Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Cream butter, tahini, and sugars.
2. Add eggs and vanilla. Beat until well combined.
3. In a separate bowl, stir together flours, baking soda and salt.
4. Gather your garnishes—chocolate chips, raisins, coconut, seeds or nuts, and millet—in yet another bowl.
5. Stir flour mixture into butter mixture. Don’t overdo it.
6. Now add chocolate chips and all of the other fun stuff. Stir until evenly distributed.
7. Wrap dough in plastic and refrigerate at least one hour. Can be frozen for longer-term storage.
8. Preheat oven to 350ºF. Place rack in the upper-middle position. I prefer to bake cookies one sheet at a time—that’s just what works best in my oven.
9. Form dough into just-larger-than-tablespoon spheres.
10. Bake until golden all over. Cool five to ten minutes on wire rack before munching.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Preheat oven to 350ºF.
2. In a standing electric mixer using the paddle attachment, whip oil and sugar together.
3. Gradually add eggs and extract. Beat well.
4. Combine cocoa powder, flour, salt, and baking powder and stir into wet mixture.
5. Divide dough and place onto prepared baking sheet.
6. With wet hands, form into log shapes about 2 inches wide and nearly as long as the pan.
7. Bake until golden, about 35 minutes. The color of the biscotti makes “golden” a bit difficult to determine, so look for firm edges and a split top.
8. Remove from oven and allow to cool.
9. Preheat oven to 250ºF.
10. Slice on a bias, about 1½ inches thick.
11. Lay the cookies flat on baking sheet and return to oven.
12. Bake for 40 minutes, turn oven off, and let cookies cool inside the falling oven.
13. Store in air-tight container.

Happy Dunking!

I can’t take much credit for this one. For starters, the whole thing was the Squeeze’s idea. I found the cookie recipe at The Joy of Baking and didn’t change it a bit, and the ice cream is a simple adaptation of my friend Bob Hopkins’ vanilla ice cream formula. When you make them, however, I suggest that you keep all the glory for yourself.

You’ll want to start on the ice cream three days ahead of when you plan on eating these beauties.

Mint Ice Cream

1. Scald milk and add mint leaves. Let steep five minutes.
2. Add half of the cream.
3. Bring mixture to a simmer. Do not allow to boil.
4. In a separate bowl, beat sugar into egg yolks until mixture is very smooth and light yellow in color.
5. Slowly whisk simmering milk mixture into egg mixture.
6. Return to heat and cook until thickened.
7. Remove from heat, add remaining cream, and pass through a strainer to remove mint leaves and any cooked bits of egg.
8. Chill overnight.
9. Freeze in ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions.
10. Freeze churned ice cream over night again before making sandwiches.

Chocolate Sandwich Cookies

1. Preheat oven to 350ºF and prepare two baking pans.
2. Cream butter and sugars until fluffy and light.
3. Beat in vanilla and egg. Scrape down beater and sides of the bowl.
4. In a separate bowl, whisk together cocoa powder, flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
5. Stir in dry ingredients and mix until thoroughly combined.
6. Fold in chocolate chips.
7. Drop teaspoonsful of batter onto prepared baking sheets.
8. Bake on center oven rack 8 – 10 minutes, or until the centers of the cookies are still soft, but the edges are well set.
9. Cool on the baking sheet for 10 minutes, then transfer to wire rack to finish cooling.

Assembling Sandwiches

1. Scoop out an ice cream puck roughly the same diameter as your cookies, and as thick as you please.
2. Place ice cream puck between cookie bottoms and smush the sandwich gently between your palms.
3. Return sandwiches to the freezer for a minimum of 20 minutes before serving.
4. If making well in advance, wrap individual sandwiches in plastic wrap before re-freezing.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Whip sugar and vegetable oil until very well combined.
2. Gradually add eggs, vanilla and orange zest, beating well after each addition. Mixture will thicken and become very smooth.
3. Combine remaining dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then stir into egg mixture.
4. Mix well, but not excessively.
5. Divide dough in half.
6. Preheat oven to 350ºF.
7. With wet hands, form each half into a log, about 2″ shorter than the length of your pan and 2½” wide.
8. Bake until well golden, about 25-30 minutes.
9. Turn oven down to 250ºF.
10. Cool logs until you can comfortably handle them.
11. Slice on a bias, about 1½” wide.
12. Lay cut-side up on a baking pan and bake again for 40 minutes.
13. After 40 minutes, turn oven off and leave cookies inside to cool.

