♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - You know, Americans don't have a long history of making cookies.

If you go back to 1896, with the "Boston Cooking School Cookbook," there are small cakes, but there are really no cookies.

Cookies tend to come from Europe.

So here are three recipes we absolutely love.

Instead of Linzertorte-- it's a little tricky to make, with that latticework-- we'll make Linzer bars.

Much easier to do and just as delicious.

Then we'll take a browned butter cookie, but we're going to add some tahini and dip it in chocolate, which makes it super-wonderful.

(chuckling) And finally, gingerbread cookies, but this is from Poland, with a little bit of honey and rye.

So three great cookie recipes that we make, I hope, even better.

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♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - Linzertorte-- I've made Linzertorte many times.

And the problem with Linzertorte is, if you do it in a tart shell, the latticework, 'cause the dough's so soft, sort of hard to put it on and organize.

It tends to fall apart on you, so we thought, let's use an eight-inch baking pan and turn them into Linzer bars.

This is a real recipe.

It's been around for hundreds of years in Austria.

It's sort of like Sachertorte, except Sachertorte became this big tourist thing.

The other thing about Austrian cooking is, they use a lot of jam.

So Sachertorte has jam in it.

Linzertorte, obviously, has a lot of jam in it.

The other thing it has is nuts.

So nuts and jam you see in a lot of recipes in Austria, also in Germany.

So we'll start with sugar and walnuts.

We like walnuts 'cause they're a little bitter.

And there's a fair amount of jam in this, which is sweet.

So it sets that off nicely.

And we're just gonna process this for 20, 30 seconds.

(whirring) You can see the walnuts are nicely processed-- okay.

Now for flour, of course.

A little cocoa powder goes in.

Then we have salt, of course-- don't forget salt in desserts-- cinnamon, some ground black pepper, which I think really is nice, adds a little punch to it.

We have cloves and allspice, so they all go in.

Now we'll just pulse this a few times.

(whirring) A little bit of fresh lemon zest is really nice.

So we have small pieces of butter, which are cold.

And again, we're gonna pulse it until the butter is really coating the flour.

(whirring) So you can see the butter is really nicely cut in.

You don't want to see big pieces.

Same speech I give you about doing pie pastry.

You want to really get the butter cut in.

So we're going to use one egg in this recipe.

The white we'll use later, the yolk now.

Put that in.

So this won't fully come together in a big ball, but it'll be sort of moistened lumps, clumps of, of dough.

So let's start that.

(whirring) So let's just see what we got.

Now you can see you sort of have large clumps of dough, and that's what you want.

So this doesn't come together as one piece, like it would with American pie pastry.

We have a log of dough, and we're going to cut off about a third of it, like that.

Set this aside.

So now, we're not doing strips of dough.

We're gonna do cutouts, like cookies.

And we're looking to make maybe an eight-inch square, 'cause that's the size of our baking pan.

So we have eight inches by eight inches, okay.

Now, instead of doing Santa's reindeer or Christmas trees, we're just going to do rounds.

We'll cut out nine of these.

Now, this is the same thing you would do in a regular Linzertorte.

You would take the tart pan, and you can't roll it out.

You're going, you're going to mash it in with your fingers.

Same thing here-- I mean, this is one of the benefits of working with something like this.

You completely mess this up, nobody's going to know.

Because, uh, it's covered with jam, and then with a top layer.

This now goes in a 350 oven for half an hour, about 30 minutes.

And once we bake that, we're going to cool it.

Then jam goes on top, and then our decorative topping.

♪ ♪ Now the fun part, the assembly part.

We have seedless raspberry jam.

Again, we're gonna get another couple teaspoons of zest.

So this had to cool for about 30 minutes.

Obviously, we don't want to put jam on it while it's hot.

A little salt, of course.

So the next layer is the jam.

And let me introduce you to my favorite kitchen tool, other than a good knife, the small offset spatula-- big one's great, too.

This is the one you can actually use to get into, let's say, an eight-by-eight-inch pan.

The bigger ones you just can't get in.

So this is the best tool I know for doing something like this.

These have been chilling-- it's cold.

Now we're going to take out the scraps in between, we're going to cut these in half, so we have half-moons, essentially, and we're going to then decorate the top of this.

