Fallen Souffle

I love when I have a Eureka! moment in the kitchen. It happens every once and a while, more so now that I have become more comfortable experimenting with baking recipes. I have been trying to come up with a great cookie recipe for Thanksgiving this year as well as the Virtual Cookie Swap. I wanted to stay away from the gingerbread and chocolate chip so I thought I would do coconut. My Mom loves anything with coconut, as do I…though we are probably the only two in the family that like coconut, so I thought I would try and find a great coconut cookie recipe. I made an Ina Garten recipe last year that was a butter cookie rolled in coconut and dotted with fruit preserves. It was labor intensive and used alot of butter. So I found a recipe in my favorite cookbook, the All New Good Housekeeping Cookbook from 1991 , I know I probably need to update.

The recipe is as follows:

Coconut Cookies
2 3/4 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 stick of butter softened
1 cup sugar
1 large egg
2 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon coconut extract (originally called for vanilla)
1 1/2 cup flaked sweetened coconut

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. In medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt.

2. In large bowl with mixer at medium speed, cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Beat in egg, milk and extract. Reduce speed to low and beat in flour, until just blended, the mixture will be crumbly. With a wooden spoon stir in coconut.

2. Drop dough by rounded teaspoon, I actually used a small ice cream scoop that was about a tablespoon. With fork, make crosshatch pattern in each cookie, flattening to 1/4 inch thickness. Bake until lightly browned on edges, about 15-17 minutes. Transfer to wire rack to cool.

Sounds like a pretty simple, basic recipe. Well when I was trying to create the cross hatch marks, the fork was getting all gunked up and I was losing my patience so I just used my thumb to mash them down. After baking two batches, one with cross hatch and one with thumbprints, I then realized that these babies would be awesome with some preserves in the thumbprint I made. So the third batch got a dollop of raspberry preserves. These cookies are great plain, but so much better with the preserves in them. I am going to try apricot preserves next…mmm. I think I found a winner to take to VA!

As a side note, I love using kosher salt in baking. I love getting a nice bite of salt, it mixes so well the sweetness of the sugar and creaminess of the butter…drool!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2005 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Cookies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.