Snow Day Cookies

When I say "Snow Day Cookies" let's just clarify that that appellation could easily be used for, oh, I don't know, ABOUT 59 OF THE LAST 60 DAYS.

Because, dear reader, I live in Narnia.

Now, you may think to yourself, educated dear reader that you are, "Oh, Beetle has inserted into this post one of the beautiful Pauline Baynes illustrations from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe."

When in reality, that's the picture of the end of our driveway that I took this morning.

You think I'm making that up?

Welcome to Lantern Waste! Fur coats can be found on your left and right. Please direct all wardrobe-related directional inquires to Miss W. Beetle. And watch out for the trees . . . they're always listening. 

SNOW DAY COOKIES
or
BROWN BUTTER TEFF COOKIES

This is a Brown Butter cookie recipe that I made last year with great success. At the time, I was attempting to demonstrate to Mum that she DID in fact like Pumpkin Seeds. I was successful. And I only gloated for a little bit.

Let's chalk this Beetle Tweak up to excess snow, several days of following Mum around with a Kleenex box and Vitamin C (she's a sicko right now, bless her, the dear little mouthbreather), and having reorganised yet again the baking section of the top pantry shelf, committing to cooking with either Teff OR Amaranth OR Quinoa OR Hazlenut Flours.

I'd like to say it was a scientifically reached decision, but really it was the above combined with a casual shrug and an "eh, teff is brown, brown butter is brown, works for me." 

BROWN BUTTER TEFF COOKIES

INGREDIENTS

• 2 sticks butter
• 1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar (you can use light but I did dark) 
• 2 eggs
• 2 cups teff flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves

In a small saucepan, melt and cook the butter until it starts to brown and get all those glorious bits in it. It will smell amazing, bubble like a crazy thing, and just generally be awesome. Burnt butter is one of the top 10 best smells in the universe, in my opinion.

From this . . . 

 . . . to this. In the time it took for Kim Yu Na to skate a truly breathtaking Short Programme.

Whilst that cools, measure out the flour, baking soda, salt, and cloves in a small bowl and whisk it together. 

Beat the sugar and eggs in a mixmaster until light and fluffy. Add the browned butter and mix again. Add the flour mixture in two bits, combining after each one.

Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and drop spoonfuls of dough (I used a rounded teaspoon, incidentally) about 2 inches apart.

The dough here was a strange midway-viscosity of being too sticky to form rounded balls by hand, but too dry to produce the classic "drop cookie" shape on the sheet. I tried to make them as uniform as possible with the teaspoon. They did even out in cooking and produce relatively equal sized circles.

Side Beetle Note: if you are using regular flour, or even whole wheat instead of white, space them out a bit more as they will spread considerably farther on the sheet. When I made this recipe with regular flour a few months ago they flattened almost totally and I needed a good three inches between each one. 

Side Beetle Note on that: IF, for some reason, your cookies smoosh together during baking and you have to spatula them apart when you take them off the sheet, THAT IS TOTALLY OK AND NOT IN ANY WAY THE END OF THE WORLD OR IN ANY WAY A REFLECTION OF FAILURE AT BAKING OR LIFE IN GENERAL. The cookie will still taste exactly the same (aka delicious). I just want to make that abundantly clear. Smooshy cookies are still cookies.

An example of a Spatula Cookie. Sometimes, even Beetles make spacing judgement errors. 

Bake at 375 degrees for 12 minutes, until slightly brown on the edges, then transfer to a rack to cool completely.

BEETLE NOTES

A WORD ABOUT TEFF

For those of you who don't know (and for those who do, feel free to space out over the next paragraph or so) Teff is one of those "ancient grains" that are en vogue at the moment. It comes from Ethiopia and Eritrea, and is a very hardy, flourishes-in-difficult-climates grain. If you've ever heard about the Ethiopian flatbread called "injera", THAT's teff.

SUPER FUN NERDY FACT: the grain itself is very small, so small in fact that the name "teff" is from Ethio-Semitic root of the word "tff" which means "lost." (thank you, Wikipedia, I love you)


HEALTH BENEFITS OF TEFF

• High in calcium, iron, and Vitamin C
• High in the kind of dietary fiber that is good for blood sugar, weight control, and colon health
• It is estimated that Ethiopians get up to two thirds of their dietary protein from teff

RANDOM AWESOME FACT (from www.teffco.com)

• One pound of teff can produce up to one ton of grain in only 12 weeks. This amount is hundreds of times smaller than that required for planting wheat. This productive potential and minimal time and seed requirements have protected the Ethiopians from hunger when their food supply was under attack from numerous invaders in the past.

When these came out of the oven they were very squishy. And having the darkness of Teff, it was harder to see whether or not the edges were appropriately browned and golden. So I pulled them out at 12 minutes exactly rather than leave them in until it was too late. Upon cooling however, they became very, VERY crispy, and very, VERY light. 

Because there's no gluten in them, there's very little rising and expansion of the dough, so there's no puffing up of the cookies as they cook. And when you take that away, you take away the chewiness and "softness" that a regular flour would have given you. 

The fun part is that teff "flour" is actually just teff grains - the grain itself is so tiny they don't actually have to grind it up, they just pour it in a bag and call it a day. And because you're then eating whole teff grains instead of ground up wheat, you get crunch, and a lot of it. 

It tastes distinctly of "health", even when combined with 2 sticks of butter. It's very earthy and nutty and dark and dense and oh-so-interesting. 

The LL's approve of this experiment, incidentally, as does Mum. (Teff, taken in equal measures with cough syrup, is the best way to beat a cold, I'm sure.) Somehow these got to them through a snowstorm, and now rain, and now (projected by STORM FORCE for later tonight) an impending thunderstorm. 

If anything comes of this experiment in cooking and guinea-pigging my Lovely Librarians, dear reader, it will be this: I am learning how to pump the brakes instead of slamming them on when I go into a skid in front of a snow plow.