Great Great Aunt Eurania's Snowball Cookies

Rachel here.

So, Monday I promised you all the easiest cookie recipe of all time. Tucked among these...

And these...

Is this!

And no, it's not an address book. Or, you know, it IS, but it doesn't contain addresses. Instead, it contains recipes recorded by my great great aunt Eurania and given to my grandmother. My parents brought it out for me the last time they visited and I was ecstatic. Nothing quite says I-lived-through-the-depression like an address turned into a recipe book, does it?

It's a fascinating read, too. Filled with anecdotes (such as, This recipe has been Methodist tested and repeatedly approved...because, you know, Methodists are the measure of deliciousness or something like that) and jello salads, my southern great great auntie was a missionary on a mission to convince my grandmother of the wonders of the pecan. There are pecans in EVERYTHING, and pages of lists of other foods that would be well served by the addition of pecans. There's even a recipe from Eurania's grandmother (that would be my great great great grandmother...come on, how cool is that that I can cook something my great great great grandmother cooked? I'm totally geeking out over this) that I'm fixing to try just as soon as I recover from the amount of lard it requires.

But anyway, tucked among these pages of tidy script is a recipe for Snowball Cookies. I'm sure you've eaten these--they're round and rolled in powdered sugar and essentially are simple shortbread cookies with pecans added to them. Sometimes they're called Mexican Wedding Cookies. I'd probably call them that instead of Snowballs if my great great aunt didn't have such an awesomely unusual name. Mexican Wedding Cookie definitely sounds more exciting than Snowball Cookie, but nothing sounds more exciting than Great Great Aunt Eurania's Snowball Cookies. In fact, I think there should probably be an exclamation mark added at the end.

So now, without further ado, I present to you Great Great Aunt Eurania's Snowball Cookies!

Sorry I don't have a picture to offer of the cookie proper. They're umm...all gone.

Caramel Cheesecake Bars

Janet here: I wanted to make these cheesecake bars the second I saw their picture in the new cookbook by Alice Medrich called Chewy, Gooey, Crispy, Crunchy (Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies). And that was before I learned that the crust was made of shortbread! After that, I was a woman on a mission.

These are seriously unbelievably good. I'd write more about this but that would mean you'd be further away from eating these...and that would be a mistake. Get baking now.

Caramel Cheesecake Bars

ingredients
for the shortbread crust
14 tablespoons (1 3/4 sticks) unsalted butter, melted
1/3 cup (3.5 ounces) sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
3/8 teaspoons salt
2 cups (9 ounces) flour

for the cheesecake part
1/2 cup (6 ounces) caramel sauce, purchased (that's what I did) or homemade
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 pounds cream cheese, room temperature
1/4 cup (1.75 ounces) sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 large eggs, at room temperature

method

for the crust:
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Put the rack in the lower third of the oven. Line a 9X13-inch pan with foil.

In a medium bowl, mix the melted butter with the sugard, vanilla and salt. Add the flour and mix until just incorporated. Press and smooth the dough evenly over the bottom of the pan. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the crut is a gold brown with well-browned darker edges. Let cool before adding the rest of the recipe.

for the bars:
Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Stir the caramel sauce together with the salt and set aside.

In a medium mixing bowl, beat the cream cheese with an electric mixer until smooth, about 30 seconds. Add the sugar and vanilla and beat until just smooth and creamy, about 2 minutes. Add one egg and beat until just incorporate. Add the second egg and mix. Stir two tablespoons of the batter into the caramel sauce.

Pour the remaining batter over the prepared crust and smooth. Spoon pools of the caramel mixture over the filing, leaving plenty of plain filling showing. Jiggle a bit to smooth things out if the caramel doesn't immediately incorporate into the cream cheese filling. Take a toothpick and swirl it around to make pretty designs and marbelize the top of the cream cheese filling.

Bake 2--25 minutes until the filling is puffed at the edges but still jiggles in the center when the pan is nudged.

Put the pan on a cooling rack. When totally cool, cover and refrigerate at last four hours but preferably overnight (yeah, that was not possible in my case and it was just fine). Cut into pieces and store in an airtight container, refrigerated, for up to 4 days — as if that's going to happen. HA!

Enjoy!

Shortbread: The Final Post

While I rarely utter these words — and those who know me well, know just how rarely — I give up. Shortbread is beyond me and I refuse to embarrass/frustrate myself any longer. Despite the annoyingly simple recipe — I mean it's FOUR ingredients for God's sake!!!!! — my shortbread just doesn't cut it.

