Orange You Glad To Discover This Cookie?
 
There are dainty cookies. There are itty-bitty cookies. And there are delicate cookies you nibble while holding your pinkie finger in the air.
These Orange Butter Cookies are none of those things.
Indeed, if this cookie were on a playground, it would be the big, hulking bruiser you’d have to make way for fast.
As my husband’s co-worker Kathryn likens, “It’s a monster cookie.”
These cookies measure about 3 1/2 inches in diameter when baked. And I actually made them smaller than the recipe called for. Really!
You’re supposed to form them into balls, using a scant 1/2 cup measure. Me? I used a scant 1/4 cup measure instead, and still they came out pretty ginormous compared to most cookies I bake.
But the flavor is nothing to be afraid of. Buttery, and citrusy, these cookies are crispy on the edges and tender, cakey within. They have this old-fashioned quality about them, reminding me of cookies I ate as a kid that were so big and soft they made for the perfect after-school snack. Of course, the fact that you use your fingers to flatten the dough balls, leaving an impression of your digits after they bake, just adds to the kid-like charm.
The recipe is from “The Sweeter Side of Amy’s Bread” (Wiley). The book is by Amy Scherber, who launched Amy’s Bread bakery in New York City in 1992, and her Executive Pastry Chef Toy Kim Dupree.
When I tried this recipe, I took the opportunity to try three new products I had on hand. Instead of freshly grated orange zest in the dough (I lacked a fresh orange in the house, if you can believe that), I used orange peel granules from the Spice Hound, which sells at my local farmers’ markets and online. Even though the recipe didn’t call for it, I added 1 1/2 teaspoons of King Arthur’s Orange Emulsion, a concentrated orange flavoring stronger than regular extract. And instead of sprinkling the cookies with regular granulated sugar, I used Nielsen-Massey’s Madagascar Bourbon Pure Vanilla Sugar. The results were fabulous.
You don’t have to doctor the recipe with those extras like I did in order to have a soul-satisfying sweet. Indeed, in the recipe below, the only changes I made were to the size of the cookies and the baking time because I made them smaller. The original recipe makes 12 cookies; I made 15.
