For Kathleen's birthday I made her new favorite cookie which is the brown sugar cookie with sea salt. For those of the savory variety and not the sweet (I am not in this camp if you haven't already noticed that) this is a great cookie for you. It is a pretty sweet cookie but it has a good deal amount of fleur de sel ("flower of salt" in french) which is a quite salty salt. So a little goes a long way. The recipe calls for a lot of sugar (mostly brown) which surprised me because even regular unsalted cookies have less sugar than these, but am not one to complain about sugar content. Another interesting component of the recipe is that it uses browned butter. Butter cooked to the point where is just starts to turn brown and right before the milk solids actually burn. Mine burned a bit (okay, I've never brown butter) but I just strained off those pesky milk solids and all was well. The browned butter I have to say is a nice touch. Adds a little extra nuttiness to the cookies (and butteriness).
The dough had a delicious molassas-y aroma and was a nice rich, nutty, brown color. I decided to split it up into three different cookies. One with pinch of fleur de sel on top, ones rolled in a mixture of brown and white sugar (what the recipe called for) and ones that I piped on the letters of happy birthday and then dredged in salt. So all camps were accounted for. The recipe called for the cookies to be pulled out when the inside was still a bit raw which is what I normally do (makes for a very chewy cookie-my fav) but this time, every time I would check on the cookies they still seemed far from done until I decided to pull them out and they looked great but turned out to be a bit on the crunchy/done side. So, don't go with your instincts on this one, just pull them out when they are raw, after about 12 minutes. The cookies, aside from texture were delicious. I love brown sugar. Who doesn't? The salt was a nice addition and for those that enjoy a little more savoriness in their lives than sweet, this is a nice treat for you.
Here's the recipe I used:
http://noshwithme.com/2009/01/brown-sugar-cookies/
This recipe is identical to the one that made this type of cookie Kathleen's new favorite, except salt is added to the sugar mixture the dough balls are rolled in. Perhaps a nice medium between camps?
Here's the recipe I used:
http://noshwithme.com/2009/01/brown-sugar-cookies/
This recipe is identical to the one that made this type of cookie Kathleen's new favorite, except salt is added to the sugar mixture the dough balls are rolled in. Perhaps a nice medium between camps?
Happy Birthday Kathleen!
Photos by Collin Monda
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