Figgy pudding

Now bring us some figgy pudding,
now bring us some figgy pudding,
now bring us some figgy pudding ...

There. I brought some. You can stop singing now. :)

For years, we've all been singing these lines at Christmastime, but has anyone ever actually had a figgy pudding? The answer is usually no. It's an obscure dish, an old British dessert, not a pudding at all, even, but a steamed cake (the British use the word "pudding" to mean "dessert," hence the confusion).

So when I saw this recipe in "The Beekman 1802 Heirloom Dessert Cookbook," I had to try it. I even bought a proper pudding mold to cook it in (I know, I don't usually buy uni-taskers, but I wanted to do it up properly, and besides, if the recipe was good, maybe I'd make it for years to come).

The verdict? Figgy pudding is quite good, definitely deserving of a place on our holiday table. It's sort of like a fruitcake, but without the booze and the fake fruits -- instead, it's filled with chopped figs. If you like figs, you'll probably like this a lot. I'm sure I'll be bringing the figgy pudding again in the future.

Figgy Pudding
From "The Beekman 1802 Heirloom Dessert Cookbook"

Softened butter for the pan
1 1/2 c water
3/4 pound dried figs, stems removed, cut into small bits
3 tbsp orange liqueur
1 1/2 c flour
1 tbsp cocoa
2 1/4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
3 eggs
2/3 c sugar
1/3 c brown sugar
8 tbsp butter, melted
1 1/2 c plain bread crumbs

1. Place a roasting pan mostly full of water in a 350 degree oven. Generously butter your pudding mold (or a tube pan, if you don't have a pudding mold).
2. In a small saucepan, bring the water and figs to a boil. Reduce to a simmer, cover and cook for 20 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the orange liqueur (don't drain the pan).
3. In a bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and salt. Set aside.
4. In a larger bowl, beat together the eggs and sugars. Beat in the butter and bread crumbs. Stir in the figs and their liquid, then the dry ingredients.
5. Scrape into the pudding mold and put on the lid. (If using a tube pan, cover the top with foil and place a pot lid on top, so it's well sealed.)
6. Place the pan into the roasting pan of water in the oven and bake for about 2 hours, until the pudding is firm and starts to pull away from the sides of the pan.
7. Cool the pan on a rack for 5 minutes, then run a spatula around the inside and invert onto a serving platter. Serve with whipped cream, ice cream or crème anglaise.

Buckeye cookies

I did a similar cookie to these last year, Rolo-stuffed cookies. But knowing how popular the combination of chocolate and peanut butter is, I couldn't resist trying these.

I made a few modifications to the instructions for these, but they came out great. The only thing I wasn't thrilled with was that I didn't think the cookie part was quite chocolatey enough; next time, I'll use the cookie from the Rolo-stuffed ones and see if I like that better. But I imagine even as-is, these ought to go over well with the Reeses-lovers in your life.



Buckeye Cookies
Adapted from Baking and Mistaking

3/4 c confectioners' sugar
3/4 c peanut butter

1/2 c butter, softened
1/2 c sugar
1/2 c brown sugar
1/4 c peanut butter
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg
1 1/2 c flour
1/2 c cocoa
1/2 tsp baking soda

1. Mix together the confectioners' sugar and peanut butter. Form into marble-sized balls, place on a cookie sheet lined with waxed paper and freeze until firm (they'll be easier to work with this way).
2. Beat the butter, sugars and peanut butter together. Beat in the vanilla and egg. Beat in the flour, cocoa and baking soda just until blended.
3. Take the centers out of the freezer. Grab a tablespoon or so of dough, roll it into a ball and flatten it. Tuck a peanut butter center in the middle and wrap the dough around it, re-rolling it between your hands until you can't see any of the peanut butter. Flatten it a bit between your palms. Repeat with the rest of the dough and centers.
4. Bake at 375 degrees for 8 minutes or so, until the cookies look dry and just begin to crack. Cool.

Peppermint pinwheels

Christmas cookies aren't just your ordinary cookies. They're the special ones, the complicated ones, the show-stoppers that you only have the energy to make once a year. When I saw these pretty, minty cookies, I knew they fit the bill perfectly.

Making them was a bit of a chore -- I had to make a few changes to the original recipe's directions to get them to come out alright. What I ended up with was a very pretty, shortbread-like cookie with a hint of peppermint and crunchy, candy-coated edges, a really nice cookie for dunking in a cup of hot cocoa. I don't think I'd make them a lot, but I might make them again sometime, maybe in a few years.

