A Short Recipe for Little Cookies

Although I have cooked my way through a good portion of Mireille Johnston's wonderful Cuisine of the Sun over the years, I hadn't tried these delicious crumbly walnut cookies until this week. I checked out the recipe because shuna mentioned she liked them. They seemed to be just the kind of cookies my elderly mother prefers with her tea, simple, but rich and interesting. When I go to visit her, she generally peeks in my bag to see if there are any cookies. I think she will be pleased with these when I stop in after work to see her.

These cookies could not be easier to make, and have few ingredients. It makes sense to use the best butter and freshest walnuts you can get. That being said, although I did have some really nice amish butter, the walnuts had been in the freezer forever, and the cookies are delicious anyhow. If you have a food processor, you can make them in a flash.

Otherwise, it might be hard to get the nuts chopped up finely enough, though you could probably do it carefully in a blender, a bit at a time. What you want is to get the walnuts to about the texture of steelcut oatmeal, and to be sure to stop before they turn into nut butter. If you are using a food processor, chop the nuts first, in bursts, and dump them out. No need to wash the container in between.

This is what you need:
1 cup finely chopped walnuts
1/4 lb butter, softened
1/4 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup unbleached AP flour
2 tbsps granulated sugar
2 tbsps confectioner's sugar

Preheat oven to 300 F .Chop walnuts and remove from food processor. Add butter and sugar to processor and whirr to cream. Add vanilla and flour and walnuts. Pulse until mixture clumps. Butter 2 baking sheets. Form the dough into very small balls-the recipe makes about 40- and set them about 2" apart. Bake 20-30 minutes, just until pale brown. Sprinkle cookies with granulated sugar, while warm. With a spatula, remove to a wire rack, over a piece of wax paper or parchment. When they are completely cool, sieve the confectioners sugar over all.

I think these little cookies are terrific. They would be nice with a fruit salad or a simple ice cream, and are very good with a cup of tea. I plan to serve them with some honey/thyme/saffron ice cream I'm working on, about which, more later.

Comments

[anapestic]

I love these cookies, and the whole book, of course. I don't have a source for really good walnuts, partly because my roots are in the south, and I generally find the pecan to be the superior nut (redfox and I have differed on this subject in the past, I believe), but these cookies are very good even with walnuts that are merely adequate.

[lindy]

anapestic-Pecans are spectacular, but perhaps less neutral or versatile, to my mind, than walnuts.

Both are particularly good subjects for the Incredible Nut Trick, whereby any unadorned raw nut toasted in the oven magically becomes 10X as good as it was prior to toasting. This is one of my very favorite unsecret tricks of the cook.It never ceases to amaze me.

Although I didn't do it here, I often toast whole nuts before baking with them, even when a recipe doesn't traditionally call for this step. And man, nothing beats a toasted pecan.

[shuna fish lydon]

Lindy, thank you for the nice mention! I made these cookies in quantity in the spring and I did some fun experimenting. I rolled the balls in sugar before baking them. I used raw and white and liked them both, but the raw sugar, (demerera is nice as well), echoed the caramel flavour of the cooked butter/walnut combination.

A note on pecans-- they are more oily and produce a more tender finished product. I have a pecan shortbread recipe that melts in the mouth like no other nut cookie! And of course there's a reason why no one makes buttered walnut ice cream...

[tanvi]

these remind me of something i made earlier this year, mario batali's recipe for walnut shortbread (http://fromthepantry.blogspot.com/2005/06/walnut-shortbread.html)

for some reason my shortbread came out a lot darker- perhaps because i added brown sugar. at any rate, your cookies look wonderful!

[lindy]

tanvi- I'll bet they were darker partly because the walnuts were toasted in yours- that might have made them taste more intensely walnut-y, too.
Next time I make these cookies, I think I will try rolling them in demarara before baking. Sounds good.
On the other hand, my mother pronounced these her "favorite cookie", so maybe I should leave them as is when I make them for her!