After Rachel's and my attempt to make a double batch and the resulting completely edible but ridiculously silly looking shortsand (see post here), I decided one day last week to just make a single batch while Rachel was at the movies with her brothers. I figured I'd bring out the final product and just say, "Hah! I can make shortbread too."

Obviously the karmic gods were on to this hubristic disingenuous strategy because while this shortbread held together, it did not have the right texture, that crumbly buttery goodness that makes shortbread a baking wonder. Again, it was edible but it wasn't right and so I give up. All my shortbread from now on will be Walker's or, if Rachel is feeling generous and perhaps just a tad smug, gifts from her.
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Oh, Ma. You really can't bake shortbread, can you? While I assure you that this is definitely as pathetic as you feel like it is (*wink, wink*), worry not. On my to-do list before school starts back up next week is to make you some shortbread and send it your way. Yes, I will be placing your initials on each piece, too, just so you remember with each bite that not only was it made with love specifically for you but it was made by hand with time for embellishments because it's that freaking easy.

My real gift to you is this, though: You make better granola than I do. I've been disappointed each morning since I came back to California not to be eating your seriously, seriously good granola for breakfast. Mine's fine, but yours is awesome. AWESOME.

Wanna do a swap? I'll send you shortbread and you can mail me granola.

XXOO.

Shortsand...or What Not to Do When You Make Shortbread

So Rachel and I are actually in the same house with the Divine Miss M and thought wouldn't it be lovely to make something together rather than virtually? I asked for shortbread because I've never made and LOVE it. I've never made it because it smacks of pie crust to me and we all know how well I do in that category. (Read about my phobia here and my feeble attempt to get past it at Thanksgiving here)

Anyway because I am such a shortbread fan and because S is as well, I figured we'd just double Uncle Bub's recipe. I mean more is always better right?

Sadly, as this photo will show, some recipes are not meant to be doubled apparently. What we ended up with is shortsand, not shortbread. It's edible but you need to stand over a plate or you will simply have disintegrated crumbs on your chest or the floor.



When my mom suggested we make shortbread together I was totally game. The recipe I usually make around the holidays is super easy and incredibly delicious so it seemed like the perfect thing to whip up together during M's nap. Though my mom revealed to me that she does indeed possess a standing mixer, we went at it together by hand this time for convenience (her mixer has collected roughly 23 years of dust in a cupboard in--of all places--the bathroom...she seems to have only used it one time and, in that one time, broken one of the attachments). I'm pretty sure this wasn't the problem, though. One of the things I learned in my years working in a restaurant kitchen is that not all recipes lend themselves to size alterations through simple doubling or halving of ingredients. For whatever reason, it just doesn't always work. Thinking we needed a double batch due to the number of interested eaters, we casually doubled the ingredients. Eeh....nope. My only real complaint is that the recipe didn't fail in terms of not being edible. This means that when we make it again tomorrow I'll find myself having consumed an obscene amount of butter and sugar. Somebody's gotta eat it all, right?

Uncle Bub's Shortbread

Hey Ma-

One of the things I really like about this time of year is baking holiday foods that you baked when I was growing-up. I like carrying forward traditions and the stories that accompany them. I've added something to my December kitchen repertoire, though. For the past few years I've baked Grandma's shortbread. The recipe was Uncle Bub's (M's great-great uncle!) and it is incredibly simple and irresistibly good. I like the idea of adding to the tradition I grew up in, bringing in Dad's side of the family and different generations. All of this will yield a bounty of stories for M once she's older. For today she was content to watch the butter cream, fascinated by the whirring sound and whipping motion.

If you haven't made these cookies you should asap. The only advice I'd give is to make a double batch because they really don't last long.

XXOO
-R

Grandma Reynolds' (via Uncle Bub) Scotch Shortbread

ingredients
2/3 c. sweet butter, room temporature
1/2 c. confectioner's sugar
1 1/2 c.+ 2 T. sifted flour
1/2 tspn. salt

method
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Cream butter, add sugar gradually, beat till fluffy. Sift flour and salt into creamed mix. Blend by hand thoroughly (there really is no other way at this point...). Press mixt into 9" pie tin and pinch edge to form fluted rim. Prick surface with fork. Mark into 16-20 wedges, cutting 1/2 thru dough. Bake till firm when pressed in center, about 35 minutes (in aluminum pan bake on lower shelf, in glass pan on center shelf). Cool in pan. Cut through wedges while warm. Serve once completely cooled.