If we need more, we'll just reroll the scraps.

So we'll start with the flat side.

Now we can get going here.

So we'll do, we'll change it up.

Last thing we need to do is to whip an egg white.

So with our super-cute little green pastry brush, little turbinado sugar.

So when we got finished baking the bottom crust, we reduced the oven from 350 to 325.

We're gonna put this back into the oven for about 50 minutes.

They've come out of the oven, obviously, and cooled down for about 90 minutes.

Now, without the parchment paper, this would be a permanent art installation that you could never get out.

(chuckling) It'd be sitting there for years.

So these are pretty intense.

Fair amount of sugar, ton of flavor.

So instead of big bars, you know, we're gonna do, like, lemon bars, we're gonna do 16 pieces, 'cause they're super-concentrated.

This looks ridiculously formal.

By the way, in Austria, people tend to have sweets in the afternoon, like, at 4:00, with a cup of coffee.

My mother-in-law was from Salzburg, and so when I'd make a dessert for dinner, she'd always save a piece and have it for breakfast, so, it's not so much a dessert after dinner.

This is probably eaten with coffee sometime in the afternoon.

So let's see how good this is.

Mm.

As they might say in Austria, "Super!"

-- super.

This is absolutely delicious.

So instead of doing a Linzertorte, which is kind of a pain to make, 'cause you have to do the latticework with very soft dough, this is super-simple to do.

Do it in an eight-inch baking pan.

And then you get these amazing squares which have chew to them, nice balance between sweet and a little bit of spicy.

Great spices in it, as well.

And you can eat it for breakfast if you like, or have it with coffee in the afternoon, or have it for dessert.

Absolutely delicious and pretty easy to do.

♪ ♪ - One of our most prevalent questions asked by our Milk Street viewers is how to freeze cookies.

Is it better to freeze the dough unbaked?

Or is it better to bake the cookies and then freeze them?

We were more than happy to discover the answer to that question.

So we took two different types of cookies.

First, a sugar cookie-- a basic roll up the dough, slice it, and bake it.

The second type of cookie we used was a drop cookie, oatmeal raisin.

Those are typically nice and chewy and soft.

These are two completely different textures.

So we figured we would test the baking and freezing out on these types.

The first batch, we prepare the doughs.

Slice the sugar cookies, bake them off, and drop the oatmeal raisin dough right on the sheet pans, bake them off and let them cool.

We bagged them up and put them in the freezer.

Secondly, we made another batch of each type of cookie.

We sliced the sugar cookies, laid them on a baking sheet, and dropped the oatmeal raisin dough on another baking sheet and froze them solid.

The next day, we took them out, baked them from frozen, and here are the results.

The sugar cookies got a little bit brittle and crumbly.

I like them crisp, but not so they're falling apart.

The drop cookies that we baked and froze are not really that chewy and... ...a little on the dry side.

There's a lot of moisture in these cookies, and when you freeze them, that moisture freezes.

And then thawing them after they were baked, that moisture is released and leaves your cookie drier.

We want the sugar cookie crisp, but we want the oatmeal cookie chewy.

Now, for the second batch, we froze the sliced sugar cookie dough and froze the dough balls, put them in a bag, and then baked them from frozen.

And let's check those out.

The sugar cookie is nice and crisp, but it's not crumbling apart like the previously baked and then frozen cookies.

Nice and crisp.

Still has a nice texture and not too dry.

Oatmeal raisin are still nice and chewy.

And soft.

Baking the cookies first and then freezing them compromised the texture.

Sugar cookies got a little crumbly around the edges and the oatmeal raisin were flat-out dry.

So your best bet is to make the dough, portion them out, freeze them, and then pop them all into a big bag.

Then, when you're ready to assemble your holiday cookie boxes, pull out the dough balls, bake them off fresh, and you're good to go.

♪ ♪ - Tahini isn't just for hummus and sauces.

In this chewy cookie, it adds nuttiness and a pleasant bitterness that really plays off the sweetness of the sugar.

And it's a simple, one-bowl, no-mixer, no-fuss cookie.

So it's perfect for the holidays, when you have a million things going on and you don't want to do anything too elaborate.

So let's get started.

