Food: Bailey’s and Kahlua Cookies

They may not look like much, but they are tasty!

My cook books are covered in little notes, so in honor of the start of Range Free, I decided to follow one of those little ideas to make those cookies above.  They don’t really look fancy, but they are delicious!  Trust me.

These were adapted from a Coffee and Cinnamon cookies recipe from Jacqueline Bellefontaine’s Cookies Galore.

So, to get this started you need to gather:
1 tablespoon instant coffee
1 tablespoon boiling water
1 cup/2 sticks butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon Kahlua (or some other coffee liqueur)
1 tablespoon Bailey’s (or some other Irish creme)
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon cocoa powder

Now that we have our key players, first thing is first.  Set your oven to 350°F and lightly grease two baking sheets.  Be careful not to grease the pan too much otherwise the bottom of the cookies will get burnt before the rest is finished.  That would be sad days.  While we’re still getting stuff ready we need to put the instant coffee into the water so it’s cool when we need it.

Next we cream the butter and sugar until it’s all nice and fluffy.  This is important because this is where the dough starts to gather air, and air helps make soft cookies.  If you don’t have a mixer, this can be a little difficult, but it’s doable.  Once we have our fluffy, sugary butter, we add the booze and coffee!  Once you’ve added that, this is what your batter should look like:

You can sort of see that butter wasn’t soft enough so it clumped together a bit.  This is okay as long as you don’t have massive globs everywhere in your dough.  These also aren’t really delicate, so a really smooth dough isn’t absolutely vital.

This is where we add the flour.  If you were just sticking your measuring cup into the flour and moving on, you are measuring your flour wrong!  This is important because you will get tough cookies if you add too much flour and then you will be all sad and there will be no cookies for you.  Or, there will be, but they will be sad cookies and sad cookies are not fun cookies.

Alright.  So to do this properly you need to get out a spoon and a knife.  When I measure flour I usually fluff it with the spoon a little before measuring, but you don’t really have to do that.  But!  You do have to spoon it into the measuring cup lightly until it is over the edge.  Then you use your knife to level it off.

Forgive the awkward picture; I only have two hands...

So, now that we’ve sorted through that, we can carry on.  Repeat that twice more.  Don’t think that just because you got the first one you can cheat on the next two…

Anyway, I’ll move on from that now.  Honestly.  So, the recipe said to sift the flour once alone then again with cinnamon, but in our case the cinnamon is cocoa powder.  Also, a sifter isn’t intrinsically vital to this.  You can just whisk it so that its fluffy.  I couldn’t sift mine because of humidity in my kitchen, and these still turned out quite well.

This is the fluffy flour with a bit of cocoa powder pre-fluffing. (There is so much fluffy going on it's not even funny...)

There is fluffy butter and fluffy flour and now they need to come together to become this dough:

Doesn’t it already look tasty?  If you’ve noticed yet, there are no eggs in this batter.  Go ahead and eat some right now.  We won’t judge.

There the dough is tasting all delicious, but we have to bake it.  These are meant to be crescent shaped cookies.  To do that, you grab a little bit (about the size of a walnut) and roll it between your palms so it looks like a fat caterpillar.  Once you’ve done that, you curve the ends a little bit.  This is what they’re supposed to look like pre-baking:

That green mat under them is extremely useful. It's a silicon baking mat that's non-stick so no greasing of the pan is necessary.

Some of them were weirdly shaped and I got annoyed with doing this, so half of them are just round.  If you don’t want to get fancy with it, just make sure to squish them down.  These don’t flatten out so they stay pretty much the shape they were when you put them in the oven.  After all that’s sorted out, pop ’em in the oven for about 12 minutes or until they loose that bit of shininess to them.

Once they’re out of the oven, let them sit on the sheet for a couple of minutes then move them to a cooling rack.  If you don’t have a cooling rack, it’s okay, just try to move them off of the sheet otherwise they’ll keep cooking.  Once they’re totally cool, you can sift some powdered sugar on top of them if you’re feeling extra fancy.

If you have any requests for things for me to bake, let me know.  Even if it’s something that you want me to fail through so that you can make it correctly.  I’ve already got a giant sized-snack in the works for the near future, so be be prepared for it. 🙂