This recipe is intended an a step zero for learning how to develop your own baking recipes!
I've chosen the sandwich cookie because the basic parts, the shortbread cookie and the filling and both simple recipes, with short ingredient lists and few technical challenges. But are endlessly riffable and quite resiliently delicious despite changes.
By making this recipe, and learning how to tweak it, you'll gain an understanding of what each ingredient does in a baked good, what happens when you change them, what you can change and what needs to stay exactly as written. You can take this foundation (which is less the specific facts, and more a method for how to research and test things), and apply it to any recipe!
Ultimately recipe creation boils down to this:
Research and collect similar recipes. Blend them together to create your best guess of a basic version of what you want. Tweak it to add the flavoring and texture you're looking for. Make it, lament that it's not perfect, research and consider improvements for next time. Repeat till perfect!
Ingredients
For Plain Cookies
88g room temp butter
45g confectioner sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 room temp egg yolks
127g sifted AP or cake flour
A pinch of salt
For Matcha or Hojicha
Add 5g matcha or hojicha powder
For Nuts (my favorite!)
Replace 127g of flour with: 27g nut flour or finely ground nuts 100g AP flour. (Almond, hazelnut, sesame, and walnut have all been tasty in the past)
Add like a big handful of nuts chopped into fine (3/16" or 1/2cm) pieces. The nut pieces are largely for visual appeal, so add as much as you think looks nice (or omit altogether)
For Cereal Cornflakes
Replace 127g of flour with: 27g ground up corn flakes 100g AP flour
A handful of Cristi Tosi's Cereal Crunch, recipe below!
- Cereal CrunchRecipe for Cristi Tosi's (from Milk Bar) Cereal Milk Crunch!
Cereal Crunch
Recipe for Cristi Tosi's (from Milk Bar) Cereal Milk Crunch!
Ingredients
5 cups (or 1/2 box of corn flakes)
1/4 cup milk powder
1/4 cup malt powder
3 Tbs sugar
1 tsp salt
8 Tbs (1 stick) melted butter
Method
preheat oven to 275°
crush the cereal to 1/2 it's original size
add milk powder, malt, sugar and salt
mix in the butter
spread in even layer on 1/2 baking sheet and bake for 20 minutes
Tips and Tricks for making Variations
You can adjust the flavor, the sweetness and even the texture of this cooke to be 100% perfect for you. Anything is achievable with some creativity and a good starting point! Here are a few pointers to get you going on your experiments!!
The Basic Dough
It's a good idea to consider how ingredients effect a baked good before messing around with substitutions and additions. These cookies are really simple, with only a few moving parts, so is a great place to start!
Butter
adds fat, and a bit of liquid
Butter is an incredible fat because it is solid(ish) at room temp. Controlling the temp of butter is critical in producing unique textures. Cold, solid butter is great in criossants and pie dough because it wont mix readily into the flour, causing those delicious layers and flakes. In this recipe, the butter needs to be room temp so that it can be whipped with sugar, trapping air pockets and incorporating that right amount of air, with the right size air pockets, to produce a nice tender, crumbly cookie
Butter, compared to oil, produces smaller air pockets and the final product tends to feel a little dryer and like springy. We really want this in cookies and pound cake, but in birthday cakes, carrot cakes, etc, oil might make more sense!
Sugar
Technically considered adding liquid, oddly enough, because it liquifies in heat and in contact with water!
Other obvious contribution to flavor, in this recipe, the grains of sugar are vital in aerating the butter, and producing a nice tender cookie. For this reason, in this recipe (and any recipe in which sugar and butter are creamed) you must use at least some solid sugar. An all a liquid, or invert sugar, like maple syrup or honey won't work in air the same way and will cause your cookie to be less tender, like a bad cracker.
Egg yolks
adds fat, and a bit of liquid
this recipe doesn't use any egg white. Eggs whites add a lot of liquid and have a tendency to expand in the oven, causing moister, springier final products. We want a stiff, almost sandy texture here, so we're leaving them out
both eggs whites and yolks act as a binder, keeping the fats, liquids, and solid together and homogenous
Flour
adds structure and body
Other than providing a base to form the body of the dough, flour in contact with water and agitation adds gluten. Lots of gluten makes things chewy and stretchy, and much of the business of baking is controlling the amount of gluten. Lots and lots for bread, as little as possible for cake.