Peppermint Pinwheels
Adapted from The Shine Project

2 1/2 c flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 c butter, softened
1 c sugar
1 egg
3 tbsp milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp peppermint extract
Red gel food coloring
Lots of white nonpareil sprinkles

1. Whisk together the flour, salt and baking powder. Set aside.
2. Beat together the butter and sugar. Beat in the egg, milk, vanilla and peppermint extract. Gradually beat in the dry ingredients until combined.
3. Take half of the dough out of the bowl and set aside. To the other half, add red gel color, kneading it in with your hands until you get a nice, bright red dough. (Wash your hands -- they'll be really red at this point, probably.)
4. Roll out the white dough on a sheet of waxed paper into a large rectangle that's about a quarter-inch thick. Repeat this step with the red dough.
5. Flip the white dough over on top of the red dough and pull off the waxed paper. Roll them both together, starting from one of the wider ends of the rectangle and removing the waxed paper as you go.
6. Go find an empty wrapping-paper tube and cut a slit up the side. Cut the length to the length of your roll of cookie dough.
7. Wrap your dough log in plastic wrap, then place it inside the wrapping-paper tube (pry open the slit you cut to help with this). Place the whole thing in the fridge to chill for at least an hour.
8. Pull out your dough and pull it out of one side of the tube, pulling off the plastic as you go, and cut it into half-inch-wide slices.
9. Dump out the sprinkles into a wide dish. Roll the edges of each slice of dough in a little bit of water, then roll in the sprinkles. Place on a cookie sheet about an inch apart.
10. Bake at 375 degrees for about 10-15 minutes, until the cookies are set and dry-looking and the bottoms are lightly golden. Cool on a rack.

Cardamom crescents

Welcome to Cookiegeddon 2013, in which I spend an entire weekend in the kitchen making cookies, most of which I've never made before.

This year, I made five kinds, two of which I'd actually made before: Linzer cookies and Egg nog-pecan cookies (which weren't entirely new but were new to this year, since the first time I'd ever made them was only a couple of weeks ago). I'll do my best to post about the other three before Christmas, starting with this post: Cardamom crescents.

I'd actually come across this recipe a few years ago, but it never quite seemed like the right time to make it: I try to balance out my cookie offerings between the different flavor profiles, fruity and chocolatey and spicy and such, and it seemed like I always had another spiced option that I wanted to try more. But this year, I finally got around to these, and I'm glad I hung onto that recipe all of this time.

They're a lot like my Russian teacakes, except that they're spiced with cardamom and formed into crescent shapes. The shaping of them was really the hardest part here: Sure, they look extra-festive and fancy, but making a moon shape for each one, while carefully ensuring that there were no absolutely cracks in a rather crack-prone dough ('cause I knew any cracks would lead to pieces breaking off when I tried to roll them in sugar later), was a painstaking process to be sure. The work paid off, though, in a decently large number of really fancy-looking, exotically spiced cookies, just the thing to go with a cup of tea at Christmastime. I'll probably end up making these again in the future, 'cause the taste was worth the work -- though if I'm feeling lazy, I might just make them into balls instead of moons.

Cardamom Crescents
From Epicurious

2 1/2 c flour
3/4 tsp cardamom
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 c confectioners' sugar
1 c chopped pecans
1 c butter, softened
1 tbsp vanilla
Extra confectioners' sugar for rolling

1. Whisk together the flour, cardamom, cinnamon and salt. Set aside.
2. In a food processor, pulse the confectioner's sugar and pecans together until the mixture is the texture of coarse meal.
3. Beat the butter and vanilla together. Beat in the nut mixture, then the dry ingredients. Knead the dough together a bit if you need to.
4. Take a tablespoon at a time, roll it between your palms a little to make it a bit log-shaped, then pinch and taper the ends, bending it a bit in the middle, to form a crescent moon shape. Carefully press together any cracks that form -- otherwise, these will be weak spots in your cookie that will tend to break off later on.
5. Place an inch apart on a baking sheet, then bake at 350 degrees for about 12-15 minutes, until the bottoms are golden.
6. Immediately roll in confectioners' sugar, then place on a rack to cool. Once cooled, re-roll in the sugar.

Out of the Kitchen: The Holy Grail of dim sum

My quest is over. I have finally found the Holy Grail of dim sum in the Capital Region.

