Baking With Dorie: Kids' Thumbprints

My daughter and I are the real peanut butter lovers in our house. So my reason behind choosing this recipe was just so I could have some fun making these with her. Halfway into rolling the cookie dough into balls, I realized this had been a bad idea because my daughter insisted she was handling play-doh and soon everything was going to end up all over the kitchen floor. So I took over the dough and allowed her to poke holes into the center of each cookie, using a wooden spoon.  I had to make them  a little larger than teaspoon-sized because my daughter kept smashing them while trying to poke the hole! The end result was a little messy looking cookie, but we did have a lot of fun baking them together. 

These buttery, shortbread-like cookies were a big hit with my toddler, her favorite part being the strawberry jam center.  

Kids' Thumbprints

from Baking: From y home to yours ,by Dorie Greenspan, Page 163.

1.5 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature

1/2 cup peanut butter - crunchy (Dorie's choice) or smooth

1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

1/4 cup sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 large egg, separated

1 2/3 cups all purpose flour

1 large egg white

1 1/2 cups roasted peanuts (salted or unsalted), finely chopped

about 3/4 cup jam or jelly (cherry, raspberry, strawberry and  blueberry are particularly good)

Position the racks to divide the oven into thirds and preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone mats. 

Working with a stand mixer, preferably fitted with a paddle attachment, or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the butter, peanut butter and sugars together on medium speed until very light and fluffy, 3-4 minutes. Add the vanilla and egg yolk and continue to beat until well blended. Reduce the mixer speed to low and add the flour, mixing only until incorporated. 

Put the 2 egg whites in a small bowl and beat them with a fork until slightly frothy. Put the chopped nuts in another bowl. 

Working with a teaspoon of dough at a time, roll the dough between your palms to form balls, turn them in the egg whites till completely coated and then drop them into the nuts and roll to coat. Place the cookies 2 inches apart on baking sheets. Steadying each cookie with the thumb and finger of one hand, use the pinkie of your other hand (or the end of a wooden spoon) to poke a hole in the center of each cookie. Be careful not to go all the way down to the baking sheet. 

Bake for 15 - 18 minutes, rotating sheets from top to bottom and front to back at the midway mark. The cookies will be lightly golder. Using a wide metal spatula, transfer them to a rack. 

Repeat with the remaining dough, cooling the baking sheets before baking a new batch. 

Put the jam or jelly in a small saucepan and bring it to a boil, stirring, over low heat. Using a small spoon, fill each thumbprint with hot jam. Allow the cookies - and especially the jam - to cool to room temperature, at which point the jam will form a shiny , nonsticky finish. 

Thank you to all the BWD bakers for baking along with me this week. Please check out the blogroll here to see everyone elses's thumbprint cookies, and please note that the gluten-free version of these cookies will be up on Elizabeths' blog Gluten-Free Baking 101 tomorrow (Tuesday). We are baking Pumpkin Muffins next, picked by Elizabeth. If you'd like to join our baking challenge, please email me at  needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along with us! 

Baking With Dorie: Caramel-Peanut-Topped Brownie Cake

It is impossible to look through Baking: From My Home To Yours by Dorie Greenspan and not stop to drool over the photos of this cake. A brownie base with salted peanuts and sticky, gooey, dripping caramel . . . it had my name all over it & so I was very happy to be able to pick the recipe for this weeks' Baking With Dorie challenge. 

It takes hardly any time to make the cake and it came out looking perfect, but it was cakier than the  super-moist, fudgy brownie I had been envisioning all along. It caved in while cooling, but Dorie already tells us to expect that it will. So, no surprises or panic attacks there.

Next up was the tricky part: making the Caramel. Needless to say, I've never made it from scratch before. Since I made this cake in a frightful hurry, at the eleventh hour, I completely forgot that I could have referred to David Lebovitz's post on how to make Caramel. And Elizabeth of Gluten-Free Baking 101 has added a wonderful step-by-step tutorial within her post this week - just in case you want to get some great visual tips on how to get it right.

Otherwise, Dorie's directions are very clear and guide you right through the process. The only thing was, my caramel took longer to cook than the 10 minutes she said it would. But that has mostly to do with the size of saucepan I used and how much heat I gave it. I really didn't want to burn the caramel since I had very little time to start from scratch all over again, so I watched it like a hawk for maybe 20 minutes. Meanwhile, I had fun doing the 'white plate test' every couple of minutes:

The fun part came next - mixing in the nuts and then pouring everything over the cake. Dorie recommends waiting till the caramel is completely cool before releasing the sides of the springform pan. But I just couldn't wait, because: 

a) I'm highly impatient

b) my kids were hovering around me like flies, wanting to poke their fingers into the cake that they just couldn't wait to eat (now I wonder where they get that from?)

c) I'm highly impatient. 

And this is what happens to impatient people who not only remove their cake from the pan but also slice it right away: 

Yup. Caramel Explosion. Never mind that it looks mouthwatering. 

Next time I'm going to have to listen to the wiser, saner Dorie and let things be. The wisdom in that would have been that the caramel would have set up a little, and some of it would have soaked through and made the cake very moist - almost fudgy. The next morning, this tasted somewhat like a chocolate-peanut version of a sticky-toffee pudding. Do I really need to say it was scrumptious!

One tip: Dorie suggests we don't dump the entire quantity of caramel over the cake and that we should be left with a lot more than we actually need. As usual she's spot on, so, don't be tempted. Less is definitely more as it will make your cake exceedingly sweet.

To check out what the other bakers did with this weeks' recipe, please check the blogroll here and here. Our next challenge, coming up on July 19, is the Creamiest Lime Cream Meringue Pie, chosen by Elizabeth of Gluten-Free Baking 101. If you'd like to join the challenge, please drop me an email. We'd love to have you bake along with us!

You can find the recipe for this cake on pages 264-5 of Baking: From My Home To Yours by Dorie Greenspan. Or you can find it right here after the jump: