smitten kitchen

These are scandalously good, yes, scandalously. Do you want to know why? Because I had one bite of one of these cookies and honestly think they’re one of the best cookies I have ever made. Like, top five good. Like, I think that the homemade Oreos just got the boot because I had to make room at the top. I hope the dozens of you who have made them can forgive me.

It took me a long time to get an oatmeal cookie recipe on this site, and the reason was that most people really like oatmeal cookies, but they have a very specific view of what they should be. Some people like them heavily spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg, others want them buttery and nutty and still others think that if they don’t have chocolate chips or large gobs of dried fruit, they weren’t worth the oats they were cooked with. To add further complication, 99.9 percent of oatmeal cookies fall into one of two categories: thick and cakey or thin and lacy, and oh, how it all made my head spin.

Well, meet the new category: thick and shatter-y, and you’ll have to make your own to believe it. They’re crispy, but not because they’re hard or because they’re thin but because they practically hollow out when they bake, leaving you with this… shell of an oatmeal cookie with rich bits of white chocolate scattered about and the tiniest flaking of sea salt on top.

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Remember those 17 flourless/Passover-friendly desserts? Did you wonder why one would make a list that numbered, say, 17 and not some easily identifiable round number such as 20? I mean, once you’ve gotten to 17, are those last three so difficult, so clearly going to push a blogger over the edge that it simply cannot be done? No, you don’t think about this? Well, lucky you.

But the list was indeed 20 to begin with, but I nixed* three because although they had very little flour in them and the odds were that it could be replaced with matzo meal with little melodrama, I didn’t want to wing it and accidentally ruin every one of your seders with my misplaced confidence. (So much for saving us all some melodrama.) Yet I’ve been staring down the Gâteau aux Amandes with Strawberry-Rhubarb Compote from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon cookbook for months now–a fairly simple cake with what I hoped would be a very intense almond flavor.

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A little over a year ago, my mother and I leapt at the opportunity to make a whole lemon tart featured in the New York Times and ended up with one of the most caustic, inedible things I have yet to make on this site. And people, with an ever-growing category of “disasters,” that is no small feat.

We received a lot of comments on that post ranging from sympathy to eye-rolling (as one of this woman’s recipes had previously felled another reader) but the bulk of them came in two veins: You should have used Meyer lemons and you really ought to make a Shaker Lemon Pie next.

As for the Meyer lemons, a milder and thinner-skinned cousin of the lemons we have readily available in the U.S., these comments made me dig my heels in, oh, just a little. Because while Meyer lemons may have yielded a better outcome, this was not my complaint: my complaint had been that the recipe said that Meyer lemons were an option not a requirement and I held the recipe to this and it nearly cauterized a hole in the roof of my mouth.

But there was another reason that I knew that it would take more than Meyer lemons to save this tart, and that, my friends, is a simple matter of proportion. The Evil Tart’s citrus to sugar ratio was eight whole lemons to three-quarters of a cup. The standard Shaker Lemon Pie recipe uses two whole lemons to two cups of sugar. You don’t need to be a math whiz to figure out why that all went to hell in a handbasket.

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Last month, someone emailed me to ask how I’d suggest she adapt the Icebox Cake to feed 30 to 40 people. Anyone who has ever emailed me to ask me a question before probably knows what happened next: I answered at least 10 (cough 20) days after the fact. Nevertheless, she assured me that she’d scaled it just fine and her husband and hers joint birthday part was wonderful, or at least I think this is what she said because I do not remember a single word that passed between us after she uttered what have to be the four most beautiful words in the dessert lexicon: Hazelnut. Brown. Butter. Cake.

[Insert sound of tires screeching to a halt.]

“Did you say someone made a Hazelnut Brown Butter Cake?”
“It’s from Sunday Suppers at Lucques and not to torment you or anything, but I am eating a piece right now.”

[Insert sound of Deb fainting to the floor. Or something equally melodramatic. Because nobody feeds me, ever.]

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This biscotti is what I like to think of as a Hole in One Recipe. And I know what you’re thinking, “Deb, golf? You never seemed the type.” And you’d be exactly correct; willingly standing outside in the heat and humidity for hours at a time wearing funny shoes is an enigma to me. But a hole in one? This I can compute.

You see, sometimes it takes several tries to come up with the recipe you’d hope for to make the thing you crave exactly as you are sure it should be–for example, I have not yet found the perfect yellow layer cake and I’m still remiss over my two recent butterscotch pudding disasters. But biscotti? I got what I wanted on the very first try.

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