These cookies should have very little gluten. To achieve this you can use cake/pastry flour which is low in gluten, or you can simply be vary careful to agitate your dough as little as possible
Adding Flavorings
It is possible to flavor these cookies in any way you want but there are some limitations. In general you are looking to maintain the ratios of fat, starch, and liquid in the recipe.
Just a pinch extra dry or wet ingredients are unlikely to change the cookie that much, but if you need to add a lot of anything, you also need to adjust the base recipe!
Taste Everything! Conveniently, flavorings go in right at the end. Once you add them, taste a little of the dough. If it doesn't taste strongly enough of your addition at this stage, it's unlikely to come through in the final product. Add more! Think of like cooking!
If you need a lot of a dry flavoring (like nut flour), subtract the amount of dry from the amount of flour you will use, and use AP flour to keep just enough gluten to keep the cookie together. ie, if using 27g of almond flour, use 127-27 = 100g of AP flour
If your flavoring needs to be wet
if that flavoring fat heavy (like olive oil), remove an equal amount of the butter. You still need at least half, but likely more butter to remain, because butter is aerating our dough. If you remove it entirely the cookie's texture will change dramatically. The exact ration will take some guess work (but it'll probably turn out fine so give your best bet a shot!)
if that flavoring is not fatty (like alcohol or juice), be careful! If it's just a dash, you can add a tablespoon or so of extra flour to keep the consistency of the dough the same. If it s a LOT of liquid, try thinking of ways to reduce the liquid or find a dry version of the flavor.
Use espresso powder instead of coffee
use lemon zest instead of lemon juice
use crushed freeze dried fruit or extract instead of juice
use ground tea leaves bloomed in the butter rather than tea itself
Mix ins make the cookie look so pretty, enhances flavor, and adds an interesting texture to the cookie.
These should be cut up pretty small so that you can slice through them easily and so that the cookies still holds together
These should be DRY. Anything wet, like fresh fruit, will leak liquids as they bake and result in an odd texture in the cookie and an unattractive sagging.
You could try swirling jam or other sauces into the dough but these too should air of the side of being drier or stiffer.
Some ingredients do plain weird things to texture. For example, matcha powder has an odd way of making everything stiffer and drier. Unfortunately you'll just have to experiment when you run into these! Google, and more specifically Reddit, is your friend!
If you can't figure out how to make the flavor work in the cookie, you can always just pack it into the cream filling, which will be more flexible, and let the cookie be a complimentary taste!
To Make the Cookie
Step 1 : Cream Butter
Cream butter, vanilla, and sugar together until light and fluffy.
This will take ~6 minutes with stand mixer on medium high with the paddle attachment, or 10 with electric hand mixer. You could also try a food processor, but I've never done it myself!
Refer to this video for pointers on how to cream the butter and sugar. You're looking for a very pale yellow that looks smooth and fluffy! Mixing too long or not long enough could make your cookies dense, but for this specific recipe, it's fine to overmix a little
Step 2 : Add Wet Ingredients
Add egg yolks and liquid flavorings (if using) and beat till incorporated
Note: Usually, regardless of what flavor the cookies are, the process and ingredients are the same before adding the dry ingredients. To test out multiple new combinations and flavors at once, I often split the dough in half at this stage and continue each half separately with a different flavor in each.
Step 3 : Add Dry Ingredients
Add sifted flour, salt, and other dry ingredients (if using) and fold with spatula until just incorporated.
Do NOT overmix. It would be better if you stopped mixing when you can still see just a few steaks of flour than to overmix. I recommend using a spatula instead of a mixer because it's harder to overmix while doing things manually.
If you are using mix ins, add them just before the dough in fully incorporated
Step 4 : Form and Rest
Dough should be easily formable into a soft but solid ball. On a piece of parchment, roughly form the dough into a 2" diameter log, then use the parchment to roll the dough into a perfect cylinder.
You can refer to this video for reference on how to roll the dough into parchment paper to get a nice cylinder of dough!
Rest in fridge at least 2 hours, best results overnight. Resting allows the ingredients to hydrate and meld, deepening the flavor and enhancing the texture. It really makes a difference so be sure you do it!!
Step 5 : Make Filling
Just before baking the cookies, make the filling of your sandwich! There are so many variations that work well here, but it has to be something that is a little hardier in texture so that it can support being sandwiched. For example, you could try...
