San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Chocolate chip cookies get twist with black sesame, orange zest
Add these ‘happy’ concoctions as holiday baking season gets into full swing
December is truly my favorite baking month of the entire year. It means lots of butter, sugar and flour, and the oven is working overtime. I adore coming up with new cookie concoctions in the kitchen and sharing them with friends and family.
I love to incorporate the season’s bounty into my cookies — think Linzer cookies filled with pear jam, orange shortbread sandwiching cranberry buttercream or my Black SesameChocolate Chip Cookies With Orange, which I am sharing today.
Chocolate chip cookies are the quintessential “happy” cookies. How can anyone say no? It is actually my husband’s favorite cookie. For one of his milestone birthdays, I decided to gather as many gifts as his age. Struggling to think of the last 10 gifts, I made chocolate chip cookies to complete the number. When he opened them, he could not contain his laughter!
Orange and chocolate is a classic match, making for a great twist to the chocolate chip cookie. Oranges are currently in abundance. In the lull of the winter blues, oranges brighten up the mood with their color, fragrance and acid. I often place oranges in a large shallow bowl as a dining room centerpiece for a pop of color.
When added to cakes, cookies or even pastry creams, orange zest imparts so much flavor. When zesting, be sure not to get to the inner white pith, which will add bitterness to your end product.
While less common, chocolate and black sesame is also a brilliant combination. Black sesame seeds have a lovely nutty flavor, especially when lightly toasted.
This chocolate chip cookie starts off with a black sesame paste. Lightly toasted black sesame seeds have natural oils that are released when you run the seeds through the food processor; slowly, it turns into a paste. (Honey helps, too.) The paste can be used for other desserts, such as black sesame ice cream. If you have store-bought black sesame paste already, you can use that instead.
The cookie dough is made with the usual suspects, starting with butter, brown sugar and granulated sugar. The key is to whip the butter and sugars until the color changes to a pale yellow, which helps create a lighter cookie texture. Then we add eggs, vanilla and orange zest, followed by dry ingredients. Cardamom adds a subtle yet lovely touch.
I like to chop up a bar of chocolate — namely the giant Trader Joe’s Pound Plus bars of semisweet chocolate and 72% dark chocolate — and add it to my cookies. I love how the bits come out of the oven all melty. But feel free to use chocolate chips if that is what you have.
The cookies are best eaten within a week. I like to warm them in the microwave for 10 seconds before devouring them. If you’d rather make smaller cookies, you could use a two-tablespoon scoop, but you’ll need to reduce the bake time.