Week 4 - Better Nutters (page 36)

To skip my preamble and go straight to the food, click here.

To jump right to the photos, this week you're gonna have to scroll. Sorry. They're peppered throughout. This is a pretty photo heavy post as well - mobile users, you've been warned.

To skip it all and head straight to the conclusion, click here.

Check out Kristen's post of this cookie here!

Grab a coffee and dive in - this is a long post. :)

Special thanks this week goes to my friend & baking saviour Joelle, for helping me not only troubleshoot the dramatic buttercream but also for loaning me the exact piping tip I needed. Thanks Joelle!

4 weeks in, and 6 recipes down! I feel like we're firmly away with this project, and it was nice to do one recipe this weekend instead of two. I'll admit to being a little overambitious some days and filling up my days/weekends with so much I often run late. Hopefully this post isn't late this week, I'm starting the draft a day early and everything! (Monday edit - Spoiler alert - my Saturday night dreams didn't happen).

I love peanut butter. I'm generally a fan of Adam's and I'm 100% a crunchy girl. Smooth peanut butter has no place in my kitchen.

Until this recipe.

I had a hard time finding a reasonable sized smooth peanut butter for this recipe that wasn't loaded with sugar or other crap, so I opted for Kraft's "Only Peanuts" for this recipe, since I could get a small amount (I usually buy my pb in kilogram or larger size. Don't judge me, internet).

I doubled this recipe because I figured these would be tasty, despite never having an original Nutter Butter. Until recently (and by recently, I mean really recently - within the last 48 hours) discovered you can actually get Nutter Butters in Canada. I think I'll pick some up as an experiment to see how they fare against Keller's version. (Monday edit: they're arriving later today. Thanks Amazon).

Better Nutters - The original recipe

COOKIE

These cookies are fairly straight forward, and by now I'm seeing the method and it's becoming old hat. Cream butter, add sugar, beat, add eggs.... etc. Ok - I've got this.

Wait, no salt. Again? I'm noticing a trend.

This also has oatmeal in it, which surprised me. Baking saviour Joelle pointed out that they sounded similar to Pirate cookies. I'd never heard of Pirate cookies before! Wait, do Nutter Butters have oatmeal in them? I have no idea. If you know, can you let me know? You can drop us a line in the comment box below or use one of the methods from our contact page. Yes, I'm quite serious :)

Ok. Curious mind set aside for the moment, let's talk about this recipe.

The instructions said to roll these out between sheets of parchment, and use the fridge as necessary to roll/lift. I had left the dough in the fridge overnight so it took some doing to get it soft enough to roll, and while I normally don't roll between parchment (usually just use some flour or some powdered sugar to prevent sticking) I ended up following directions, and I'm glad I did. Once rolled out, this dough was sticky and hard to work with unless it was cold.

I ended up using 80mm circle cutters for this dough which landed me an extra half dozen when all was said and done (remember I doubled the recipe). Slightly smaller cookies than he calls for (by 2mm) but I don't think Mr Keller would mind much.

The process for cutting and getting ready for the freezer was tedious.

break off a chunk from the large block of dough
place between two sheets of parchment
roll, roll roll, smoosh and roll again, until 1/4" thick (I use dough thickness strips for this)
refrigerate
cut the circles
refrigerate
move the circles to the smaller pan on parchment, ready for the freezer.
repeat

Top to Bottom: Ingredients scaled and ready go go (mise en place), the dough immediately after it's mixed, Double batch of dough in a quarter sheet pan (9x13 jelly roll), Rolled out and cut, 6 cookies x a few layers for freezing before baking, Frozen cookies on a half sheet ready to bake.

With my oven working, convection on, these baked up like a dream, switching the rack positions halfway through as instructed.

Look at the colour on these babies.

At the end of the day, I had a teensy bit of dough left over, so I rolled it out to be the same thickness as the others, baked it, and then we tasted it while it was still warm.

Bleh.

My high hopes for these cookies were just dashed. They were bland, not very peanutty, and not very sweet, they tasted like a healthy breakfast cookie - all joking aside. Maybe they'll be better once the filling is in there.

FILLING

I'm an American buttercream girl through and through. Straight up unsalted butter, icing sugar (confectioner's/powdered sugar for those of you unfamiliar with this Canadian-ism), a little vanilla and maybe a bit of salt. The buttercream called for meringues, sugar that was heated on the stove, warnings about the meringues being too hot when adding the butter, broken mixes - this sounded like work, and it was.

I think what I ended up making was a mix of Swiss meringue buttercream, but it could have been French or Italian - I'm not enough of a baker to know the difference. (ninja edit - apparently it was the love child of Italian and French, since it's hot sugar syrup into raw egg whites).

