Cardamom-Walnut Crescents

adapted from the NYT 12/15/10
(a reader sent it in and she got it from a Williams-Sonoma cookie book!)

Cardamom-Walnut Crescents
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For the Dough:
1/4 cup sugar
1 cup all purpose flour
3/4 c. shelled walnuts
1/4 pound unsalted butter chilled, cut into 1/2" pieces
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon ground cardmom
1/2 teaspoon grated orange zest
1/8 teaspoon salt

For the Vanilla Sugar:
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 vanilla bean


1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
Combine all dough ingredients in a food processor. Pulse until dough resembles coarse meal. Then process until it begins to hold together.

2. Roll 2 teaspoons of dough at a a time into a half moon shape. Arrange 1" apart on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake until firm (18-20 minutes)

3. Make vanilla sugar by putting sugar and vanilla bean into clean food processor bowl and process until vanilla bean is completely pulverized.

4.Allow cookies to cool 5 minutes in the pan, then transfer to a rack. Sift vanilla sugar over cookies (this will also sieve out any pieces of vanilla bean). Allow cookies to cool completely.

Those wonderful Earthquake Cookies

My friend Mary Ann has done it again! She was with me last week when we tried these little deadlies at Sofra and thought they were the cat's pajamas... and now she's has searched the web trying to find a recipe that replicates them and she's already tested out two recipes. Amazing. All that productivity while I was just starting to lean back and contemplate a drive back over to Sofra to buy more cookies...

So here's the link to the better of the two recipes:

http://www.ouichefnetwork.com/oui_chef/2010/02/chocolate-earthquake-cookies.html

This blogger is bent on improvement so this recipe may change over time and become even better. As of right now it is very good and pretty darn close to the original, but falls short in moistness... the centers of the original cookie was soft and fudgelike (I mean that in the nicest way).

I'll be trying these soon myself... well, after I finish off the bag that Mary Ann gave me.

Yum!

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7/2/10

I made this recipe yesterday and baked them today and I felt pretty happy with the outcome. I made a few modifications to the recipe, however, that I'm just going to document here for my own handy reference.


substituted 4 tablespoons EVOO for butter
substituted white whole wheat flour for all-purpose flour
I used a mixture of chocolates to make up the 12 oz. - some unsweetened Scharffen-Bergen with (4 oz) with 5 teaspoons of Turbindo sugar added, some Lindt dark chocolate and some 70% dark chocolate chips.

I baked the cookies for 15 minutes.