sandwiched between

 

My son is a big eater.  He is not a very big person, not in any direction, but he can pack away an enormous amount of food.  Though you might expect he would finish a big meal looking like The Little Prince’s boa-constrictor-who-swallowed-an-elephant (that creature, if you recall, resembled a fedora--see drawings #1 and #2, below), in fact he does not.  I am not sure where he keeps the food.

illustrations by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

When he was in kindergarten, his Lunchbox Lament was “never enough.”  I assembled bigger and bigger lunches, and we began to project that when he got to first grade, and required both snack and lunch to be packed for him, that he would need a wheeled suitcase to carry it all.

This has not come to pass.  I sing the Lunchbox Lament now, and it goes a little something like this: “why didn’t you eat your lunch?  Why, oh, why, did you not eat the nice lunch that I packed?” His standard story is that the allotted lunch time is too short.  This defense has been cross-checked with his teacher, and it did not bear up under further investigation.  It is suspected that chatting occupies the jawbone in question more than chewing does.

Recently he has made it known that he has covetous feelings for his seat-mate’s vanilla sandwich cookies, and so I spent some time last week making a cookie that could carry some nutritional firepower and still taste like a cookie.  This is version 2.0, and maybe you will try it out and let me know how you tweak it, and I’ll let you know if they make a round trip in today’s lunchbox.

The fine print:

• I used a combination of shortening and butter in the cookies, because that makes them taste (to me, anyway) more bakery-ish, and makes them crisper, but you could use all butter. 
• In my quest to boost nutrition, I replaced the standard powdered sugar in the filling with nonfat dry milk powder, which is quite sweet and hardly required any additional sweetener to make them feel dessertish.  I reckon you could use powdered other kinds of milk, too. Just be sure it is entirely free of lumps.
• The fillings may look too runny when you mix them up, but once they are in the cookie sandwich, they set up more firmly. 
• I used the no-stir kind of peanut butter for the peanut version (I have a secret passion for Skippy--do not tell anyone); if you use all-natural peanut butter, you may want a slightly higher proportion of shortening to PB for the sake of texture.
• My brilliant friend Alana (who has a dandy recipe for the straight-up dessert version of the classic tooth-blackening chocolate sandwich cookie in her wonderful book) taught me to slit open a paper towel tube lengthwise and roll the dough log in it to create round cookies, but all my empty paper towel tubes get turned into telescopes or marble runs almost immediately and are probably under the couch.  Lacking that high-tech tool to mold with, I punted and made square-ish cookies: 

sandwich cookies

makes about 36 sandwiches

8 T butter

4T shortening

½ c sugar

1 egg, room temperature

1/2 t vanilla

pinch salt

1 ¾ c flour (all purpose, or a mixture of ww pastry flour and all purpose)

½ c almond meal

¼ c golden flax meal

Cream the butter, shortening and sugar until quite smooth.   Beat in the egg and vanilla.  Combine the dry ingredients, and mix these in to make a smooth dough.  Don't over-beat.  Scrape the dough into a fat snake onto a long sheet of wax paper, and roll it up, either using a slit-open tube to create a smooth round log, or using the counter to form a smooth square.  Chill for at least one hour in the fridge.

When you are ready to bake, line two baking sheets with parchment and preheat the oven to 350.  Use a sharp knife to cut the chilled dough into 1/4" slices (thicker cookies create an unsatisfactory cookie-to-filling ratio, and lower your yield) and lay these on the parchment. They will not rise or spread much in baking so they can be pretty near each other.  Bake 8-10 minutes, reversing the sheets halfway through to ensure even baking, until the centers are firm and the edges barely golden.  Remove to a rack to cool.

When they are completely cool, fill them with one of these things:

peanut butter filling

4T creamy (not chunky) PB

3T shortening

1T honey

¼ c milk powder

Cream everything together well and try not to eat it all.

vanilla filling

3T butter

4T shortening

¼ c milk powder

1T honey

¼ t vanilla, or 1/2 t finely-grated lemon zest and a teaspoon of lemon juice

Cream everything together really well.

nuts to you

It is seventy degrees here, sunny as all get-out, and all three progeny are off school for the week. So you can relax in total confidence that nothing I tell you about this week will be especially complicated.

Here are the cookies I promised you on Friday. Here is what they are not, particularly: complicated, beautiful, indulgent.

Here is what they are: insanely simple, delicious, satisfying and exciting for your mouth.



The recipe comes from my friend Naomi, who got it from her friend Lina. These two women wield mighty spoons. Do not doubt them. Especially do not doubt Naomi's warnings and caveats, reproduced for you almost verbatim below from the text message she wrote me on the train where she was when she received my frantic plea for the instructions.

I cannot even really tolerate eating raw almonds; it produces the kind of itchiness that leads directly to scraffing your front teeth along your tongue repeatedly, pausing only to manifest that garchy hairball noise in the back of the throat that is so taxing on a marriage. And yet I ate the dough, and then I ate some more. When I say the recipe makes about a dozen nuggets, I mean that in the end, that is about how many you will be able to bake. If, in your haste to get the dough in the oven and away from your grabby hands, you do not heed the warning about compacting it firmly between two spoons and the cookies look a little fall-apart-ish once baked, you can smish them together a little while they are still warm. Again, this is not the sort of thing I would want anyone to know that I recommend. I am just saying it can be done.



Lina and Naomi's version requires not one iota of improvement, but for giggles there is a variation below it that seems to have worked out fine.

naomi & lina's almond cookies
makes about a dozen

Turn oven on to 300 and line a baking sheet with parchment.

1 cup raw almonds
1/4 cup maple syrup
A good fat pinch of good salt
Dash vanilla
2 cardamom pods, shells removed
2 tsp water

Chop everything up in a food processor until it looks right and kind of sticks together. Try not to eat it all when raw. (Maybe make a double batch next time, eh?)

Put small spoonfuls, well-compacted between two teaspoons, onto the parchment-lined pan. Bake about 20 minutes or until they are a nice golden color. Remove them to a cooling rack. Eat them before anybody notices and start another batch right away.....

Variation on that theme:
Replace the maple syrup with honey. Replace the cardamom with a fat pinch of red pepper flakes, add a teaspoon of grated fresh ginger root and then proceed as above, in the vain hope that the kick of spice will slow you down before you eat it all.