March 31, 2019 We have a winner

The winner of the winter 2018-2019 contest is the purple Siberian Iris.

Here was the final vote.

Julia's recipe

Kourabiethes or Kourambiethes (Greek Cookies)

My Aunt Julia made delicious Greek food, which made sense since she was Greek and a good cook. I have mentioned her a few times in these posts, with reference to her moussaka and baklava. She baked cookies of several kinds, and I associate them with Easter and parties. By the way, Eastern Orthodox Easter is almost always a week or two later than what was called in my family "American Easter". And, as I may have mentioned in a prior post, the Greeks among our family and acquaintance believed that the invariable nicer weather on Greek Easter was a sign that they were right and we were wrong in the date calculation.

These cookies (spelled with an "m" in one cookbook and without in another; the spelling is probably not an issue in Greek) are a version of shortbread, sort of. I combined the recipes from both cookbooks and made the cookies a little simpler. I am positive Aunt Julia's were better, but if you want to try your hand at a not-terribly sweet ethnic morsel, here you go.



The players: 2 sticks of butter, 1/4 cup powdered (aka confectionary) sugar, 1 egg yolk, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1 teaspoon vanilla and  3 cups flour. Plus more powdered sugar for dredging the baked cookies.

Some recipes call for ground nuts (1 cup almonds or walnuts). If so, use about 3/4 to 1 cup less flour). Some recipes call for whiskey or mastiha (a Greek liqueur flavored with mastic. Not sure what that is. Never had it.) or cognac or orange juice. I did not use any of those.

All of the recipes call for unsalted butter, which I did not have. You could certainly use unsalted (also called sweet) butter. Most recipes called for cake flour which I also did not have. Use about 1 tablespoon less flour per cup to compensate (that is, 3 tablespoons less flour).




I started by leaving the butter on the kitchen counter for a few hours to soften some. Then I put both sticks in the stand mixer and beat the butter until it was soft. Next I added the 1/4 cup powdered sugar and beat some more. Then I added the egg yolk and the vanilla. More beating. I saved the egg white. I keep egg whites in the freezer because every once in a while, I try to make an angel food cake, which is a humbling experience. I am not good at angel food cake.

I turned the oven on to 350 degrees.






Then I added the baking powder and the flour in 1/2 cup increments, beating slowly after each addition to avoid the flour blizzard that comes of adding flour to a stiff-ish dough with the mixer on high speed. After all the flour was added, the dough looked kind of mealy and lumpy. The important news is that the dough would clump together when formed into little balls.

I used a little scoop to portion out the dough, and I formed each scoopful into a firm ball.








I ended up with 28 cookie dough balls, which I put on 3 cookie sheets, 12 on 2 and the last 4 on a little sheet.

I baked the cookies for 15 minutes. After 10 minutes, I rotated the cookie sheets, top to bottom and front to back.

The little cookie sheet had the oven to itself.








While the cookies were baking, I poured some powdered sugar onto a plate. As the cookies came out of the oven, I ootched them into the plate of powdered sugar and rolled them around, still hot. Then I put each cookie on a big cooling rack.












Here are the cookies, all coated with powdered sugar. Careful observers will note that there are only 27 cookies. One broke while being rolled around in the sugar, and so I had to eat it. It was good.

When we were children, and when kourambiethes were present, someone would also encourage one of the little kids to put one into his or her mouth whole. And then the child would, for some little time, be unable to open their mouth because the combination of powdered sugar and dry cookie was like glue. Good times!

A plate full of goodness.
















Odds and Ends
The contest is over.
Spring has arrived.
Winter is over.
We will figure out what to do next.
Philip