it’s oddly satisfying, for what it’s worth.

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Lemon Feta Pistachio Cookies

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For quite some time — coinciding with me nervously and vaguely muttering “freelancer” whenever anyone asked what I did for a job — I had a Patreon account where I shared recipes and interminable snippets of poetry and manuscripts to a supportive group of subscribers. I’ve since closed it down, now that I have a real live job, but one of these for-your-eyes-only recipes was a lemon curd made with preserved lemons that I was inordinately fond of. I had of late imagined a salted lemon ripple ice cream flowing with that very curd, but couldn’t find any preserved lemons within a walkable radius. No mere velleity, the thought of lemon and salt together lingered, and, nudged along by the flavours of the Palestinian dessert knafeh, the idea morphed deliciously into these Lemon, Feta, and Pistachio cookies.

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white chocolate-dipped joe frogger cookies

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I have all the time in the world for a droll, old-timey recipe title, the more obtuse and obscured in layers of misheard words and regional vernacular the better. Fortunately, as well as having the kind of eye-catching name that caught my eye and made me want to bake them instantaneously, these Joe Froggers are also strikingly delicious.

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Nigella’s Granny Boyd’s Biscuits

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I have always faltered at getting the timing right; I either play my cards so soon they haven’t yet been dealt, or I over-project meaning onto something and never get to achieve it at all. On my birthday two years ago I found — in a moment of pure magic that I still haven’t processed — Judy Holliday’s 1958 Trouble is a Man record, a circle of vinyl I didn’t even know existed in New Zealand, let alone for me, let alone on my birthday. For some reason, I promised myself that I wouldn’t listen to it until I had my very own space, beholden to no one but myself and my whims (and also my landlord) and that alone would be the perfect context to finally absorb this record. Two years and then some passed, and I have, as of December 1st, at last moved into a place where I am the only resident, and yet — I don’t know, it still just hasn’t been quite right, I haven’t been in the right frame of mind, and so I still haven’t listened to this record despite it meaning the world to me.

I have, however, made some cookies, and I baked a loaf of bread, and both were Nigella Lawson recipes, so despite my existential fumbling for the needlessly unattainable, this new place is undeniably mine, all mine now. (And my landlord’s. But for the purposes of romantic drollery: mine, all mine.) If in doubt, Nigella. If really in doubt: Nigella and chocolate.

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kūmara chocolate button cookies

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Even someone as relatively jaded as I can occasionally still have my brain rewired by a tweet, for example, the claim by Folu (of Unsnackable acclaim) that chocolate chip cookies should have 30% less chocolate. (And I am nothing if not a scholar; historians found records of this opinion dating as far back as 2014.) It seems counter-intuitive — what, after all, is the point of chocolate if not to push you to take its presence to the extreme in every possible application — and yet it makes sense; cookies themselves should be the main character, not a merely tolerated and oversaturated vessel, if you want it that much just eat some chocolate. It was this tweet that guided my hand while making these kūmara chocolate button cookies; each softly mountainous ball of dough holds three chocolate buttons, tops, and that contained rarity only adds to the chocolate’s allure.

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Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Snacking Cake with Brown Sugar Icing

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Look, I am standing with a foot on both sides of the fence here: I still find the phrase “snacking cake” irritating and yet continuously, willfully bake cakes that undeniably fit this billing. I think it started when I got myself a 25cm square tin: such width, such surface area, there’s something so accessible and appealing and genuinely snackable about the cakes its shallow walls bear. The latest iteration is this Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Snacking Cake with Brown Sugar Icing; yes, it’s a cake, but it’s definitely of the snacking variety, almost veering into slice territory. After getting most of my disdain out of the way with my Lemon Polenta Snacking Cake I’ve probably got about one more cake like this left before I have to give up on the whole scornful thing and just proceed in earnest.

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