Cookie Drama

A funny thing happened on the way to the cookie exchange

My friend recently hosted a cookie exchange, which was great news because… well… cookies. But also this was an excuse to dive into my baking cookbooks — something I’d do more of except my waistline has certain goals, and those goals do not work in tandem with never ending baked goods on my counter.

While I have two cookbooks dedicated to cookies (Cookies: The New Classics by Jesse Szewczyk and 100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer), I decided I would show some love to a few books I had yet to bake from: Bake Smart by Samantha Seneviratne and What’s For Dessert by Claire Saffitz. Next, I just had to figure out what the hell to make.

The rules for the exchange were simple: first, bring about two dozen cookies to the party. Second… actually, that was the only rule. So much for a high-stakes story. Nevertheless, when I make cookies for these sorts of things, I tend to make two different types. It’s not that I’m trying to show off or anything, but a) it gives me a chance to do extra cookbook exploration, and b) it allows me to cater to the unique cookie needs of me and my boyfriend Dominique.

You see, I’m a chocoholic. There will always be a chocolate presence in any cookie that I bring to an exchange. After all, what would happen if I made a non-chocolate cookie but then there were NO CHOCOLATE OPTIONS at the party? No one should have to live with that fear.

Cruelly, chocolate gives my boyfriend migraines, and so I always make a non-chocolate cookie for him. This way he has options in case the pendulum of cookie fate swings the other way, resulting in nothing BUT chocolate sweets at the party (my dream, his hell). The point is, I like to cover my bases because no one should be left behind at a cookie exchange.

For the chocolate category, I selected Chocolate Peanut Butter Honeycomb Bars from Bake Smart (and yes, I believe a bar is appropriate at a cookie exchange). For the non chocolate category, I went with Lime Squiggles from What’s For Dessert. Spoiler alert: one cookie never made it to the exchange, and one cookie, possibly the same one, I’ve already baked a second time.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Honeycomb Bars

In this recipe, I needed to make shortbread and then top it with peanut butter, melted chocolate, and finally honeycomb candy (which was a whole other recipe). So simple! Nothing could possibly go wrong…

The selling point for me here was the honeycomb, which, for what it’s worth, was not real honeycomb. No, this was a simple candy made from boiled sugar and honey. I’m not a fan of sub-recipes, especially for a cookie (or bar, as it were), but upon seeing the honeycomb photo, I knew I had to make it.

The process was actually simple, if not deeply, viscerally terrifying. First I had to boil honey, sugar, and water until it reached 300 degrees. Then I had to whisk baking soda into the mixture, which caused everything to froth and bubble up. I felt threatened. It was like I had made magma on my stovetop. Lastly, I dumped everything into a 9”x9” pan, where the mixture continued to writhe and grow, bubbling over the edges onto my unassuming fish-shaped trivet. This whole process took about five (heart-pounding) minutes total; although, it did then take about two hours for the honeycomb to cool down.

Removing the honeycomb from the pan was a challenging process. Despite having buttered the pan aggressively and despite having lined said pan with an aluminum foil sling, that honeycomb did not want to come loose. Sliding a knife around the edges was a nonnegotiable (candy is not flexible like a cake round); so I just had to slice into the sugar slab and hope for the best.

After some maneuvering, I did manage to triumph over the obstructionist honeycomb, and to celebrate, I of course tasted a shard. It was so light, airy, and full of honey goodness! But also… a menace. While the first few bites were impossibly flakey and brittle, the sugar layers compacted on my molars almost immediately, transforming my back teeth into razor sharp stalactites and stalagmites. It’s a miracle I didn’t lose a crown.

So… mixed feelings about this honeycomb. On the one hand, delicious. On the other, scary, difficult, and dentally vexing.

Fast forward two days to cookie-making. The shortbread layer of the bars came together easily in a 9x9 pan. Atop it I had to spread a mixture of natural peanut butter, confectioners sugar, and — notably — two cups of crushed honeycomb candy. It was a bit tricky to spread the peanut butter on the shortbread, but life is full of challenges, and this was one I’m happy to report I overcame.

Next I added a layer of melted chocolate, on which I sprinkled many shards of remaining honeycomb candy. It all went into the fridge to chill and coalesce. After some time, I pulled out the pan and attempted to slice the bars. Let’s just say… this was not a graceful moment. The peanut butter never really set up; so slicing into the hardened chocolate layer caused the PB to ooze out the sides. Plus, very frequently, the peanut butter and chocolate layers would simply separate from the shortbread, meaning that we had serious cohesion issues going on. This is what I get for trying to broaden the cookie tent to include bars.

What is the opposite of elegant?

Compared to the beautiful and polished cookies at the exchange, my bars looked like a hot mess. I was shocked that anyone would go near them. But… here’s the twist. These chocolate peanut butter honeycomb bars were absurdly delicious.

The various components of the bars not only complemented each other, but they actually prevented the honeycomb from sticking to the teeth, which meant I could eat these bars without fear of destroying my mouth. I particularly adored the peanut butter layer where the crushed honeycomb offered a crispy texture not unlike a feuilletine or a very delicate puffed rice.

