Rich Rolled Cardamom Cookies

The Recipe:

Rich Rolled Cardamom Cookies

A cardamom flavoured twist on a Joy of Cooking classic.

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Course Dessert

Ingredients

  

• 1 cup (225g) unsalted butter cubed and softened
• ⅔ cup (140g) caster sugar (I used 128 g)
• 1 whole egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2½ cups (375g) sifted all purpose (plain) flour
• ½ tsp salt
• ½ tsp ground cardamom

Instructions

 

• In your mixer at low speed, combine flour, sugar, cardamom, and salt
• Add butter piece by piece and mix until dough looks like wet sand ~2 minutes
• Add egg and vanilla extract and beat until dough starts to come together (you're looking for a couple big hunks of dough here) ~30s-1m
• Turn out onto the counter and knead only until it comes together into a ball of dough
• Divide in two, form into balls and flatten into disks.
• Wrap each disk in plastic wrap (cling film) and chill in the refrigerator at least 3-4 hours and up to a day or two (if chilling longer, you may want to thaw slightly before rolling)
• Preheat oven to 350F/180C/160F position the rack in the middle rack
• Cut parchment to size for your baking sheets.
• Working with one disk at a time, leaving the 2nd in the fridge to chill, roll the dough out between two pieces of parchment or wax paper to ¼ inch thick. Cut your cookies and carefully transfer them to the baking parchment spacing them about 1 inch apart.
• Re-roll the scraps and cut out cookies for as long as you're happy to. If it gets too soft, roll it to ¼ inch thick and chill in the fridge for ~10 minutes before continuing to work. (Not a bad idea to chill the raw cookies on the cookie sheet while you're at it)
• Now's the time to decorate – if you decorate your cookies pre-baking. Sprinkle the cookies with princess sugar, coloured sugar, egg wash, sprinkles, your choice.
• Bake, 1 sheet at a time 6-9 minutes, rotating the sheet after about 4 minutes. When the cookies are done they'll just start to take a little color on the top and maybe appear a little darker on the edges.
• Cool on the cookie sheet for 3-5 minutes, then transfer them to a wire rack to finish cooling.
• If you're more a "decorate after" type – i.e. you use glaze – do so once the cookies have cooled completely.

Notes

• Cool baking sheets completely between uses – if needed run them under cold tap water. 
• You don’t want the dough so cold it’s cracking when you’re working with it, but if it’s getting soft and the cookies don’t hold their shape when moving them to the baking sheet, roll it out if it’s not already and put it, and the cut cookies for that matter, in the fridge for about 10 minutes to cool it back down.
• dip your cutters in flour to help keep them from sticking to the dough, from time to time, wipe them down.
• Prevent your cookie cutters from rusting: wash them as the last couple of sheets of cookies are baking, after the last batch is out of the oven, cool the oven a little (maybe 275F/160C/140C fan?), give the cutters a quick dry with a dish towel, and pop them in the oven for 5 minutes.

Keyword cardamom, cookies, desserts, holiday

The Waffle:

This is a franken recipe, it’s Joy of Cooking (not sure what edition, I have 1997, this was emailed to me from another edition and doesn’t quite match what’s in my book) but with America’s Test Kitchen’s Foolproof Holiday Cookies method, and cardamom mixed in cos why not.

I used caster/fine grain sugar for a finer texture, and on America’s Test Kitchen’s advice, swapped to reverse creaming method, rather than classic creaming mix dry and mix wet (and sugar) separately, then combine creaming method, because it’s meant to help prevent the cookies rising and the recipe has egg which has leavening properties.

We played with 3 decorations here:
1. Princess sugar – this is flavoured coloured sugar, lemon as is in the recipe this time. The flavour didn’t quite come through, this may be because I was raised with alcohol based extracts and the bottles I hastily grabbed at Sainsburys are rapeseed (canola) oil based and out of the bottle are mellow-er flavours. It may be that flavoured sugars just don’t come through the oven in-tact.
2. Cinnamon sugar – I love the tabby lines I was able to make by rubbing the sugar between my fingers over the cookies, the cinnamon was very faintly there, that’s either the light touch, or the oven killing the flavour.
3. Lemon flavoured glaze – this was the winner. Lemon and cardamom seems to be a popular flavour combo so I went for it here too.

So this is: Joy of Cooking, America’s Test Kitchen, and L’Academie de Cuisine all in one. Really, all that’s missing is Alton Brown and my mom.

ETA: And then she found an Alton Brown Recipe… with less sugar and claiming to be crisp.