Dear accidental cooks and haste-makes-wasters,
These delicious cookies almost
never happened – they almost became a costly tragedy! Flying around the kitchen like a whirling
dervish, sometimes the cooking bloodlust fills your eyes and you get going so
fast you can’t see the corners as you go around them. Pit stops for hand-washing between raw meat and
fresh salad become blindingly efficient, scalding water and soap bubbles
exploding, and onions are chopped and thrown into the pot of hot oil before one
barely has time to find a knife. And so
disaster can happen in an instant, it can strike without warning. But let me start at the beginning …
It was a bright, sunny Friday in
fall, and Mr H and I were planning to have three or four of the guys over
for dinner – and sometimes word spreads about these sorts of events and the
numbers can grow without my knowledge, so I always have to be prepared. It’s downright impossible for any social cook
to turn away a hungry guest, and I didn't want to disappoint!
These guys were in training,
and with all their physical exertion could easily put away a ten to twelve-thousand calorie lunch (that’s the
equivalent of five or six Red Robin burgers) and I’d seen them sit on my couch and inhale tottering stacks of
thick whole-grain pancakes without blinking; so dinner had to be something more
substantial than milquetoast and tea. I
got up early and started my preparations: I had come up with a list of dense
foods that would all be relatively inexpensive to make. We would have biscuits, meatloaf, mashed
potatoes, roasted carrots, gravy, Caesar salad, homemade barbecue sauce, and a
rich apple cake for dessert – a regular carbohydrate orgy. And there would be plenty of each item!
Since I’m the only female around
these parts and the guys could get off work as late as eight at night, I knew
I’d have my hands full with preparations come evening. I did as much in advance as I could. After washing the kitchen down spic-and-span (I
can’t cook quickly in a mess!) and making sure all ten of my dishes were clean,
I mixed the dry ingredients for the biscuits in a bowl and set them on one
counter with their respective recipe, forks to mix in the fat, and a cup of
measured dry buttermilk powder. On
another counter I set up my stand mixer and, in a separate bowl, whisked
together all of the dry ingredients for the cake. I set the butter next to the stand mixer to
soften, put the recipe on top of the bowl, and went about my day grocery
shopping and cleaning.
Back
home, preparations went into full swing.
It was early afternoon, and surprisingly the men were already off work. My husband and two of the fellas settled in
the living room eating a quickly-made lunch of soup and cheesy bread, busily sharpening knives, and I whizzed about the kitchen at full speed. I beat eggs, sugar, all the good things for
cake, and dumped in the dry ingredients.
The mixer slowed as the dough thickened – wait a minute – dough? I screeched to a halt and stared into the
bowl. This was not cake batter! I
released the lock on the mixer and the paddle lifted. Instead of a rich yellow batter dripping from
the metal apparatus, a thick dough congealed about it in a massive blob.
The
dough stared at me reproachfully.
“No!”
came my anguished cry from the kitchen.
My
husband came in to investigate. I was
staring at the bowl in agony. “What’s
wrong?” he asked, as a mixer full of dough in my house is usually not cause for alarm.
I
realized what had happened even as I stood there.
I pointed a trembling finger here, then there. “I mixed the wet ingredients for the cake –
with the dry ingredients for the biscuits!”
“Hmm, well …” my husband looked from me to the
mixer. In the living room, nobody else seemed to share my concern.
“It’s a
waste!” I raised hue and cry. Wasting
food is horrible in any instance, but this was eggs and butter and sugar –
expensive ingredients as ingredients go, and I hardly had enough to spare!
But the
treacherous mixture had to be dealt with, so I started thinking. The dough looked thick enough to stand in the
oven, so I prepared a cookie sheet and piled on blobs. I threw it in the oven at a random
temperature and tried to regain my momentum, remixing all the ingredients for
biscuits and cake. The first pan emerged
looking hopeful, and I broke off a piece and ate it. I took a plate out to the living room.
“Would
you like,” I said, “a biscuit-cookie?”
One of the guys gingerly picked off
a corner. “Are you sure it’s good?” he
said warily.
“Oh yes,” I said. “Eat it.”
He cautiously put the bite in his
mouth.
Moments later the plate was empty
as they all cheered. “You should sell
this recipe!” one of them applauded.
“This is so good!”
Throughout
the rest of the evening, no matter what was in the oven – meatloaf, carrots,
biscuits – there was always a second pan of cookies baking. My cookie sheet only held a few at a time so
it took a while, and the temperatures ranged from 350 to a soaring 450.
Butterscotch
Biscuit-Cookies
These are especially good if the next day you toast them briefly in the toaster oven – they magically taste like toasted marshmallows!!!! The cookies are tender-soft, their flavor complex and mellow. Even days later, they are still soft! They freeze well, and are soft when they thaw. I would guess this makes about 4 or 5 dozen – I do not quite remember how many I ended up with as they were eaten as they came out of the oven!
Whisk together the doubled dry ingredients from Cook’s
Illustrated Best American Classics buttermilk biscuits:
4 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
Set aside.
In a stand mixer or bowl, we will have the wet ingredients
from a single batch of King Arthur Flour’s Legacy Apple Cake.
Cream together:
1 cup softened butter
1 cup light or dark brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
Beat in, one at a time:
3 large eggs
Mix in:
¼ cup cider or apple juice concentrate
1 generous teaspoon Mapleine (I used Mapleine instead of
vanilla, which the original recipe calls for.
You can use vanilla, buttercream, or whatever flavoring you have on
hand. The Mapleline & brown sugar
lends the cookies that decadent butterscotch flavor.)
Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix with the paddle
or a wooden spoon until just mixed.
Put generous tablespoonfuls on ungreased parchment paper (if
it is greased, the cookies will spread too far in the heat and be thin around
the edges).
Bake at approximately 350 degrees F for 8 to 12 minutes,
checking for doneness frequently with the first batch. Take them out while they are still soft, but
browning around the edges and on top.
Even if they are over baked, they will stay soft – I know this because I
forgot about a pan or two so a few cookies were very well done!
Serve to hungry boys or freeze.
Variation: Mix in peanut butter chips, or really any
chip.
from tragedy to triumph,
Mrs H
twitter.com/_mrs_h