Buttercream
Ganache
If you'd like something a little wetter, like a jam or a curd, consider also making a stiffer filling to surround and contain the wetter one. Here's a video of what I mean!
Here's a versatile recipe for White Chocolate Ganache that has worked well for me!
Whipped Chocolate Ganache
Ingredients (and Variations)
For Dark Chocolate Cream
100g heavy cream
120g bittersweet chocolate chips
For White Chocolate Cream
65g heavy cream
150g white chocolate chip
For Hojicha or Matcha Cream
12g hojicha or matcha powder
150g white chocolate
75g heavy cream
a bit of salt
a dash of vanilla
For White Chocolate Sesame Cream (WIP)
65g Heavy cream
150g White chocolate
A bit of vanilla
Tiny bit a salt
a handful of toasted and crushed sesame seeds
1tsp of sesame oil
For Chocolate Hazelnut Cream
80g heavy cream
120g bittersweet chocolate chips
A bit of vanilla
Tiny bit of salt
a big handful of Toasted and chopped hazelnuts (put raw hazelnuts in a 350 oven for 10-12 minutes, put toasted hazelnuts in a towel and rub them to get skins off, grind in a food processor till a paste). Add little by little to the mixture until you get the taste you want!
For Malted chocolate
120g bittersweet chocolate
100g heavy cream
30g malt powder
Milk and cereal (WIP)
soak 80g of warm heavy cream and a handful of Corn Flake Cereal Crunch
150g white chocolate
1.5 Tbs of milk powder or malt powder
Method
For all the variations of ganache, the method remains basically the same!
Step 1: Melt and Mix Everything
Put chocolate in a large-ish bowl with any dry flavoring
In a separate, microwave-safe bowl, microwave heavy cream and any liquid ingredients until steaming (a few minutes), stirring every 30 seconds so a skin doesn't form over the milk.
Pour the milk over the chocolate and stir until the chocolate is melted and smooth. If the chocolate isn't melting, microwave the whole bowl for 10 seconds and stir again.
Step 3: Set chocolate
Transfer to fridge, and check on it every 20 minutes. Take it out once the ganache is much thicker but still soft and pliable. There should be significant resistance when you try and move a spoon around in it. If it's gone totally solid but its still pliable, you could try and do that next step anyway. If it's rock hard, set it out at room temp till is softens some.
The exact stiffness doesn't matter than much, it just needs to be stiff enough to hold air bubbles when you whip it!
White chocolate sets faster than dark so keep an eye on it!
Step 4: Whip ganache
Beat with a mixer until doubled in size and much lighter in color.
Make sure your filling is room temp when you go to fill your cookies! Otherwise it might be too stiff to spread evenly
Step 6 : Bake Cookies
Preheat oven to 350°F
Unwrap the roll of dough. If you'd like, you can roll the log in some stuff to add a nice textural element. Coarse sugars, seeds, nuts, and other nice crunchy things are great here. Beware things that might melt in the oven though!
Using a big kitchen knife, cut the log into 3/16” slices (a ruler helps) and arrange slices on a baking sheet with parchment paper. To keep the shape pretty, keep remaining dough slices in fridge while each batch bakes.
It's somewhat difficult to cut the cookies to even thickness with a knife. Make sure the dough is cold and stiff and that you regularly wipe dough residue off the knife. I think alternatively, instead of shaping the dough as a log in step 4, you could roll the dough into a flat sheet between two parchments, chill it in the same way, and then punch the cookies out as long as you keep the dough cold cold cold. But I've never tried this!
Bake until edges and bottom are every so slightly golden. The center of cookie should still be soft. In our oven it's 5-6 minutes but just watch them like a hawk, they burn easily.
Cool to room temp
Step 7 : Sandwich 'em up!
Pair off the cookies. Try to pair them with a partner cookie that is as similar as possible in size and shape.
With a small spoon to add a bit of filling to one side of the cookie. You could also do this with a piping bag, but the spoon works great!
Gently press the partner cookie on top of the filling. The cookies are a bit delicate and break easily so be careful! To prevent cracking, apply even pressure across the whole surface area of the cookie, using both hands. One to support the bottom cookie and the other to slowly press the top one into place.
Step 8: Enjoy!
You can eat these immediately! Or you can place in fridge up to a few days. Chilling them overnight is great because it softens the cookies slightly and stiffens the cream!