BY YAM STAFF
Indulge in these sweet treats from seven of Victoria’s most celebrated pastry chefs, perfect for gifting, sharing or keeping all to your happy self.
Pastry Chef Approved
Cookies are the happiest of baked goods. They are the perfect size for snacking, just a couple of sweet bites, plus they’re (relatively) easy to make, pretty to look at and as fun to give as they are delicious to eat. They are by nature meant for sharing — after all, you never bake cookies for one person — making them the perfect treat for a season that is all about giving and gathering.
So when we started putting together YAM’s annual holiday issue, we quickly decided that what we wanted most of all was cookies — but not just any cookies. We reached out to seven of Victoria’s best pastry chefs to see if they’d be willing to share their favourite recipes. We were thrilled when they all said yes.
Kimberley Vy of the Inn at Laurel Point, Haley Landa of GoodSide Pastry House, Tracie Zahavich of Fox & Monocle, Gerald Tan of the Fairmont Empress, Dominique Laurencelle of Marilena Cafe & Raw Bar, Kelly Duke of The Courtney Room and Tom Moore, author of the new cookbook Crust, sent us recipes for spice cookies and chocolatey ones, cookies filled with jam and others with caramel, chewy cookies, crispy ones and even all-grown-up boozy ones.
Keep an eye out every Friday for the next seven weeks, there’s sure to be a cookie — or two, or three, or seven — in our series that you love.
Happy baking, and even happier eating!
Cook’s Notes
Pastry chefs measure in weight rather than cups and tablespoons, so in cases where the recipes were submitted in grams we’ve kept them that way, but included a volume conversion as well. The grams will be more accurate (and, frankly, easier), so we suggest using those if you have a digital scale.
Pastry chefs love complicated recipes with many steps and multiple components. With these cookies, you don’t need to make the fillings, glazes, soaks and garnishes — the cookies alone are delicious enough. But all those extras are so pretty and delicious, we think you’ll want to.
Some of these cookies are also quite large; by all means make a smaller version if you like, but note that you may need to adjust baking times if you do.
7 Tips for Better Cookies
Cookies are among the simplest of bakes, but these tips will help make them even better.
1. Weigh, Don’t Scoop
There’s a reason why pastry chefs use a scale rather than cups and tablespoons: Weight is way more accurate than volume. A cup of flour can weigh anywhere from 118 grams to 160 grams, depending on the humidity in the air and how tightly you pack the flour, but 120 grams is always 120 grams. Pick up an electronic scale (you should be able to find one for under $50) and your baking life will be transformed.
If you don’t have a scale and you need to make cookies right now, here’s how to scoop properly: Fluff up the flour first, use a spoon to scoop it into the measuring cup, then scrape off the extra.
2. Adjust Your Temperatures
In baking, temperatures matter. A lot. Most importantly:
- Butter needs to be at room temperature to cream properly. Room-temperature butter should feel like clay when you press your finger in it; it should not feel soft and greasy. The most reliable way to get room-temp butter is to leave it on the counter for a few hours; to speed things up, slice it first. (If your recipe calls for room-temperature milk, cream and/or eggs, set those out for about an hour before using them.)
- Butter needs to be very cold if you are making laminated dough or short pastry, where it is cut into or layered between the flour.
- If the recipe says to refrigerate your dough or pastry, do so. Otherwise you are likely to end up with a greasy, puddled mess on the baking sheet.
- For ingredients that require accurate temperatures — such as custards, some frostings, candies, chocolate and caramel — invest in a digital thermometer.
- Also consider the temperature of your oven — the degrees on the dial may not be the actual temperature inside. Use a digital thermometer to check it and adjust accordingly.
3. Cream Correctly
Creaming butter and sugar together does more than just blend the ingredients; it also creates little pockets of air that help leaven the cookies as they bake.
If you don’t cream butter and sugar long enough, the mixture will be gritty and your cookies dense; if you cream them too long, the cookies may puff up too much, collapse while baking and/or become cakey. Properly creamed butter and sugar should be pale and fluffy, which takes about four minutes at medium speed in a stand mixer.
4. Use the Right Sweetener
In baking, granulated sugar does not equal icing sugar does not equal brown sugar and definitely does not equal honey or maple syrup. Each has varying amounts of moisture and acidity, which react differently with any leaveners you might use. Use the sweetener the recipe calls for.
5. Use a Cookie Scoop
If you’ve ever tried to portion cookie dough with a tablespoon, you probably ended up with misshapen, lopsided, randomly sized cookies and very sticky fingers. Make your life easy and your cookies beautifully consistent by using a cookie scoop (basically, a small ice cream scoop with a lever).
6. Line Your Baking Sheets
You never want to place cookies on an unlined, ungreased baking sheet; they will most likely stick. But greasing the pans can make your cookies spread in ways you don’t want and cause dark bottoms and burnt edges, too. The solution? Either parchment paper or a non-stick silicone mat, both of which give you good, consistent results, ensure your cookies don’t stick to the pan and leave you with less mess to clean up later.
7. Don’t Crowd Your Cookies … and Don’t Overbake Them
Cookies tend to spread more than you think they will. When you place the balls of dough on your (lined!) cookie sheet, spread them out with a few inches in between and bake them in batches rather than all at once. In between batches, never place raw cookie dough on a hot baking sheet, but let the pan return to room temperature first.
Also, baking times can vary wildly from what the recipe suggests, depending on the temperature of your oven and other factors. Typically, cookies are done when the edges are set and lightly browned. If in doubt, err on the side of under rather than overbaking cookies — even after you pull them from the oven, they will continue to bake on the hot baking sheet.