Orcas Island Date Bars

After a long day of hiking in Moran State Park on Orcas Island, I presented my friends with a treat that I had gotten earlier in the day: bar cookies from the local Rose's Bakery, made with oats, walnuts, and dates. The bar was quite close to perfection, with a light buttery taste in the crust and the gentle sweetness of the date filling. The first thing one of my hiking buddies said, after finishing a few sizable mouthfuls, was, “can you make this?” I smiled and assured him that it would be no problem to do so. After looking through a few resources, I decided that I would rather try a drop cookie than a bar; though each have their advantages, I'm a big fan of the simplicity of drop cookies. I found a great starter recipe that included dried cranberries instead of dates, and I made a few adjustments until I came up with my own variation.

The dates in these bars were intense, and next time I think I would reduce the amount of sour cream slightly; the filling was quite creamy. The crust was just perfect, though, and in the future I may experiment with variations of fruit fillings to go along with the crumbly, sandy crust.

Orcas Island Date Bars

Ingredients:
Crust:
½ cup whole wheat flour
½ cup kamut flour
1 cup quick-cooking oats
½ cup packed brown sugar
¼ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. baking soda
¼ tsp. ground cinnamon
6 Tbsp. butter, melted
3 Tbsp. milk
Cooking spray
Filling:
1 1/3 cups chopped dates
¾ cup sour cream
2 Tbsp. whole wheat flour
2 Tbsp. maple syrup
2 Tbsp. brown sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 egg white, lightly beaten

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 325°F.
2. To prepare crust, weigh or lightly spoon flour into a dry measuring cup; level with a knife. Combine flour and next 5 ingredients (through cinnamon) in a medium bowl, stirring well with a whisk. Drizzle butter and juice over flour mixture, stirring until moistened (mixture will be crumbly). Reserve 1/2 cup oat mixture. Press remaining oat mixture into the bottom of an 11 x 7–inch baking dish coated with cooking spray.
3. To prepare filling, combine cranberries, sour cream, granulated sugar, and remaining ingredients in a medium bowl, stirring well. Spread cranberry mixture over prepared crust; sprinkle reserved oat mixture evenly over filling. Bake at 325° for 40 minutes or until edges are golden. Cool completely in pan on a wire rack.

Please Vote for Me and My Cookies!

Hi all,

I've entered the recipe that you see posted below, for Coconut Crisp Cookies, in this year's Bon Appetit's Bake Off competition. If you have the time to go to their website at

bonappetit.com/go/bakeoff

you will see a plethora of beautiful recipes for desserts of all kinds - make sure that you find the bars and cookies page (the first page to come up features cakes). If you do stop by Bon Appetit, please vote for me and my cookies! And please try to do so by December 13. If you're feeling motivated to try out the recipe also, I highly encourage it; these cookies are fan-tastic!

Thanks so much, and have a happy start to the holiday season, and the holiday baking that to ensue!

~Christie

Perfectly Peerless Coconut Crisp Cookies

I love to try out a new cookie recipe, and I found this one in The Good Cookie cookbook by Tish Boyle. Although I made a few alterations on the recipe, when I first came across it I was struck by how delicious the combination on ingredients sounded, and how I could not entirely picture what the cookie would look like or taste – in my mind – the flavor it would have. Happily, after an adventurous go at the recipe, with few expectations in place, I found that it is indeed a good cookie. Once I sampled these, though, I found it difficult to come up with an apt comparison so as to accurately describe its taste; on the one hand, there is the delightful combination of chocolate and coconut, which leads me to think of coconut cream chocolates, or Samoa girl scout cookies, minus the caramel. But the texture is almost that of shortbread: dense and a bit sandy, and with a noticeable hint of butter flavor. So, there really is nothing that I can completely compare these cookies to, which is a bit frustrating in terms of exposition, but absolutely wonderful in terms of cookie creation.

Because they are a heartier cookie, I envision them as the perfect companion to a holiday dessert buffet, and because they are quite different from the garden variety drop cookie, as a unique gift for the dessert lover who has tasted it all. I intend on making several batches to bring to a few of the upcoming Christmas dinners and parties, and hopefully I will come back with some appropriate adjectives to describe this coconut cookie.

