Geez, it’s been a whole season since the last post! I’ve had a busy time acclimating/melting in the summer heat. Now, though, since the heat’s broken, I hope you’ve been able to dust off your fire pits to engage in the ritual of lightly smoking your favorite sweater for the past month or so.
It’s fall, which is one of the four most exciting seasons. And… it’s not particularly early in fall any more, which means I’ve largely missed the perfect opportunity to try out fall flavors in cookies before the holidays. In any case, let’s to try out some strange fall ingredients before being sucked into the inevitable holiday cookie train.
For this go-round, I was interested in seeing how some nonstandard bake into a fairly standard cookie, in order to see how they might be put into future recipes later. For these, I tried beet powder and mushroom powder. Beet powder, I think is not too out there… mushroom powder is… we’ll see.
(I must admit here that earlier in the summer, I tried dehydrating beets and mushrooms myself to put them into cookies but was /far/ too impatient. I will try this again when I have more foresight, but for now I bought powders to use.)
For an initial attempt, I put together a few fairly regular batches of shortbread cookies:
- 1/2 cup (2 sticks) butter
- 1/4 cup light brown sugar
- 1 1/4 cup oat flour
where the butter and sugar are beaten until fluffy and then the flour is mixed in until the batter is smooth. For the substitutions, I replaced 1/4 cup of the flour was replaced with one of beet powder and mushroom powder. This probably on the extreme side, but subtlety be damned. (I picked oat flour here since I thought it might go well with the test ingredients. Also, normally I measure by weight but I was feeling lazy or something.)
well they look the part
tan cookies - mushroom powder, purple cookies - duh, annoyingly thin swirls - both, lightest cookies - control
Let’s see how they are!
beet: the powder lends a pretty distinct earthy / slightly bitter/sweet beety-ness to the cookie, mostly after the initial hit of sugar/butter. It is nice, but maybe doesn’t fold into the overall cookie as much as I would have liked.
mushroom: now these are a surprise! These were actually really good. The very fine mushroom powder lent the cookies a fudgy texture, and the earthiness is much more pronounced up front. That said, the cookies are also very nutty, and in my opinion “taste like fall” in a very cool way.
Both variations, I think would go really well with chocolate (the mushroom versions especially so). Just how good the mushroom cookies were surprised me - I thought a cookie with mushroom powder could be good but would need a lot of help from other flavors to get there.
That said, I went into this sort of blind and picked a mushroom powder at random, and I don’t know how much the mushroom variety matters. Probably a lot…