I spent this past weekend at my folks' temporarily empty house on the coast of southern Massachusetts with a fire in the fireplace, five excellent human beings, and lots and lots of food. Sadly the weather wasn't so great, so after a gray walk on the beach, there really was just one way to spend the rest of Saturday afternoon: making cookies.
Dinelle, friend and frequenter of Brooklyn bakeries, opened my eyes to a peculiar but delicious espresso and sea salt cookie a couple weeks ago, and it inspired me to do something I'd never done before: make up my own cookie recipe. I don't bake much (I was abysmal at chemistry), so this was kind of an adventure. After doing some thinking and surveying what my mom had in her kitchen cupboards, I settled on a variation: espresso and ancho chilli.
Everything was going fine until I discovered that the dried ancho chillis I had weren't brittle enough to be finely ground. Since larger chunks of chillis didn't really mesh with my idea for the cookies, I ended up changing them out for ground cayenne. I think I liked these results better, anyway.
The cookies are very chewy, and it turns out that the heat that creeps up at the end of each bite is perfectly offset with some cool, creamy vanilla ice cream. Yeah, you might know where I'm going with this...

Ice cream sandwiches! And now that there's a solid chance it'll break 65 here in Brooklyn tomorrow, I feel fully justified in thinking ahead to summer eating.
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