For years, I've been looking for a place around here with good dim sum — ALL of it. That means perfectly cooked har gow, and tasty sesame balls, and baked pork buns, which are usually where places around here fall short: Only one place I've tried has baked buns consistently available, but the rest of their dim sum sucks.

So the other day, when my husband decided that we should go check out Rain, a new Cantonese place in Albany, I was up for it, cautiously hopeful that maybe this would be the good place, the place with a full slate of well-prepared Cantonese dim sum.

And the clouds parted, and the sun shone down, and I swear I heard angels singing as I bit into their beautiful, juicy, meat-filled baked pork buns. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating — but these are the best damn baked pork buns I've had in the area, hands down.

And better, it wasn't only the pork buns that were good. The har gow was perhaps a teeny bit thick-skinned but nicely chewy and filled with succulent shrimp pieces. The sesame balls were warm and crispy-chewy and filled with what I think was lotus seed paste, very yummy. The dan tats were flaky on the outside, eggy on the inside, just right. The cheung fun were great as well, meat-filled and perfectly cooked. And the sui mai were some of the best I've had.

We got an order of beef chow fun, too, just to see how they did on a regular noodle dish, and we weren't disappointed. The noodles were cooked perfectly, with just the right amount of chewiness, and the beef itself was intensely flavored, marinated with something, I'm sure, but better than most beef I've had in a Chinese noodle dish. One odd quirk: They asked whether we wanted our noodles dry or with gravy, which is an option neither of us had ever seen before (and we have plenty of experience with authentic Chinese food). It turns out that "dry" isn't dry at all: It's the usual way you'd expect to get it, seasoned lightly and with plenty of wok char adding to the delicious flavor of the dish. The "gravy" is a brown sauce, which sounded... sort of gross on a noodle dish, really, but I guess somebody must like it that way, since they offer it.

Anyway, I know where I'm going for dim sum from now on. Rain has lots of options, and they're all top-notch. I've found my Holy Grail of Cantonese food, for sure.

Egg nog-pecan cookies

This year, I participated in The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap. It was really cool -- you sign up and pay a small fee (only a few bucks), and then the swap operators (swaperators?) match you with three people. You make a big batch of a cookie recipe you haven't blogged before, then mail a dozen cookies to each of your three people. Meanwhile, three people out there have your name, so you'll be getting three dozen cookies in the mail! Also, the swap has cool sponsors who will send you free stuff as a thank-you for participating -- for instance, OXO sent me a nice set of silicone spatulas. And the whole thing raises money for Cookies for Kids' Cancer, so it's not only a fun swap but helps out a good cause, too.

I've never actually bought egg nog before, 'cause while it smells delicious, the idea of drinking eggs always grosses me out. But baking with it sounded like a fun idea, so I decided to make these egg nog cookies for the swap. They came out delicious! They have a nice texture and taste sort of like a bear claw or a Danish, eggy and nutty and yummy. :)

In return, I received two delicious packages: one from Ellen at In My Red Kitchen of yummy, shortbread-like Dutch cookies, half of them dipped in chocolate (which my husband promptly made off with, once he got a taste), and one from Susan at A Less Processed Life of homemade Thin Mints. Then, a week past the deadline, I got a third box, with postage dated a week and a half ago. Thanks, USPS? Anyway, the Nutella/white chip cookies from Nicole at The Marvelous Misadventures of a Foodie were still tasty.

This was so much fun! The best part was that not only did I get to try new cookies and maybe pick up some new recipes to use in the future, but the actual baking and sending happens in November, meaning that it doesn't add to the pile of December cookie projects. I'll definitely be doing this again next year.



Egg Nog-Pecan Cookies
Adapted from ShopGirlMaria

12 tbsp butter, softened
1 1/4 c sugar
1/2 c egg nog
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
3 c flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 c chopped pecans

1 1/2 c confectioners' sugar
3 tbsp egg nog

1. Cream together the butter and sugar. Beat in the egg nog, vanilla and eggs.
2. In another bowl, whisk together the flour, cinnamon, baking powder and salt, then dump this into the first bowl and beat until combined.
3. Stir in the pecans.
4. Scoop cookies and place them 2 inches apart on your cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes, until the edges and bottoms are lightly browned.
5. Cool on a cooling rack.
6. Whisk together the confectioners' sugar and egg nog, then drizzle over the cookies and let sit until hardened.