You start by combining sugar and water, bringing this to 100ºC and then you start whipping egg whites at the same time. Clearly you need a stand mixer for this. As the meringue is doing it's thing (getting foamy), you keep boiling the sugar syrup until it's 120ºC. The meringues might be done before this, but soft peaks stage is where you want to be, then you add the hot sugar syrup. I was terrified of cooking the egg whites, so I drizzled slowly, and the meringue mix got super glossy. I was on my way.

I turned the mixer up to medium high, set a timer for 15 mins and away we go. 15 mins later, I still have soft peaks (I needed firm peaks). The bowl is room temperature (around 20ºC).

L-R: Ingredient layout, the sugar syrup, midway after sugar add, glossy, soft peaks after 15 mins.

So, I let it go for another 5 mins. No perceptible change. After another 5 mins, it feels like the volume is getting lower, so I put the whole thing on hold and sent texts to a couple of baking pals that helped me troubleshoot this. "Add the butter now," was the message, so I did. And it wouldn't. come. together.

After adding the butter and mixing for a long time, it looked like this. Definitely not the smooth, glossy, gorgeous buttercream I was promised.

Above: Basically me when I saw my separated, curdled buttercream

At this point I was thinking that I'd wasted 2-and-a-bit egg whites, some good butter, and a lot of time.

Then my pal Joelle came to my rescue, and said "oh the drama of meringue buttercream". Drama is definitely the word I'd use here.

I showed her the photos, told her the temp and she indicated that it was too cold (the book said nothing about too cold, although now that I think about it of course it needs to be warm enough to have the butter soften enough to emulsify with the egg whites). DRAMA. I tried warming my bowl in a couple of ways - my hands (not enough heat), a hot washcloth (too hot on my hands) - and then I remembered I had a hair dryer close by.

You thought I was joking, didn't you?

About 30s on high heat and low airflow was enough to warm the mixture up to a beautiful, smooth buttercream that I was able to mix with more peanut butter, a little salt and turn into something of glory.

(the tall glass trick is something that someone taught me once - makes filling pastry bags a breeze! Try it if you haven't)

Look how glossy and peanut buttery and emulsified that is! It's a thing of glory.

Achievement unlocked!

I matched my cookies for size (nobody likes a lopsided sandwich) and set about filling my three dozen cookies or so (leaving me with 18 filled sandwiches). I got to the dozen mark and realized that I was out of buttercream. Seriously? The buttercream I had after the drama above amounted to just over 2x the recipe so I scaled up the other ingredients accordingly. I guess I overfilled them.

So now I was left with 12 cookies that are basically tasteless on their own. See my variation below for how I solved this problem.

My observations:

If I was making these cookies again I'd only let them sit in the fridge for a couple of hours to firm up slightly, vs. overnight where they firmed up all the way. They really took a lot of elbow grease to get soft enough to roll
Don't eat hot cookies, unless they're chocolate chip. Not worth it.
This meringue buttercream is dramatic. But it also turns out smooth and glossy, I can see why people use it. Is it worth the effort? Ehhhhh, maybe, in some cases. But I'm still a fan of American buttercream, if for no other reason than its simplicity.

Like last week, B sampled these cookies with me.

Our conclusions:

Out of the oven, still warm, these cookies are kind of bland.
Eating freshly filled cookie sandwiches are messy
For best results, keep these cold after you make them.

Better Nutters - my variation

So I have a dozen cookies left that need filling to become sandwiches.

I turned to my go-to-all-things-cake-and-frosting book, Sweet Bakeshop by Tessa Sam, to see if she's got a peanut butter buttercream filling.

Not only does she have a proper peanut butter buttercream, but she actually has a recipe for PB cookie sandwiches with a PB filling, that is destined for 6 sandwich cookies. This is definitely meant to be.

Not only is it quick and easy, but it uses icing sugar AND also the last of the dreaded smooth peanut butter (I was actually short here so I subbed in a couple of TB of crunchy peanut butter - I'm not mad about it)

Great success!

This filling was slightly sweeter, but just as peanut-buttery, and a great option if you don't want to futz about with the drama of the meringue buttercream, or if you don't care that your filling is glossy.

Some comparison photos. The rounded filling is the American buttercream, the fancier love child buttercream I used the requisite Ateco 867 tip that Joelle loaned me. Look how great that cookie sandwich looks!

Top to Bottom: French Italian Love Child Meringue Buttercream sandwich, American Buttercream sandwich, three cookie stacks, another cookie stack.

TL;DR Conclusion:

This is a well balanced cookie, once the filling is in.
No salt isn't always a bad thing
Meringue buttercream is a pain in the ass, but it has it's place
I'm still a chunky pb girl. I honestly think that these cookies could have gotten away with chunky pb, rather than smooth. Maybe next time :)

Thanks for reading! I'm really looking forward to week 5 where we tackle another sandwich cookie that's even prettier!