Thank you ! A couple of granddaughters dropped by and took half home…they were very happy with it.
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I need help with a recipe I was volunteered to make for a wedding.
This is a Crisco-era “Italian cookie” recipe I was given on an old recipe card. I just made a half-batch of as a trial. The cookies are not good; they frankly remind me of Bisquick-type “biscuits.” You are supposed to split them in half, dig out a little well and fill it with jam, then replace the top and dust with powdered sugar. They are dry, not flavorful, difficult to split, and don’t really look pretty.
Since the point of this nostalgia cookie is nostalgia, I’m most interested in finding out what these are supposed to look and taste like (versus rewriting the recipe completely.) For your reference:
1.5 c sugar
1.5 c Crisco
6 eggs
1 tsp salt
2 tsp vanilla
8 c flour
1 cup milk
8 tsp (!) baking powder
Basic cream method, then add eggs and vanilla, then flour and milk. Roll into balls and bake briefly.
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From your photo I was reminded of baci di dama, but the recipe doesn’t resemble them at all.
Recipe looks ok outside of the Crisco and the fact that it’s a low amount of fat for all that flour. The sugar is low, too, but that can be ok for sandwich type cookies. Baking powder is fine since it’s basically 1 tsp per cup of flour, and that’s a lot for a cookie, but if the cookie is biscuit-like I can see it. Milk is kind of weird for that style of cookie, but not for a biscuit-like result. Salt is low.
I’m going to see if I can remember an Italian cookie that is similar to that.
Exactly right. Not enough fat, first and most egregious problem. Here’s a funny thing: when i was measuring out the milk, I put Mom’s skim milk back in the fridge and used my raw grass-fed deliciously incredibly creamy full-fat milk. I imagine if I had used the skim, I would’ve spit the first one out when I tasted it!
They’re also not sweet enough for me, although I must say, that’s my impression generally of Italian-American cookies - from Italian-American bakeries, that is. I’ve never had homemade, I don’t think.
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Ha, I usually find Italian baked goods more sweet than I like. I mean, even rainbow cookies, which I love, I find pretty sweet. But I can see what you mean for some of the butter cookies, which I tend to love for that reason.
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The cookies are better today, flavor wise, but even harder to split and scoop without crumbling.
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Mini popover pan? !!!
Yes, it’s Nordic Ware petit popover pan.
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Still working my way through this cookbook before I have to return to the library next week. I made “unbirthday cake cookies” with a smidge of almond extract, white chocolate chips and sprinkles. I like that it makes a small batch of cookies ( supposed to be 10, I got 14). Sample was tasty…
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Found this looking for what to do with a lot of sweet cherries and I am intrigued. Do you know of a good recipe for what I think must be cowboy cookies? I found one in NYT but it was a cookie not a bar cookie.
I will continue to “chew on” your subs!
I felt the Quaker Oats recipe worked well as a bar cookie (they give the instructions at the bottom of the page). Since I always sub some of the oats with coconut in oatmeal cookies, adding some additional dried fruit and nuts was not a stretch. I haven’t searched too hard for anything other. Most traditional Cowboy Cookie recipes, for my taste, rely too much on the chocolate.
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While I have you, any thoughts about drying sweet cherries to use here? Somehow I think you might know!
I haven’t tried drying cherries, although I’ve done both whole blueberries and grapes. My experience with dehydrating whole fruits or berries is that they all have to be pretty much the exact same size (thickness) so that they are ready (more or less) all at the same time. If you’ve a bunch of (more or less) uniformly sized cherries, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. My inclination would be to pit them, halve them, and then dehydrate them cut-side up. Halving them would speed up the process. Placing them cut-side up in the dryer would help prevent them from sticking to the screen.
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I’m hoping to try making a jammy oatmeal bar with semi-dried sweet cherries. I don’t have a screen or dedicated dehydrator. I’m using a half sheet pan, parchment paper and the dehydrator setting on a Breville Smart oven.
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Won’t it be the opposite of jammy if the fruit is dried?
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Like if I wanted jammy, I might cook the fruit down to cook the water out, then use the resulting jam for the bars.
I’m using “a jammy oatmeal bar” as the idea of a type of recipe I use, but I’m thinking of the dried fruit in the “cowboy cookies”. I see it’s actually “jammy fruit bars”, and the recipe lets you use jam or fruit. The last batch was a bit too sweet and too jammy. And I made some oatmeal bars a month ago that I would like to try again.
I’ll stop writing until I sort it out.
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