Buttermilk Cookies

Over the past week I've made homemade strawberry ice cream and coffee granita - both of which I meant to blog about but the busy-ness of life as the mother of four children, a wife, a full-time employee, a friend and a freelance mommy blogger caught up with me and the food blogging never happened.


However, the buttermilk cookies I made tonight are wonderful and must be blogged!  Here I sit at 12:30a.m., tired as all get-out, but I've got to talk about these cookies!  I bought buttermilk to make Dorie Greenspan's Devil's Food White Out Cake for my husband's birthday and so I was left with almost a quart of buttermilk.  What in the world am I going to make besides pancakes?  (By the way, can someone tell me the difference in Belgian Buttermilk and Cultured Buttermilk?  Is it fat content alone?  I googled it and didn't come up with anything, even after excluding anything that included the word "waffle" since I'm not looking for Buttermilk Belgian Waffles.) Anyway, I was wondering what I was going to make with all this leftover buttermilk when I saw this picture of Buttermilk Cookies on Foodgawker.

I visited Mandy's blog, and after looking at all her photos and reading her post about the cookies, I decided that I would give them a try.  I finally got to it tonight.  Oh. My. These aren't cookies, they're more like lemon cupcake tops! Delicious.

The dough for this is more like a quick bread than like any cookie dough I've ever worked with (thanks to the buttermilk and baking soda).  It was springy and stretchy looking and it was good (yes, I eat cookie dough...I know I'm taking a salmonella risk).  The recipe called for level tablespoons of dough to make the cookies; however, I love my medium scoop from Pampered Chef which is approximately 2 tablespoons.  I decided to use it anyway and just watch the cookies closely.  My oven really needs to be calibrated. No, wait, what my oven really needs is to be shot and put out of its misery.  Anyway, I decided to risk it and make the cookies bigger.  This decision made them seem all the more like lemon cupcake tops since they're about the circumference of a cupcake.

My two-year-old was awake and in the kitchen as I was pulling these out of the oven tonight (at 11:00 - she had a nap late this afternoon). I caught her once standing on the step-stool staring at the cookies..."Annie, don't eat one of those cookies, you've already brushed your teeth. Don't even touch them, okay?"  So, she didn't eat one and she didn't touch it. At least not with her hand. She licked the edge of it.  {sigh}  I had to laugh - and made note of which cookie was hers so I could set it aside.

When I made the glaze for the cookies, I decided to put just a teeny bit of lemon zest in it.  Not much, mind you, but just a smidge (as in 1/8th teaspoon kind of "smidge"). I'll be making these again.  If you know a lemon dessert lover, these are excellent.  I am going to make them again this weekend for Care Group; however, I'm going to do lime instead of lemon just because I'm a lime lover. I can't wait to make them again!

The recipe is from the January 2008 issue of Gourmet and is posted on their website - here. Since I followed the recipe exactly - other than the wee bit o'lemon zest in the glaze - I'll just link you to their site.  Well, okay, I didn't follow it exactly...I didn't beat anything on "low speed" since I didn't use an electric mixer of any sort, I used my hand and a spatula.  :) I didn't want to risk waking anyone with the hand mixer. 

I have some freshly-caught salmon (filleted into steaks) in my freezer - anyone have suggestions on a great marinade before grilling them?  Our neighbor went on a fishing excursion to Alaska and she gave us a couple of the steaks they filleted from some of the salmon she caught.

Edited post to add: My husband called from the office this morning and said, "Those cookies are good!" He rarely says things like that so I know they must be really, really good  for Brad to say something about them tasting good.  The girls each had one with breakfast.  I figured it I'd thrown poppy seeds in them they'd have basically been lemon-poppy-seed muffin tops - so why not?