Coffee and Walnut Cookies
I have been a lot of places. I have lived at some twenty-five addresses. I have done exquisitely stupid things on four continents. But I am, at my core, a nice girl from the suburbs.
Yes, they say HI! in metallic letters. The message within is no less subtle.
In another version of my life, people from big cities explained things like Costco and traffic jams to me because they were laboring under the delusion I was from a farm, a vocation from which I am at least three generations removed. No, my first car was a Volvo, I went to a big public high school, and I find a lap or two around a department store very relaxing. I am The Suburbs made flesh.
I spent my twenties in college towns and cities of varying sizes, always opting for an apartment in the thick of things. I adore walking and find driving terrifying, so I made a trade of space for convenience and never looked back. I don’t have kids and I sleep like the damned, so noise or how to run errands with a toddler just weren’t germane.
Last winter, as my life fell apart, it became evident I wasn’t going to be able to put it back together, and I realized I couldn’t stay in my home. I started to prepare myself for a move to Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York. My train of thought was that there were jobs in all those places, I already had friends in all three, and I wouldn’t be an absolute freak for being single in my early thirties. I settled on LA, figuring I was going to be sad no matter what, so might as well be sad in the place with the best weather and most interesting produce.
This…did not happen. Between looking for a job from a distance, planning a second move during a global pandemic, and debilitating crying jags, I watched my planning runway slip away faster and faster until I was out of time. When my mom called me to tell me she’d found a house for me to rent in her neighborhood I rejected the idea out of hand. “I don’t see you as having much of a choice,” she said. I cried for another week before putting everything I owned in boxes pilfered from the liquor store and moving two PODS worth of things into an enormous-to-me house a few blocks from where I caught the bus to middle school.
It’s humbling. Fifteen years into adulthood, I feel like I can’t take care of myself alone. It’s pretty gutting to look back at how far you’d come and find yourself in the exact same place where you started, both literally and figuratively. This was the right move; my mental health was deteriorating rapidly, taking my physical health with it. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard.
I’m so grateful for the help; my home is beautiful, I am very cozy, and I have been offered more love and support in the last ten months than most people get in a lifetime. But wow, wow, wow am I out of step with my neighbors, who are mostly either recent retirees or families with middle schoolers. Everyone is very pleasant, but I am, shall we say, a curiosity. It’s really hard to meet people when you’re driving everywhere, and I missed the camaraderie I felt with those around me in my last six or seven houses.
Left is greased cookie sheet, right is Silpat mat. It’s just the better option.
So I did what any reasonable person would do: I made cookies for all my neighbors and delivered them with a handwritten note. Is this needy? Asked and answered. This post could alternatively be titled “Please Like Me.”
Nigella calls these “splodge” cookies, a thing I could not bring myself to do. In her recipe header, she refers to them as “American style” with a level of disdain that jumps off the page. I tried two different preparation methods. On one, I put the dough directly on the metal of a greased cookie sheet. On the other, I laid down a Silpat mat. I regret to tell you that the second sheet turned out better. The Silpat cookies are taller and more golden. The edges are cleaner. I’m sorry— I hate cleaning those godforsaken things.
These coffee-walnut are fluffy and only a little sweet; the coffee flavor comes as more of a pleasant surprise than it should considering the word “coffee” is in the name. The crunch of the walnut provides a provides a perfect counterpoint to the cakey-ness of the body of the cookie, a perfect thing to have as a midmorning snack. Hopefully they’ll be a good emissary for me.
Walnut and Coffee Cookies
adapted from How to Be a Domestic Demigoddess
makes 25-30 cookies
Ingredients
1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon table salt
14 tablespoons unsalted butter (this comes out to two tablespoons shy of two sticks, or 200 grams, depending on where you are in the world and how you think of butter
1/4 cup white sugar
1/4 cup light brown sugar, packed
2 1/2 tablespoons instant coffee (I had instant Trader Joe’s iced coffee in my house due to a catastrophic lapse in judgment I once had, but I think this would be better with instant espresso. I would dial it back to about two tablespoons if you have that)
2 eggs, beaten
3/4 cup of toasted, chopped black walnuts
To Do:
Preheat the oven to 350F/150C.
Mix the flour, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl and lay aside. Cream the butter and sugars in a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment on medium. This takes about five minutes. When it’s looking good, spoon in the instant coffee powder, then one egg, and then the other egg. Stir in the flour mixture you already made. You’re going to have a very sticky, very dense dough at this point. Add the walnuts and mix until they’re just combined.
Drop tablespoon-sized balls of dough onto a Silpat-lined baking sheet. These expand a little as they bake, so put a nice inch to two inches between each. Bake for twelve to fifteen minutes, rotating 180 degrees at the halfway point if your oven heats unevenly (or you suspect it may). They’ll be golden-brown, firm, and a little bit spongey to the touch. Let them sit for about five minutes on the cookie sheet, then cool completely on a wire rack.