The most difficult thing you'll do here is brown the butter.

And that isn't even hard.

So all we're gonna do is put our butter in a skillet on medium, and we're gonna let it melt until it starts to brown.

Brown butter caramelizes the milk solids in butter, so it gives that nice kind of toasted, nutty flavor.

And with tahini, it's just a perfect combination.

You're gonna see the butter get really foamy.

There'll be bigger bubbles, and then they'll get really small, and that's when you know it's almost ready.

So when you start to see a little bit of the brown in the center of the foamy butter, that's when I like to pull it off.

Because if you burn brown butter, it's gonna be really bitter, and you don't want that.

So I'm gonna put it in a large bowl.

So I'm also gonna whisk my tahini in right now.

If the ingredients are cold, every time I've done it, it kind of seizes up.

So this is a great time to add it.

Now, it does help cool down the butter a little bit, but it also keeps your tahini nice and smooth.

Now, we're just gonna give this a few minutes to cool down till it's just warm.

So while that's happening, I'm just gonna whisk together my dry ingredients.

I have flour, baking soda, and of course, a little bit of salt.

So our tahini-butter mixture is just warm.

I'm gonna add two kinds of sugar, brown sugar and some white sugar.

These cookies are soft and chewy, very much like a peanut butter cookie.

So if you like that kind of cookie, and maybe you have people who have nut allergies, this is a great cookie for that.

And then I'm gonna add my eggs-- I have two eggs.

Make sure you get any brown sugar lumps.

And then just fold in the dry ingredients.

So I've got two sheet pans here covered in parchment paper.

These are big cookies.

They're about two tablespoons per cookie.

I have a scoop here.

I'm gonna do nine cookies per sheet.

And these go in a 350-degree oven.

We have one rack in the upper middle position and one in the lower, so you can bake them at the same time.

And they bake for 16 to 18 minutes.

You just rotate them halfway through.

I just want to press them down a little with the palm of my hand, just so that they're all an even half-inch thick.

Okay, so let's put these in the oven and bake them off.

♪ ♪ Okay, these are ready.

So you can see these make nice big cookies.

Sometimes they kiss a little bit in the oven.

I'm gonna let these cool in the pan for about five minutes.

Then I'm gonna take them off and put them on the cooling rack for 30 minutes, and then we'll start melting our chocolate.

So these are chewy, nutty, delicious just as they are.

But if you're gonna do a holiday box and you really want to up your game a little bit, you can dip them in some chocolate.

To melt the chocolate, I have about an inch of water in this medium saucepan.

I've brought that to a simmer.

Make sure it's a heat-proof bowl, and put that on top.

You want to make sure the water is not boiling so much that the steam is hitting the chocolate.

Because water and chocolate do not mix.

Just leave it on there and let it gently melt.

And what I like to do when it's pretty melted is, I like to add some room-temperature chocolate.

I'm actually gonna take it off the heat and just let that melt a little bit.

So that cools the chocolate down.

It will make it a little shinier.

It's not a, an exact temper, but it works a little bit.

This is bittersweet chocolate-- I love that with this.

But choose your adventure.

You can use any chocolate that you like.

And now, I'm just gonna dip half the cookie.

I'm not even dipping the bottom.

I'm just gonna dip the face of the cookie halfway.

See how pretty?

So I'm only gonna do half of these, because I might want to keep some that don't have chocolate.

And that way, if you're, say you're boxing up cookies for the holidays, you might decide you have other chocolate things in the box, and you don't want everything to be chocolate.

Or you might decide you do want some chocolate.

And Wes is gonna talk about storing cookies.

These will last for five days, but don't store them with another cookies.

Store them on their own.

So you want to let the chocolate set for an hour so it dries completely before you package these up to store.

Or if you just want to eat them, you can eat them with the chocolate hot if you want, but they're better if you let them sit and set up.

So these have sat for an hour.

You can see the chocolate is all set up.

So I hope you'll try these.

They are a simple cookie, but they look like something you might get at a bakery.

And they're a perfect gifting cookie.

I'm gonna take some with chocolate.

So chewy, beautiful, nutty flavor.

I love the chocolate with that.

Chocolate-dipped tahini and browned butter cookies.

