First let me explain my photo. I made a lemon bundt cake on Thursday night, glazed it on Friday, and got so excited to give it to some dear friends that I forgot to take a picture before passing it along. Then, when I went to take a picture of the cookies I made, my camera’s battery died. I tried taking a picture with my phone, but the quality was even worse than with my regular camera.Instead of posting without a picture, though, I thought I’d introduce you to the cutest kitty in the world, Mr. Geoffrey Jellineck.
Moving on. As I mentioned, I made a scrumptious lemon bundt cake this week that, adhering to my new dietary adjustment, was also dairy free. I adapted a recipe from (who else?) Cook’s Illustrated. The recipe was for one 12-cup bundt cake, but I only have a six-cup pan and a pan that makes six one-cup cakes, so I used those. It turned out to be a good idea, because I was able to make one big cake and a bunch of mini cakes, which allowed me to sample my goods before foisting them upon my friends.
The recipe also called for glazing the cake twice: once right out of the oven, and once when cooled. Eliza got super cranky right around when I was taking the cakes out of the oven, so the first glazing did not happen. I ended up glazing all the cakes the next afternoon and, frankly, I see nothing wrong with that. The lemon glaze was tart and delicious and a perfect pairing with the sweet cake. That first glazing might have allowed some of the glaze to penetrate the cake a bit, but it was plenty tasty the way I did it.
Two of the mini cakes went to our new next-door neighbors, and the big cake went to Akina and Todd (Akina is lactose intolerant, so the dairy-free cake was welcomed gratefully). The other four mini cakes ended up in my belly.
On Sunday night I had a hankering for some cookies. I looked online for a good cookie recipe that I could easily modify to be dairy free, and that also called for ingredients I had already since I didn’t feel like going to the store. The recipe I decided on was Dorie Greenspan’s World Peace Cookies (there’s an explanation for the name of the cookies here).
In my Google travels I’ve read a lot about Dorie Greenspan, but I’d never tried any of her recipes until this one. And I’m hooked. I will be buying Baking: From My Home to Yours very soon.
The World Peace Cookies recipe is a little funky. The dough is really, really crumbly, and the chilled dough logs were nearly impossible to slice; the dough just kind of fell apart and I had to mash it back together into cookie-like shapes. As a result, many of the cookies I made were unsightly—delicious, yes, but they were some ugly mofos. I guess it’s lucky my camera battery died after all.
But it doesn’t matter that they were ugly, because I couldn’t keep my hands off of them. They're super chocolatey, with just a hint of a salty bite. Their texture is like sand or, as Erik said, like "cooked cookie dough"—which somehow makes perfect sense. They are delicate and hefty at the same time. I'm pretty much addicted. I was only able to get 14 cookies from the recipe, and that’s a good thing, because if there were many more I probably would have turned into a giant World Peace Cookie.
Dairy-Free Lemon Bundt Cake
(adapted from Cook’s Illustrated)
Cake
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
Zest of 3 lemons
3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon table salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup plain soy milk plus 1 tablespoon lemon juice
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1 large egg yolk, at room temperature
18 tablespoons shortening, at room temperature
2 cups sugar
Glaze
2 - 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon plain soy milk
2 cups confectioners' sugar
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 12-cup bundt pan. Mince the lemon zest to a fine paste (you should have about 2 tablespoons). Combine the zest and 3 tablespoons of lemon juice in small bowl.
2. Whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in a large bowl. Combine the lemon juice mixture, the vanilla, and the soy milk/lemon juice mixture in a medium bowl. In a small bowl, gently whisk the eggs and the yolk to combine. In a standing mixer, cream the shortening and the sugar at medium-high speed until fluffy, about 3 minutes; scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. Reduce to medium speed and add half of the eggs, mixing until incorporated, about 15 seconds. Repeat with the remaining eggs; scrape down the bowl again. Reduce to low speed; add about one-third of the flour mixture, followed by half of the soy milk/lemon juice mixture, mixing until just incorporated after each addition (about 5 seconds). Repeat using half of the remaining flour mixture and all of the remaining soy milk/lemon juice mixture. Scrape the bowl and add the remaining flour mixture; mix at medium-low speed until the batter is thoroughly combined, about 15 seconds. Remove the bowl from the mixer and fold the batter once or twice with a rubber spatula to incorporate any remaining flour. Scrape into the prepared pan.
3. Bake until the top is golden brown and a wooden skewer or toothpick inserted into center comes out with no crumbs attached, 45 to 50 minutes.
4. While the cake is baking, whisk 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, the soy milk, and the confectioners' sugar until smooth, adding more lemon juice gradually as needed until the glaze is thick but still pourable. Cool the cake in the pan on a wire rack set over a baking sheet for 10 minutes, then invert the cake directly onto the rack. Pour half of the glaze over the warm cake and let cool for 1 hour; pour the remaining glaze evenly over the top of the cake and continue to cool to room temperature, at least 2 hours. Cut into slices and serve.
Dairy-Free World Peace Cookies
(adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours)
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
11 tablespoons Earth Balance shortening, at room temperature
2/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1. Sift the flour, cocoa, and baking soda together.
2. In a standing mixer, beat the shortening on medium speed until soft and creamy. Add both the sugars, the salt, and the vanilla extract and beat for 2 minutes more.
3. Turn off the mixer. Pour in the flour and pulse the mixer at low speed about 5 times, a second or two each time; if there is still a lot of flour on the surface of the dough, pulse a couple of times more. Continuing at low speed, mix for about 30 seconds more, just until the flour disappears into the dough. Toss in the chocolate pieces and mix only to incorporate.
4. Turn the dough out onto a work surface, gather it together and divide it in half. Working with one half at a time, shape the dough into logs that are 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Wrap the logs in plastic wrap and refrigerate them for at least 3 hours. (The dough can be refrigerated for up to 3 days or frozen for up to 2 months. If you’ve frozen the dough, you needn’t defrost it before baking—just slice the logs into cookies and bake the cookies 1 minute longer.)
5. Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment or silicone mats.
6. Working with a sharp thin knife, slice the logs into rounds that are 1/2 inch thick. (The rounds are likely to crack as you’re cutting them—don’t be concerned, just squeeze the bits back onto each cookie.) Arrange the rounds on the baking sheets, leaving about 1 inch between them.
7. Bake the cookies one sheet at a time for 12 minutes. They won’t look done, and they won’t be firm, but that’s just the way they should be. Transfer the baking sheet to a cooling rack.
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