Butterscotch Cookies

We call these butterscotch cookies in my family, but they don’t really involve butterscotch per se. They are a holiday tradition–great right out of the oven or later with the hot beverage of your choice.

2 cups brown sugar
1 cup butter
2 eggs, well beaten
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cream of tartar
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup nuts (I prefer walnuts)
4 cups (all-purpose) flour

Cream butter and sugar, add beaten eggs. Sift cream of tartar and soda with 1 cup flour. Mix well. Add vanillia, nuts, and rest of flour. Form dough into a roll–be sure to put flour on your hands first, or you’ll get cookie dough all over your hands! Wrap roll in wax paper; place in the refrigerator until the dough is stiff enough to hold its shape while cutting. Slice the dough into 1/4-inch thick cookies and bake for 10 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

This recipe dates back at least five generations to my maternal great-great-grandmother who was a German Mennonite living in Nebraska. Today we’d call it a refrigerator cookie, but back then you formed the roll, left it covered on the back porch overnight, and baked in the morning!

Scones

Hmm.  The new layout doesn’t attach names to posts.  This is Mark.

As an undergraduate, I didn’t do a lot of baking. It’s time-consuming, for one thing, but more importantly I’m not very good at it. My products are usually edible, but the cookies are always unevenly cooked and the pies have slightly burnt crusts and so on.  However, I had friends who were undergrad bakers, and so if you tend to have the usual baking supplies sitting around, it’s nice to have scones ready to eat with your tea or coffee.  (I’m moving to grad school in a couple months, and have already discovered that the town contains a small restaurant where they roast and sell their own exquisite coffee blends.  I am therefore looking for things to have with the coffee which I will no doubt be consuming by the gallon.)

This is a really good scone recipe — I’m not a fan of raisins or currants in my baked goods, so I had to look around for a recipe that didn’t call for them.  It’s really easy to make, too, and since I’m barely a mediocre baker you know that must be true.

Notes:

• I cheated and used about a teaspoon of lemon extract in place of the zest, which seemed to work pretty well — I can tell you from a prior experiment that dried lemon rind, such as you might find in the spice aisle, really doesn’t cut it.
• I’m used to cutting in butter with a pair of knives, but, as the author says, for this recipe I find I wind up using my hands to crumble the butter finer.
• I usually need to add a little extra cream to get the dough to cohere properly.  Have some standing by.
• You can cook this on or in practically any oven-worthy dish.  It doesn’t rise much, so even a flat, rimless cookie sheet works fine.
• This isn’t like the overgrown cookie-scones one finds in Starbucks.  It’s barely sweet at all, so, again as the author suggests, serve with lemon curd and clotted cream (if you can find any).  And, it goes without saying, some tea or coffee.