Pastry chef and activist Natasha Pickowicz stops by the TODAY kitchen to bake some of her favorite recipes from her cookbook,”More Than Cake: 100 Baking Recipes Created for Joy and Community” She shows us how to make chocolate buckwheat and brown butter cookies and shortbread bars filled with crunchy granola.
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Nubby Granola Shortbread Natasha Pickowicz
This breakfast-inspired shortbread is a special way to use up that last bit of your favorite granola, adding a mysterious crunch to a buttery cookie. Sandy ultra-fine rice flour enhances the texture of this cookie that naturally melts in your mouth. Cubed cold butter is worked into the dry ingredients using a food processor before the dough is pressed into the pan using the knuckles. A final dusting of icing sugar is essential.
Its impressive longevity after baking makes a pan of this crusty but unsliced crusty bread an exceptional and easy gift – it will stay fresh for more than a week and survive even the bumpiest journey.
Brown butter, buckwheat and chocolate cookies Natasha Pickowicz
Chocolate chip cookies get their chewy, caramel-like texture from a mixture of white and brown sugar. The sugars dissolve when beaten with the eggs, the same technique that gives great brownies their satiny, crackly finish (you also get that with these cookies). Think of sugar less as a unique “flavor” and more like a spice or accent like salt. A little sugar pushes the butter and flour into bolder, livelier versions of themselves. It can soften the edges of bitter, sour chocolates. However, use too much and it mutes and dulls the other ingredients.
The butter will become nutty and fragrant. Toasting wheat and buckwheat flour brings out their natural, earthy sweetness. Both dark chocolate and creamy semi-sweet chocolate are chopped into chunky pieces. Buy the best ethically sourced single origin vanilla extract you can find for signature caramel undertones of cookies.
If you like these dessert recipes any time of the day, you should also try these:
Carrot Halwa Sticks by Samah Dada
Lemon, lime and Earl Gray Sablés by Samantha Seneviratne
This article was originally published on TODAY.com