Sometimes there's nothing better than the simplest of flavors. We both love these cookies as they are or with a simple glaze, or we sprinkle demerara sugar on them for a bit of sparkle. If you add 1 tablespoon of cream of tartar to the dry ingredients and roll them in cinnamon sugar prior to baking, you will have classic snickerdoodles. With orange or lemon zest, they can easily be nudged in other directions. When we lived in New York, there was a little bakery, now gone, called Mary's Off Jane. She made the most incredible lime shortbread-ish cookies with a lime glaze that we devoured. These come close, but we have yet to re-create them to her standard.
These cookies were inspired by Jeni Britton Bauer's Bangkok peanut ice cream--a tantalizing blend of toasted coconut and peanut butter cream, finished with a sharp prickle of cayenne pepper.
This cookie is like a well-made cardigan: it always presents handsomely and requires very little fuss. Almond flour gives the cookie a tender bite and a subtle nutty flavor. Replace the almond flour with hazelnut, pecan, or pistachio flour if you prefer. I make these cookies year-round and always have a log or two in the freezer.
These cookies taste like a mug of rich hot chocolate. The deep mocha-flavor is followed by a kick of cayenne pepper. Don't let the heat put you off; it only enhances the flavor.
When Tony Fortuna, the owner of Lenox, one of my favorite restaurants in New York City, gave me this recipe for his biscotti, I stopped making any other almond biscotti and started making these in double batches--twice a week. They are perfect--crunchy but not rock solid, dippable, dunkable and eminently munchable, as good with breakfast café au lait as with late-night herbal tea. They're great with ice cream, fruit salad, mousses and puddings too. Mille grazie, Tony.
Not a traditional Florentine, this lacelike biscuit is the kind you just can't leave alone. Although its crisp lightness is quite extraordinary, you could brush one side with melted dark chocolate if you like, to justify the name and give it a more substantial texture.
These are my rendition of my grandmother's sugar cookies, the ones she used to make for us every week, sprinkling the tops of the cookies earmarked for my brother and me with cinnamon sugar and the tops of those meant for our parents with poppy seeds. Actually this recipe is a composite of grandmother recipes, from mine and my husband's (with an Aunt Bertha recipe tossed in for good measure), all of which were written on small recipe cards and fingerprint-stained long before they came to me.
Ingredients