Coconut Crisp Cookies

Yield: About 4 dozen

Ingredients:
1 ¾ cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temperature
2/3 cup date sugar
1/3 cup light brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups unsweetened flaked coconut
2 oz. semisweet chocolate, chopped

Directions:
1. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.
2. In a large bowl, blend together the butter and sugars until light. Beat in the egg, then the vanilla extract. Gently mix in the coconut and the chocolate. Add in the flour mixture until well-blended. Divide the dough into two pieces and shape each half into a disk. Wrap each disk in plastic wrap and refrigerate 1 hour.
3. After 1 hour, shape each disk into a 12-inch log, re-wrap, and refrigerate for at least two hours.
4. Preheat the oven to 325° F and line two cookie sheets with parchment paper.
5. Unwrap one log of dough. Using a large knife, cut the dough into ½-inch thick slices and place on the baking sheets. Repeat with the other log.
6. Bake for 15-17 minutes, rotating the cookie sheet halfway through cooking time. Remove when the bottoms are lightly browned but the tops are still soft. Cool on wire racks.

Better Brownies with Agave Nectar

Whenever I walk into a bakery and I look at the sprawling selection of desserts in front of me behind a protective glass case, my eyes seem to find the most chocolately item in the bunch, almost immediately. It's a sort of radar I've discovered I have, but it really does no one much good. Except, of course, for the bakery which inevitably becomes several dollars richer once I finally leave. I definitely have a thing for chocolate brownies, chocolate cookies, chocolate mounds of chocolate drizzled with more chocolate. It's to the point where I transcend the stereotypical woman who craves chocolate, and my love of chocolate is a running joke amongst those who know me best. And given my propensity to purchase the most decadent and rich dessert laid before me, I have been on the search for a better chocolate baked good, and one that I will create myself. Enter, the “better brownies” below. The original recipe was a “low-fat” brownie that still asked for 1 ½ cups of white sugar, and so I decided to do quite a bit of tweaking. And the brownie that emerged is better, in so many ways. These brownies are not for the casual brownie sampler – since these use actual chocolate, and not cocoa powder, the intense chocolate fudgey-ness was almost enough to even overwhelm me. However, they are not very sweet, and so the better the chocolate that you use, the more its distinctive flavor will stand out.


Better Brownies

Ingredients:
¼ cup unsalted butter
8 oz. bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
¼ cup unsweetened applesauce
1 cup date sugar
¼ cup agave nectar
2 egg whites
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
¾ cup whole wheat flour
½ tsp. salt

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350° F. Coat an 8-inch square pan with cooking spray.
2. Place butter and chocolate in a heatproof bowl set over simmering water to form a double boiler. Stir frequently until the butter and chocolate are melted together and smooth. Remove the bowl from heat and cool to room temperature.
3. Stir in applesauce, date sugar, and agave nectar, blending well. Whisk in the egg whites and the eggs, one at a time. Whisk in vanilla extract. Stir in flour and salt.
4. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan and bake about 30 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Transfer pan to a wire rack to cool completely.

New England Maple Cookies

This recipe was unearthed from my cookie archives: a recipe hand-written on an index card with flourishing letters that are not my own. Unfortunately, I'm not exactly sure where this recipe came from, but I'm glad that it found its way into my collection, somehow, and that I tried them out. I find maple syrup to be a brilliant source of wholesome sweetness in cookies (or any dessert, of course). Since maple syrup contains more complex sugars, it is absorbed more slowly into the bloodstream and therefore does not cause the sugar spike and drop that other sweeteners do. Date sugar, agave, molasses, and brown rice syrup have similar properties as maple syrup in this sense.

So although these cookies are quite sweet in taste, I found that they did not affect my body in the way that other simpler sugars do. And that is good news for these cookies, as a serving should include at least two or three. The one thing that I would want to tweak is the maple flavor: it actually did not come out strong enough for my liking; there's a very delicate maple taste, and if that is all you want, then the recipe is swell as is. But if you want something a bit stronger, as I do, then double the amount of maple extract, and that ought to do it.

New England Maple Cookies
Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. salt
½ cup butter, softened
2/3 cup date sugar
1/3 cup pure maple syrup
¼ tsp. maple extract
1 egg
2 Tbsp. maple sugar

Directions:
1. Whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt in a bowl and set aside.
2. Cream together the butter and evaporated cane juice in a separate bowl. Mix in the maple syrup and maple extract. Add the egg and continue to mix until well-combined. Slowly add the flour mixture.
3. Transfer the dough to a sheet of wax paper and work into a cylinder. Roll up in the wax paper and refrigerate about 3 hours.
4. Preheat oven to 375º F. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper. On a lightly floured work surface, roll the dough out to the thickness to 1/8 inch, one half of the dough portion at a time. Cut out 2-inch circles with a cookie cutter and transfer to the cookie sheets. Sprinkle with maple sugar.
5. Bake for 10 minutes, or until golden brown. Cool on wire racks.