Procedure:

1. Cream together butter and sugars until mixture is light and fluffy.
2. Beat in peanut butter until uniformly combined.
3. Beat in egg.
4. Stir in dry ingredients and mix until dough comes together. Dough will likely be a bit crumbly at the bottom of the bowl; just knead a few times to mix it in.
5. Wrap dough in plastic and chill at least thirty minutes.
6. Preheat oven to 350ºF.
7. Divide dough into ½ ounce pieces and roll into spheres.
8. Place balls on baking sheet (greased, or lined with parchment or a Silpat) and smush to form discs about ¼” tall.
9. Using your finger, a chopstick, or some other similarly shaped item, press a divot in the dough large enough to accommodate about ¼ teaspoon jam or jelly.
10. Spoon preserves into the dough (I use a heaped ¼ teaspoon).
11. Sprinkle white sugar around the edge of the cookie, if you’d like a crispier finish.
12. Bake in preheated oven for 8 – 12 minutes, or until edges are firm and golden.

Procedure:

1. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
2. Beat in vanilla and egg and combine thoroughly.
3. Stir in flour, cornmeal, salt and baking powder. Mix with paddle attachment on low speed until dough becomes one cohesive lump.
4. Stir in cranberries until evenly distributed.
5. Divide dough in half and form two logs, about an inch in diameter.
6. Wrap logs in plastic and freeze or refrigerate.
7. Preheat oven to 350ºF.
8. When dough is cool enough that it’s no longer sticky, slice about ¼” thick.
9. Lay slices out on a cookie sheet lined with parchment or silpat. You may place them fairly close together, as these cookies do not expand very much.
10. Bake until edges are just beginning to brown, rotating once, about fifteen to twenty minutes.
11. Transfer to wire rack immediately.

Procedure:

1. Cream butter and sugars.
2. Add egg, vanilla and milk.
3. In a separate bowl, combine all remaining ingredients.
4. Stir dry into butter mixture.
5. Chill dough before rolling into spheres.
6. Bake until cookies are golden on the edges and “lose their gloss” in the middle.

To make these oddly addictive coconut-habanero scones, begin with this recipe for the strawberry almond variety. Omit the strawberries and the almonds. To the flour mixture in step one, add one cup of lightly toasted coconut and one habanero chili pepper which you have seeded and very finely minced.

First published in a 1950s Good Housekeeping Magazine, these candy cane cookies are tender and have a surprisingly complex and subtle flavor. I’ve made a small change with the fat, but otherwise these cookies are the same that my mother and grandmother have been making every winter for as long as I can remember.

I guess I must have grown up a Nabisco Kid. I can still hear the mid-1980s jingle: the rising intonation of the company name followed by the sweet little “bing,” just like, I always imagined, a faerie’s wand, putting just a little bit of magic into my favorite snack cookie. Little Debbie was cute, but she never stood a chance.

While the Keebler Elves kind of creeped me out, and I’ve always preferred Premium brand saltine crackers to Nabisco’s Club, the Fig Newton is, I believe, among the very best of the brand’s bunch. And while I can’t really sign off on the “fruit and cake” assessment, the classic Fig Newton is no ordinary cookie. Neither is my grown-up version of it, a revision and expansion of David Lebovitz’ Fig Cookie recipe in his gorgeous cookbook, Room for Dessert.

You will need a couple of hours from start to finish, which may be split over two days if you like. I suggest starting with the filling, and letting it reduce and thicken while you make the cookie dough. When both the filling and the dough are well chilled, you’ll want a good-sized, cool workspace upon which to roll out the dough and assemble the cookie logs. I like working on a lightly-floured pastry cloth, as the cloth makes transferring the log to a cookie sheet quite easy. When I set to making these the first time, I was somewhat intimidated at the notion of making a filled cookie, but they are really quite simple.

Roll the dough out into rectangles, then make a row of filling in the middle.

Then brush the edges with water. Fold one side up, then the other.

Next, just press the short ends together to seal off the log and transfer to a lined baking sheet.

Bake until golden, about thirty minutes. Cool; slice.