Lebanese Pistachio Cookies with Orange Blossom Water: The Lebanese Kitchen: #CreativeCookieExchange Recipe
April showers bring May flowers! Right? Right!?!? All that rain and snow had better bring something! Something other than more rain that is. Anyway, Creative Cookie Exchange has got you covered, because we are going all floral with our cookies this month! Flower shapes, flower decorations, and flower flavors! We’ve got it all!
I found my cookies in a great new cookbook I have been excited to tell you about. So this post is a twofer! Phaidon sent me The Lebanese Kitchen
by Salma Hage for reviewing. Like most Phaidon cookbooks, it is an awe-inspiring tome, with 500 recipes; unlike many older Phaidon cookbooks, it also is filled with gorgeous color photographs of both Lebanon and the dishes featured in the book. The primary reason I went looking in it for a recipe for this month’s Creative Cookie Exchange is because I knew rosewater and orange blossom water are both used in Middle Eastern desserts, so I was hoping to find some inspiration. Happily for me–and dare I say you?–I definitely was inspired!
I do need to make a note that I am not sure I recommend the book for beginning cooks/bakers. I can honestly say that I did not even realize there was a crucial step missing from my recipe, because I just proceeded as I assumed I should be (she never says what to do with the pistachios); I only noticed it now, as I was looking over the recipe for writing this post. I do not regret owning this book, and I do not think I would regret it even if I had paid for it (you guys know I love cookbooks more for inspiration than anything else), but honesty compels me to point this fact out.
This is a traditional Lebanese pistachio cookie made by non traditional means. It might suffer a little for it, but I am head over heels in love with these cookies so they cannot have suffered much! Anyway, Salma Hage calls for rubbing the butter into the dough by hand, as I do with traditional British scones for example. But given the sheer quantity of butter in the cookie (this is not diet food), I decided to use frozen butter in a food processor. If you do not have frozen butter, just place your butter in the freezer 30 minutes before beginning, to make sure it will stay cold. Likewise, the eggs should also be cold. I also chose to add some salt and sprinkle the cookie with coarse sugar–some cookies got French pearl sugar bits and some got colored coarse sugar.
I hope you check out everyone’s flower cookies down below! I really had fun with this theme and think it was a great way to get into summer!
Lebanese Pistachio Cookies with Orange Blossom Water Closely adapted from Salma Hage Author: TheSpicedLife Recipe type: Dessert Cuisine: Cookies Ingredients
2¼ cups (285 g) AP flour, plus more for rolling ½ t baking powder ½ t fine sea salt ¾ cup (80 g) roasted, salted pistachios (she calls for raw but roasted and salted is what I always have on hand) 22 T (2¾ sticks, 11 oz, 300 g) unsalted butter, well chilled and cut into cubes 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1 T orange blossom water coarse sugar for sprinkling Instructions
Preheat the oven to 325 F. Line 2 cookie sheets with silicone or parchment paper. Set aside. Place the flour, baking powder and salt into a food processor (16 cups sized bowl worked well for me, but it might have been ok in the 11 cup bowl--if you try leave a comment and let me know!). Pulse a few times to mix. Add the pistachios and pulse a few times to begin to chop the nuts. Add the well chilled butter. Pulse until it looks like bread crumbs. Add the sugar and pulse to mix. Whisk together the egg and orange blossom water in a small bowl. With the processor running, add the beaten egg. Stop the processor as soon as it is evenly distributed. At this point, it will not come together as a dough, but instead will look like moist crumbs. Clean and dry your counter. Lightly flour it. Dump the dough onto the counter, and, using your hands, gather it up and knead it a few times to form a cohesive dough (it will seem improbable but it will--and be certain not to overwork it--as soon as you have your cohesive dough, stop kneading). Roll the dough out to ¼-inch thickness on a lightly floured counter. Cut out the cookies using a cookie cutter or biscuit cutter, aiming for a 2½-3 inch diameter. Place the cookies onto the prepared cookie sheets, 1-2 inches apart (I got 12 to a sheet). Sprinkle with coarse sugar. Bake 2 sheets at a time--refrigerate the scraps until you can roll them out for a freed up cookie sheet. At the very end, after rolling out 36 cookies, I just patted out a large circle and baked it, because every time you roll out the dough the cookies will spread more. Bake for 20-25 minutes, rotating the 2 cookie sheets top to bottom and front to back halfway through, until the cookies are browning at the edges and turning a light golden brown. 3.2.2499
The theme this month is May Flowers! All that snow and rain has to lead to something, right!? Creative Cookie Exchange has decided to stop using the linky. What this means is that the only way to join in the fun is to become a host. Just contact me at thespicedlife AT gmail DOT com and I will get you added to our Facebook group, where we discuss our cookies and share links.
You can also just use us as a great resource for cookie recipes–be sure to check out our Facebook page, our Pinterest Board, and our monthly posts. You will be able to find them the first Tuesday after the 15th of each month! Also, if you are looking for inspiration to get in the kitchen and start baking, check out what all of the hosting bloggers have made:
Disclosures: I was sent a free copy of The Lebanese Kitchen
to review; I was not compensated in any other way and all opinions are my own. Also, affiliate links were used in this post, but only to link to items I would be discussing and linking to anyway.