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Buttermilk Lemon Cookies and a finished garden
Posted at 17 Sep 2008 09:47:11 AM |
So, fortified with a jack & coke, sour patch kids and the lack of a headache, I present to you the promised post. Only a day late*; not too bad, considering.
The cookies which I mentioned are these:
They are the lemon buttermilk cookies which were mentioned
here at Orangette's blog. You know that I'm a sucker for anything involving lemon, so they became my weekend baking. I made the full recipe, figuring that even if it made all 6 dozen I could always foist some off on Timm and Liz, or on the office.... well, it made 7.5 dozen, so I did both with two full tupperware containers left for us!
The original recipe as printed in Gourmet magazine can be found
here. The only thing I changed was to double the amount of lemon zest to around 2 tsp (or 3 lemons' worth) as suggested on Orangette.
Skip past the recipe?
Buttermilk Lemon Cookies
INGREDIENTS
For cookies
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2/3 cup well-shaken buttermilk
For glaze
1 1/2 cups confectioners sugar
3 tablespoons well-shaken buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
PREPARATION
Make cookies:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F with rack in middle. Butter 2 large baking sheets (note: I used silicone-treated parchment paper instead).
Whisk together flour, zest, baking soda, and salt.
Beat together butter and sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer until pale and fluffy. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition, then beat in vanilla. Mix in flour mixture and buttermilk alternately in batches at low speed, beginning and ending with flour mixture, until smooth.
Drop level tablespoons of dough about 1 1/2 inches apart onto baking sheets. Bake, 1 sheet at a time, until cookies are puffed and edges are golden, 12 to 15 minutes per batch. Cool cookies on sheets 1 minute, then transfer cookies to racks.
Glaze cookies:
Whisk together all glaze ingredients and brush onto tops of warm cookies.
Let stand until cookies are completely cooled and glaze is set.
Cooks' note: Cookies are best the day they're made but can be frozen, wrapped well, up to 1 month.
Also accomplished is the raised garden in the back yard!
More pictures are
here; the album should be public.
It's about 2' high on the outside, and is set into the hill. Down the road if we want to build another box on top of it, it should be relatively easy to base one wall on the existing (inside) wall, like we did for the shed-ward now (it's set on top of the retaining wall around the shed). That might do bad things to my sunlight, though, so for now this is more than good!
It has more soil in it now than in the picture, and comes up within about 6 inches of the top. It's a mix of ~3:1 soil to peat moss, which should help hold in the moisture once temperatures hit the 90s this summer. You'd never know it now, though... from the radio this morning we're slated to get 8 days of sporadic rain and thundershowers.
On the plan are heirloom cherry tomatoes and mini bell peppers, snap peas up the wire screen in the back, cippolini onions, dwarf carrots, hungarian wax peppers (my favorite), chinese 5-color peppers**, possibly some jalepenos and assorted herbs.
Weather-permitting I'll get the peas and carrots off of my windowsill and actually planted. Keep your fingers crossed that they don't get drowned out, but I don't think they'll survive much longer in the limited environment I've got for them inside anyway.
Probably bowling this evening :) I'm slowly getting less bad at it, which is a comfort! League starts the 19th (of May), and I'd like not to be a complete embarrassment, though Dan assures me I'm not ;-)
* Or two,if you consider that I'm posting the morning after actually writing the post.
**The mystery peppers from Tom Matarese, finally identified thanks to the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog!
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