If you're looking for something that's a little unusual that everyone may not have heard of, a little bit more elevated than a chocolate chip cookie or peanut butter cookie, this is the perfect cookie for you.

♪ ♪ - If you're a big baker and you're getting ready for the holidays, baking off batches and batches of cookies, and you're putting them all in a box to store them together, take the lid off, they all taste the same.

What can you do?

Well, here's a little advice.

Cookies come in a few different types of categories.

We have very crispy, crunchy cookies, like sugar cookies, almond biscotti.

We have chewy cookies, like macaroons, blondies, brownies.

These two are not friends.

If you mix up blondies and brownies with crunchy almond biscotti and sugar cookies, those almond biscotti are not gonna have any crunch left after a couple of days.

Likewise, there are spicy, heavily flavored cookies, like our Linzer bars and our Polish gingerbread.

These have big flavor, big spices.

That spice can seep out into any other cookies that they are in the same box with.

So you go to take a bite of your Mexican wedding cookies, and they taste like cinnamon and ginger, it's not what you want.

So here's what you need to do.

When you're baking all those batches of cookies, keep your crunchy cookies, your highly spiced cookies, and your chewy cookies separate.

Then when you're ready to put together your cookie box or your plate for your party, plate them right before you go.

That way, your crunchy cookies stay crunchy and your chewy blondies don't taste like cinnamon and ginger.

Also, if you're going to mail some cookies, or you're putting boxes together that you're taking to the office, separate the three types.

You can put all of your heavily flavored, spicy cookies in a cookie tin.

Then separate out your chewy cookies, put them in some little cellophane bags, and tie them shut.

Same thing with the crunchy cookies.

You can put them in the box with the spicy cookies.

This will keep chewy chewy, crunchy crunchy, and heavily spiced very flavorful.

Now we have a nice assortment of cookies that you spent so much time working on, but you're going to keep them separate, fresh, crispy, crunchy, and spicy.

Spicy like these delicious Polish gingerbread that Bianca is going to show you how to make next.

♪ ♪ - The name of the Polish gingerbread cookie, pierniki, translates as "pepper cookie," and that refers to the generous amount of ground black pepper there is in the dough.

Now, in a dough like this, you might expect to see molasses as a sweetener.

But in Poland, they choose honey as the primary sweetener.

And honey's lighter flavor allows all those spices to take center stage.

Now, the first step of this dough we adapted from something we learned in Poland from the Muzeum Piernika.

Yes, this cookie has its own museum.

(chuckling): So what they did was, they stirred the spices into a warm honey.

So we're gonna take that just a little bit further and actually bring the honey and the spices together to a simmer, which infuses the honey with the incredible flavors of the spices and also serves to help the spices' flavor bloom a little bit, too.

We really love buckwheat honey in this.

Buckwheat has a very distinct flavor.

Basic clover honey works great here, too.

All right, we've got our honey over a medium heat.

I'm gonna add some butter to it.

Now our spice blend-- primarily ground ginger with some cinnamon, cardamom, and, of course, freshly ground black pepper.

Ground ginger is one of those spices that has a little bit of bite to it.

And you combine that with the ground black pepper, and these cookies have a little punch that comes right through those spices.

It's really delicious.

We're gonna cook this mixture, stirring until the butter melts.

The only thing to be careful with at this point is to let the honey just come to a simmer.

You want to stop it at that point.

If it simmers too long, it's going to get a little too thick.

Transfer it to another bowl, 'cause you want to stop it from heating further.

Okay, this just needs to cool about 20 to 30 minutes before we can use it.

Meanwhile, we can mix our dry ingredients.

We have a combination of all-purpose flour and rye flour in equal proportions.

We'll mix those together, and then we have a touch of baking soda as leavening.

Our honey mixture is nice and cooled.

It can be lukewarm on the bottom.

That's about where you want it.

The smell is beautiful.

We'll add one egg to that.

We also add freshly grated ginger.

The flavor of freshly grated ginger is bright and strong, and it complements really nicely with the ground ginger.

And a little salt, of course.

And along with the honey is a little bit of brown sugar.

Okay, we're just gonna whisk that until smooth, and the lumps from the sugar have worked their way out.

You want to mix the dough just until no dry flour remains.

