Tagbaking

Cookie Week 2020

By Jessi Spell
In Cookie Week
December 9, 2020

At least around here, holiday baking is the best kind of baking. December is an excuse to try all the new cookie recipes I’ve been bookmarking, and the holidays make a perfect excuse for pawning off excess on friends gifting baked goods.

So. Welcome to five days of saccharine madness.

If you want to bake along, here’s what you can expect next week, plus shopping lists (which I haven’t converted to metric yet) if you want to follow along:

Pecan Pie Sandwich Cookies: NYT Cooking

Honestly, these sound so good that I actually might not make any tweaks – high praise coming from someone practically incapable of following the recipe as written.

You’ll need:

  • 325 grams pecan halves
  • 225 grams all-purpose flour
  • 340 grams (3 sticks) unsalted butter
  • 40 grams powdered sugar
  • 295 grams brown sugar (the recipe calls for light brown – I will probably use dark)
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 ea egg yolk
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 80 grams dark corn syrup
  • 1 tablespoon bourbon
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The quest begins: honey oat sandwich bread v. 01

By Jessi Spell
In Uncategorized
November 13, 2020
An overhead shot of two pieces of bread thickly spread with butter and raspberry jam sitting on a white plate. One piece sits slightly atop the other. A knife is resting on the bottom-most piece of bread. In the top left corner, you can see part of a white crock.

I was on the hunt for a new sandwich bread recipe to try last week, partly as a distraction from, you know, *gestures vaguely* the everything, and partly because my current go-to isn’t made with whole wheat in mind. It has a tendency to either misbehave in the proof and get really rough and open crumbed, or dry out and stale quickly, and I don’t love that. Plus, I love honey-oat sandwich bread, and this doesn’t quite fit the bill.

Enter King Arthur Baking Company’s Vermont Whole Wheat Honey Oatmeal Bread. It ticked a bunch of my boxes – it is designed specifically for whole wheat flour, it includes both honey and oats, and it has a lovely nearly-one-bowl mixing method that melts my little dishes hating heart. So I baked it. And it was delicious. A beautiful, pillowy-soft crumb that reminded me of the best kinds of cheap squishy supermarket sandwich bread, the faintest whiff of cinnamon to play off the oats, enough tooth to keep things interesting, and, best of all, it didn’t get noticeably dry or stale-tasting until nearly the end of the week.

It was, however, very sweet. We’re talking cinnamon roll-without-the-icing type sweet. Which was amazing spread with butter for breakfast, or for PB&Js…not so much what I’m going for in ham and cheese.

So I decided to hack it.

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Jessi Spell

A culinary degree and two years of professional experience has not stopped Jessi from making stupid mistakes – she just makes them more efficiently. She habitually reads cookbooks before bed, loses track of time on Wikipedia, and yells at cooking shows like dads watching football. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Jackson, five plants, and more cookbooks than a 600 square foot studio should hold.

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