Zosia's Reviews
6 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 6Sort by: Title 
| Date | Rating
Rose's Christmas Cookies
By Rose Levy Beranbaum
William Morrow Cookbooks - 1998
Bone à Fidos : page 78
Leave it to Rose Levy Beranbaum to include an easy and delicious (I'm taking my dog's word for this!) recipe for our canine friends and family members.
These dog biscuits are very easy to make (the dough comes together quickly and is easy to work with) and they are chock-full of healthy ingredients - whole grain flours, beef stock, kelp powder - a treat I don't mind giving to my pet and his friends.
useful (1)
Chocolate Caramel Chews : page 100
These tasted wonderful when first made – like a candy bar with chocolate, caramel and nuts on a crunchy oat cookie base.
Unfortunately, the quality deteriorated with time: the chocolate and caramel hardened making them difficult to eat. Rose does warn that they’re best eaten within 6 hrs of making and provides instructions for refreshing them….I can see doing this for a dessert that’s going to be eaten all at once, but not for a cookie.
I’ve come across many cookie recipes of this type that seem to maintain their integrity for more than a few hours….I think I’ll give them a try.
useful (0)
Cocoa Brownies : page 47
These are okay for what they are: 1-bowl/pot brownies that require only regular pantry ingredients and just a few minutes to put together.
At room temperature they’re more cake-like, cold from the fridge, more fudge-y. (photo is of cold brownies). The chocolate flavour is okay and the toasted pecans prevent them from being too sweet.
A good recipe to use when you want brownies but don’t have chocolate on hand.
useful (1)
Maple Walnut Sable Sandwiches : page 173
These are tender buttery walnut cookies filled with a silky maple walnut filling that I made to celebrate mapling season.
The cookie ingredients are those of a basic sable, flour, sugar, butter, and egg with the addition of ground walnuts. The dough is very temperature sensitive and needs frequent refrigeration but is not as difficult to work with as I expected based on the author’s dire warnings : ).
The filling is a not-too-sweet buttercream made with egg yolks, sugar, butter, maple syrup, maple flavouring and chopped walnuts.
The combination of cookie and filling is absolute perfection.
The recipe only makes 24 sandwiches, but the maple leaf shape is quite large so a little goes a long way. Not a cookie I will make often, but one I will definitely make again.
useful (0)
Mom's Coconut Kisses : page 45
I love coconut but my family members are avowed coconut haters so I don't usually bake or cook with it. I had a craving and decided on this recipe when I saw that it makes only 24 cookies, has a short ingredient list and a simple mixing method.
However, it also calls for fresh coconut; Rose Levy Beranbaum warns, "Don't even think about substituting here!", and I didn't....at first....but I must admit that while I was drilling holes into the nut, and then draining, roasting, hammering, peeling and shredding it, I thought about it several times : )
The resulting snowy white strands of freshly shredded coconut were then mixed with sweetened condensed milk, cornstarch, vanilla and lemon juice, dropped by the spoonful and baked. The coconut watered out so the mixture was quite soupy towards the end. I squeezed the excess liquid out as I shaped the cookies and they were fine.
The result was the most luscious, moist, chewy, sweet - but not too sweet - coconut cookie I have ever tasted. And those avowed coconut haters?......they loved them too!
useful (1)
Peanut Butter and Jelly Jewels : page 35
These are tender, sandy - not to be confused with dry - melt-in-your-mouth peanut butter thumbprints with a fruit preserve or chocolate ganache filling.
The recipe has just a few ingredients, with a lower than usual proportion of flour to peanut butter/butter ratio, that come together quickly in either a food processor or electric mixer; I used the latter to avoid over mixing. The completed dough is refrigerated, shaped and baked.
My first batch spread quite a bit so I refrigerated the remaining shaped cookies for several hours on cookie sheets before baking; the result was the same.....
Once cooled, half the cookies were filled with the chocolate mixture (melted chocolate and butter that takes less than a minute to make in the microwave and tastes out-of-this world delicious!), and the remainder with sour cherry jam.
The chocolate-filled cookies were a huge hit as the filling balanced nicely with the intense peanutty flavour of the cookie. The jam-filled ones were less successful.....perhaps a more intensely flavoured jam like raspberry would be a better choice.
useful (1)