Make sure you scrape all the way down in the bottom of the bowl.

Flip it over so you can see if there's any flour down under there.

For me, I could eat gingerbread year round.

I love the taste of it.

But there's something about holiday time that the smell evokes just this, like, warm, comforting feeling.

We're going to just lay this out on a piece of plastic, in a disc.

By spreading it out in a disc like this, it just helps it chill a little more evenly and it also makes it easier to handle later.

We'll let this chill for a minimum of two hours, up to 12 hours, and then we'll be ready to bake it.

You know, during this time, it's not just to chill the dough, but it also allows the flour to fully hydrate.

And this just makes for a much more pleasant cookie texture with a lighter crumb.

So I'm using a one-tablespoon scoop here.

You could certainly just use a large spoon.

You want to break off about a tablespoon-sized pieces.

Then we'll roll them into balls and put them on the tray.

So there are a couple of options with these.

One is to roll the raw cookie balls into turbinado sugar, which gives them this little sparkly crust on them after they're baked, it's really beautiful.

The other is to bake them naked, and then we'll do a coffee glaze over the top.

So to roll these in turbinado, we'll just put a few of those balls in there, roll them around, put them right back on the sheet tray.

And we're gonna flatten these just a little bit to about a quarter-inch.

You could certainly use your fingers, but your fingers are gonna leave marks.

And if you're like me, you end up doing it four times, trying to get it even.

So I just use the bottom of a measuring cup, which is nice and flat, and simply just give it a single little press each one.

So I'm gonna do these cookies both ways, one coated with turbinado sugar, and the other tray not coated with turbinado sugar, because we'll be glazing those cookies later.

Meanwhile, the oven is preheated to 350 degrees.

I'm gonna get these in, and they'll bake for about ten to 12 minutes.

♪ ♪ Okay, the cookies are out of the oven.

These are the ones that did not get rolled in sugar.

So we'll call them naked cookies for now.

You can see they're beautiful, little, very slightly pillowy cookies.

And we will now make our espresso glaze.

We have instant espresso powder.

Really great for adding coffee flavor.

Very easy to dissolve in liquids.

This is a little bit of milk-- I'm gonna hold off a little bit of the milk, in case we need a little bit more.

Now we have our bowl of confectioner's sugar.

We'll add that right to it.

With confectioner's sugar, it's always the case that you think, "Oh, man, this is not near enough liquid."

And then all of a sudden, it'll come together, and then sometimes, you have too much liquid.

But it's a surprising thing-- you never know.

See how now it's flowing nice and thin?

The ribbon is sitting for a few seconds, and then it's sort of just fading into the hole.

One word of warning about confectioner's sugar glazes.

If you make them in advance, make sure you cover the surface with plastic wrap, like, right on the surface of them, because they dry out pretty quickly.

So I'm just going to use a spoon, let it start dripping, just to get the flow going, and then you can start going onto the cookies.

You want a thin drizzle, and go all the way off the edge of the cookie.

Random is good here.

This is going to be gorgeous on a platter.

So these should take about 30 minutes to get to a nice, dry stage, and then we will platter both of our cookies side by side.

You can tell the coffee glaze is set now.

It's a little bit less shiny, and if you touch it, look, nothing comes off on your fingers-- it's really nice.

If you plan to give these cookies as gifts, I would suggest doing the turbinado sugar rolling.

It's drier, it's more sturdy, and you can pack them a lot easier than you can the ones with the glaze.

'Cause the glaze will stick to the bottom of whatever cookie you put on top of them.

And because I'm even more impatient than this recipe allows, mm.

Oh.

This is kind of a cookie that's the best of both worlds, both worlds being a spice cookie with deep, intense layers of spice and that black pepper bite, and gingerbread, because it's soft, it's cakey, but it's got the crunchy cookie outer layer.

It really is sort of the ideal holiday cookie.

And boy, does it bring back all those warm memories.

This is a recipe worth having, worth working into your holiday tradition of cookie making.

And you can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season at MilkStreetTV.com.

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Access our content anytime to change the way you cook.

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From Vietnamese chicken salad and tiramisu to easy-stretch pizza dough and Austrian apple strudel, the new Milk Street Cookbook offers bolder, fresher, simpler recipes.

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