About a week or two ago I got it in my head to try and make Danish butter cookies (a la Royal Dansk). None of the online recipes I could find seemed like they would give the desired results, except maybe this one. So I tried it and wasn't pleased with the results. Dense, blah.
So I set about reverse engineering it from the label of a tin of Royal Dansk. It couldn't be that hard, right? There are relatively few ingredients and if I could set up a system of equations based on the nutritional information...
So this is what I got:
Danish Butter Cookies
Preheat oven to 325°F.
Makes about 40 cookies.
4 oz fresh high-quality unsalted butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
8 oz flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
Creaming method.
Press into a thin round, poke with a fork, bake until light brown.
That jives with the ingredient list and nutritional information. Quite well, actually. But there's some things to note. The ingredient list includes desiccated coconut, eggs, and ammonium bicarbonate. I think the coconut is in one variety in the box only, so consider it an optional addition. While there may be some egg there's neither the cholesterol nor protein to support more than maybe an egg wash (hint: it's listed after the coconut).
Ammonium bicarbonate, aka hartshorn, is a leavening agent not entirely unlike baking powder. Except it's supposed to be more awesome for making cookies. If you can find some, by all means use it.
Ok, so that jives, but when I tried it I was a bit disappointed. The dough was very dry. Very crumbly. It didn't look at all like the dough in the video. It certainly couldn't be squirted out a pastry bag to make those little circle cookies. Or could it? Maybe if the butter was allowed to melt? Or did they add water (not on the ingredient list)? These are mysteries to me.
Also, it baked up even denser. But the taste was spot on!
I figured probably the easiest thing was to back the flour off to be closer to what shortbread recipes call for, which would be 6 oz instead of 8 oz. I also suspected my creaming method technique was lacking.
So today I made another test batch, and I finally got a great result. The recipe I used today is slightly different (and half as big):
2 oz salted butter
1 oz sugar
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
3 oz flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp cream of tartar
This time I made sure to cream the sugar and butter real good, until it was light and fluffy. Really, it does get both light (in color) and fluffy (it about doubles in volume). Funny, that.
Then I mixed the flour in by hand and put it in the fridge in a bag. Did I have to put it in the fridge? I don't know. I don't think so. But it was convenient.
Then I rolled it thin. It was more workable but still a bit crumbly for working with individual cookies. Maybe rolling it will make it more dense, in the future I will probably just press it without refrigerating.
I baked it for 20 minutes in a 325°F oven. It was a light brown. I let it cool and then came the break test. It broke, nay snapped! It was crispy. It was very thin, but what "crumb" it did have looked like the inside of a Royal Dansk.
Notice that I used baking soda and cream of tartar. It may be my imagination but I thought I was getting a metallic taste. I wanted to be sure it wasn't my baking powder (which is aluminum-free anyway). The astute will notice I have it backwards—you're supposed to have 1/2 tsp cream of tartar and 1/4 tsp baking soda for each tsp of baking powder. I misremembered. But it didn't adversely affect the end result. In fact, the free baking soda may have contributed to the crisp by interacting with the butter fatty acids (is that possible?)
No doubt I'll continue to refine my recipe and method, but not with the frequency I had been (much to my wife's chagrin). It may take me a few months/years to get it fully ironed out from a scientific standpoint, but it works as it stands.
Oh, and note I have a bit less sugar—more in line with a shortbread than with the nutritional information on the tin. Indeed, they taste a bit less sweet than the Royal Dansk, but less sweet is ok by me. If you want the original taste, stick with the sugar ratio in the first recipe.
In summary, I think, really cream it good, thinner is better, and flour:butter:sugar ratio of 3:2:1 or maybe 4:2:1 (by weight of course!) if you can manage the crumbly dough (or find the secret to making it magically un-crumbly). Sorry for the imprecision, but my wife will kill me if I make any more butter cookies this week.
A short while back, we were enjoying some ice cream. Erin and I have different
ideas on the proper dressing for ice cream. She likes hot fudge and maybe some
chopped almonds. I like caramel, roasted peanuts (not chopped), and maybe
some chocolate (if she's already gone through the trouble of heating up her hot
fudge). So we traded spoonfuls as we sometimes do, and the hot fudge struck me
as more disgusting than usual. It really is sickening stuff. Not that I don't
like chocolate. In fact, a truly good hot fudge on ice cream is a treat indeed.
It's just that stuff they sell in the supermarkets that passes for hot fudge
that's disgusting.
This experience coincided with me running out of caramel sauce, so fate had
thrown down the gauntlet: make really delicious hot fudge and caramel sauce
from scratch.
To make a long story short, she actually wants a good hot chocolate sauce, not
a hot fudge sauce, and I really want a good cajeta sauce, not caramel sauce.
The hot chocolate sauce is easier. I consulted my mentor redbeard and he suggested a
ganache. It turned out to be the perfect suggestion. Bring 1/2 cup cream
just to a boil (in a large pot because it will bubble up), and pour over 3 oz
quality semisweet chocolate. Stir to melt and drizzle on ice cream. Store in a
jar in the fridge. It will set up, so the microwave is your friend in the
future. May I recommend a small glass condiment bowl for microwaving small
quantities? It will melt faster and you won't be remelting the stuff at the
bottom over and over. Now, this sauce isn't very sweet. More of a dark
chocolate flavor. But the ice cream is already sweet - all we need is creamy
chocolate and heat - and I think this sauce is a perfect ice cream topping.
For the cajeta, there were two challenges. First, cajeta is quite thick, more
suited to a cookie sandwich than an ice cream topping. Second, how do you make
the stuff? There's loads of unnecessary mystery, complication, and noise on the
internet on this subject.
Let's tackle the second one first. I had already convinced myself I was too simple for redbeard's simple caramel sauce. Either his recipe isn't foolproof or I'm less than a fool. (I think, after further reading, that my troubles could be mitigated by not adding that splash of water, but starting with just dry sugar). I was worried that making cajeta (which is a different beast than caramelizing sugar) would also fail, but I didn't have to worry. There's a good
article on Chowhound to clear up the
mystery surrounding this confection, and a simple
recipe by Suzanne
Martinson that fills in the gaps. There, that was easy.
Now, we need to make a sauce out of it. If you're smarter than me, it might
already be obvious to you how to make a sauce out of dulce de leche: add liquid
to thin it out. This didn't come to me until I was reading about the cold
water candy test
and it dawned on me that this mumbo jumbo about cooking sugar syrup to a
certain temperature isn't about the temperature so much as it is about the
concentration of the syrup. The thermometer, or cold water test, is just an
indicator of the sugar concentration. That's a bit oversimplified of course,
but that's how it came to me. Now, if you just stopped cooking cajeta at 230°F
(thread stage), you might not get the full maillard reaction. No, better to
cook the cajeta completely, then add liquid to bring it back to a sauce
consistency. You can find my recipe here. I burnt my
first batch (by not stirring it) and it was still too good to throw away.
Absolute heaven.