The most delicious, buttery, adaptable cookie recipe ever
Plus an extra recipe for dreamy pecan and maple cookies - or do you call them biscuits? - to make for yourself or to give to others. Your kitchen will smell amazing.
Welcome to Pen and Spoon! This week I’d sharing a couple of wonderful cookie recipes with you, plus tips on how to adapt the basic recipe with all sorts of different flavours and additions to make them your own. They make great gifts - if you can stay away from them long enough. The recipes are for paid subscribers only, as financial support support makes this newsletter and all the research, writing and recipe testing possible. I’d love you to join our community - for a little under £1 a week. Or give a subscription as a Christmas gift! Just click below.
Apparently it’s Cookie Week in the US, a time when Thanksgiving feasting gives way to a period of baking, nibbling and ‘gifting’ cookies. There’s no such nationally embraced tradition in the UK - although we do have our own baked-good eccentricities in the shape of mince pies, of which we devour an estimated and quite extraordinary 800 million each year, apparently.
But during the festive period we Brits go hard into baking mode and in that spirit some of us - including me - love to bake ‘biscuits’, the preferred term in the UK. At this time of year at my house we stamp them into Christmassy shapes, douse them in garish icing and edible glitter, and hang them on the Christmas tree where they delight us until the dog eats them all. The recipe for these is in The Kids Only Cookbook (a fantastic Christmas present, it’s full of recipes I designed for kids to make on their own. An international best seller and available here for a bargain price!)
It’s something I’ve done with kids since they were tiny, and as adults they still love doing it. Also, I’ve also come to realise the value of keeping a stash of biscuit dough in the freezer, so I can bake some at a moment’s notice when visitors pop by, or to take to someone’s home as a gift.
So, what’s the difference between a cookie and a biscuit? To many people the terms are interchangeable, but to my mind they’re distinctly different morsels. To me, cookies imply something richer, softer and chewier than the crisper biscuits the British traditionally dunk in their tea, like a Hobnob. I did some research into this once, and discovered that the US developed its world-famous cookie tradition thanks to generations of immigrants from all over Europe who took their recipes for flat, sweet baked confections with them. In fact, cookie evolved from the Dutch koekje, meaning ‘little cake’. (Biscuit, on the other hand, derives from the Latin panis biscoctus, ‘bread twice cooked’.)
US cookies flourished in the 1930s with the arrival of the electric range in many home kitchens, allowing for cookies to be baked at the all-important precise and consistent temperature. After this “there was no stopping the march of the Cookie Monster”, according to The American Century Cookbook.
Although cookies/biscuits come in a myriad shapes and forms, they generally fall into two categories: drop and refrigerator. Drop are made with a soft batter-like dough spooned or scooped onto a baking sheet: the dough spreads out into a cookie shape in the heat of the oven. Refrigerator cookies/biscuits are made with stiffer dough that absolutely needs to be chilled before baking. The butter in cold dough takes longer to melt than when it’s at room temperature, so the cookies hold their shape better in the oven. It really does make a difference.
Either style of dough can be frozen. For drop cookies, chill the dough, then scoop out and roll into balls. Arrange on a freezer-proof board or tray, freeze and then transfer to ziplock bags. Freezing the balls of dough when they’re spread out on a tray prevents them sticking together). For refrigerator cookies, roll the dough into logs, wrap in baking parchment and cling film, and freeze. When you’re ready to bake, defrost the log just enough to slice into 5mm cut them into slices, then wrap them in clingfilm and store them in the freezer, then cut into 5mm slices for baking.
Alternatively, you can just roll out the the chilled dough and stamp into shapes with cookie cutters or a glass dipped in flour. (Some bakers find it easier to roll out the dough first, and then chill it, but you will need room in your fridge for this).
Here I offer you a few recipes to choose from. First up is a very buttery and delicious basic dough that you can easily adapt and include your favourite flavours - I’ve offered some ideas.
Cookie baking tips
Try baking a single cookie first to make sure you have the oven temperature right, as all ovens and some run hotter than others.
Turn the baking sheet halfway through the estimated baking time to ensure even cooking, as most ovens have hot spots.
Adjust the cookie thickness and baking time to your personal taste. Thicker dough and/or a shorter baking time will yield softer cakier cookies. For crisp cookies slice/roll more thinly and/or bake a little longer.