That being said, a little taste goes a long way. These bars are dense and intense. It’s hard to eat more than one at a time (which may be a good thing now that I think about it). Either way, for a full week, the chocolate peanut butter honeycomb bars have drawn extensive praise. I’ve received voice memos and text messages asking for the recipe, and I even learned that my friend’s handyman used a bar to help him power through a morning bike ride! Not sure what the takeaway on that last point is, but what I do know is that despite the setbacks, these not-quite-cookies qualify as a success!

Lime Squiggles

Since the honeycomb bars were such a project, I chose a super simple recipe for my non-chocolate recipe. The lime squiggles are essentially just a shortbread, but with cream cheese added for tang and lime zest and juice added for… uh… lime. Seemed easy enough.

Well, everything came together in a heartbeat, and all was looking breezy until I reached a dreaded step: pipe the cookie dough through a pastry bag fitted with a star tip.

I didn’t have a pastry bag, nor did I have an obligatory star tip. Actually, that’s a lie: at the store, I had found some star tips courtesy of Betty Crocker, but it was only after I had returned home that I learned the tips were only to be used with Betty Crocker branded frostings. Real slick, Betty. This was all gravely important because these cookies were supposed to be piped onto a sheet pan in the shape of squiggles. I couldn’t just ignore this step. I mean, it’s in the name, people. How do you have squiggles with no squiggles?

Since I am resourceful and resilient, I decided I would slice the corner off a Ziploc bag and stick the Betty Crocker star tip in the hole. This was ill advised. The cookie dough, which was considerably firmer than any frosting, simply pushed the star tip through the hole and out of the bag, rendering it useless. This happened a few times. I gave up on the Betty Crocker star tip and decided I would just pipe the dough through the bag without a tip. Sure, there would be no fun ridges on the squiggles, but we would at least have a squiggle factor, and that felt most important.

So, there I was, with my umpteenth Ziploc bag ready to go. Corner was snipped, dough was loaded, and glory was just one steady squeeze away. I applied pressure with my hand, hoping to achieve sublime squiggle, when suddenly the right side of the bag burst at the seams and the dough plopped out onto the counter with a soft thud.

GODDAMMIT THESE SQUIGGLES.

It seemed as though I had hit a wall with my baking skills, and apparently that wall was the shape of squiggle. With “No One Is Alone” from Into The Woods playing in my head, I gathered all my dough and divided it into balls, placing each one on a sheet pan and squashing it into a round with a coffee mug (enormously satisfying). Thanks to all my squiggle drama, I was now fully behind schedule, which meant that I was able to bake off these cookie but not glaze them. I decided an unglazed cookie was not an acceptable cookie, and so after allllll that, I never brought my lime non-squiggles to the cookie exchange. Sad.

The next morning, I did finally glaze the cookies because it was my duty. I then stepped away for several hours so I could record my podcast. When I eventually returned to the kitchen, I was surprised to discover that Dominique had quietly gobbled up four of the cookies. He’s not a cookie fiend; so I knew something was afoot. “They’re really good,” he said bashfully. My first bite of the non-squiggly squiggle explained everything. It was intensely limey but also tender and crumbly, if perhaps sliiiightly chalky. It tasted sort of like a Key lime pie in shortbread form. True citrus greatness. By the next day, the cookies were gone.

Achieving Squiggle

Those lime cookies were so good that I wanted to make them again right away. This time, however, I was determined to do it right. By Friday night, I had acquired a cookie press, which is basically a gun-shaped device that allows for hardcore piping and other decorative experiences. And yes, it came with a star tip. There would be squiggle.

With the cookie press rotating between me and my friends Judy and Derya, we did in fact achieved unabashed squiggle. At first, our squiggles spoke more of poop than whimsy, but our technique improved rapidly, and soon we had trays of bendy, silly shapes that delighted us all.

Meanwhile, the cookie press came with a variety of attachments, most of which were stencils through which we could stamp ornate cookie patterns. But of course since none of us knew what we were doing, we thought they were just alternate pastry tips. This is going somewhere, I promise. We took one stencil and pushed the cookie dough through it, dragging it in a straight line as if we were decorating a cake. What came out was a shaggy, ridged ribbon of dough that didn’t look quite right, which made sense since were were completely misusing the attachment. Nevertheless, we baked the strange shapes alongside our squiggles, later glazing them after they had come down to room temp.

Note the strange, flat cookie in the lower right. That came from stencil misuse.

The squiggles were great. Bite-sized and crispy, they barely felt like a cookie but still packed all the same lime punch as the version I had made earlier in the week. Dom did miss some of the soft texture of the classic cookie shape, but I preferred the crumble of the squiggle.

Then we moved on to the other shape, which we called Shaggies, given that they looked like shaggy little rectangles. This, people, was it. Our cookie press naiveté had delivered the best texture of all: crispy like the squiggles, but ever so tender like the classic cookie round. Who would have thought bastardizing a stencil could yield such a wonderful shortbread?

So glad we gave the lime squiggles a second go, and even more thrilled to have a cookie press to play with. I may be entering my spritz cookie era…

What are your cookie dramas?