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Madame Benoit's Carrot Oatmeal Cookies

I refer to these delicious, nutritious cookies as breakfast cookies. They don't crumble when eaten, so they make perfect treats to enjoy in the car. They keep, for a few days, in a tin, and they freeze well. This Carrot Oatmeal Cookie recipe was the first one I tested from Madame Benoit Cooks at Home back in 1982. Madame Benoit wrote me letters after I reviewed her book. You can read about my connection to Madame Benoit here. 

Preheat the oven to 350°F

Ingredients:

1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

½ cup soft shortening

2 eggs

⅓ cup of milk

1 cup grated raw carrots

1½ cups of all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon of baking powder

½ teaspoon of soda

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon of cinnamon

½ teaspoon of nutmeg

2 cups of oatmeal

1 cup of seedless raisins

Step One:

In a medium bowl, cream the sugar, shortening, and eggs until light and creamy. Add milk and carrots, and stir until well mixed.

Step Two:

Sift together flour, baking powder, soda, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Add salt, oatmeal, and raisins. Stir together, coating the raisins with the flour mixture.

Step Three:

Blend the dry raisin mixture with the creamed mixture. The batter will be quite stiff. Drop by spoonful onto a greased cookie sheet.

Bake the cookies at 350° F for 15 minutes or until brown all over.

Yo-Yo Cookies Reshaped for the Season

As Halloween approaches, I am thinking about ways to embellish great family recipes for this spooky time of year! Many specifically themed baking ideas require too much sticky store-bought icing or food colouring, in hopes of creating that seasonal thrill. The results aren’t always as tasty as they are cute.

Today, I am sharing a vintage recipe for delicious Yo-Yo Cookies, which has been enjoyed by my family since the early fifties. The jam-filled centres create the perfect contrast for this not-too-sweet cookie.

Over the years, I have formed this recipe into caterpillars, spiders, and assorted other creatures. Honestly, the icing embellished caterpillar made a lovely centrepiece, but my grandchildren preferred the spiders. They pulled out the shoestring liquorice legs and enjoyed the familiar taste of grandma’s Yo-Yo cookies. 

I hope this recipe inspires you to recreate some of your favourite dishes, for Halloween or any season. Its never too soon to start putting spooky treats in the crypt…I mean…the freezer.  

Yo-Yo Cookies

Ingredients:

1 cup of butter and lard/shortening mixed (I use 1/2 cup of each)

1 cup of brown sugar (packed)

2 eggs

⅓ cup of liquid honey

1 teaspoon of vanilla

3 ½ cups of sifted all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons of soda

Method:

Mix butter, sugar, and eggs, thoroughly, together. Stir in honey and vanilla. Mix the flour with the soda and add it to the butter mixture.

Chill the dough, several hours or overnight, until firm.

Roll dough into balls the size of walnuts and place them on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake in a 350° F oven for 10-12 minutes, or until touching the top of a cookie, leaves almost no imprint.

When slightly cooled, sandwich the cookies together with the jam of your choice.

TIPS:

I measure the dough using a one-tablespoon scoop, so I can make cookies that are uniform in size. Use a variety of jams; clean up partial jars from your fridge. The original recipe called for apricot jam, but my husband likes strawberry best. 

I tried baking on a Silpat, for the first time, ever, this week. I loved the results. Keep in mind, that these cookies are also excellent when baked on a plain, ungreased cookie sheet.

NOTE: If you click on a highlighted word in this blog, or anywhere on the internet, you will be taken to a place with more information. For example, clicking on From the Cookie Jar will take you to the brief sampler from our pilot for television. 

Spritz Cookies Have a Long History

My grandchildren are growing up and can barely remember the day we made spritz cookies for a television pilot. That day, a seven-member crew moved into my kitchen, gear and all, and in the end, helped us eat the delicious cookies we created. Since then, I won a blue ribbon for this 1940s recipe at a website I enjoy called Just a Pinch.

All of my grandchildren have made spritz cookies with me. Each one had a turn using my press, which we call a cookie gun. Most children’s hands are strong enough to squeeze cookies onto a pan using a press. Enthusiasm trumps perfection when making these cookies. It’s fun to shop around for the perfect press for your needs. On the day we filmed, we tried eight different presses, but one was a clear favourite. Families often pass recipes and presses from one generation to the next. Perfect! 

All spritz cookies are made from buttery dough consisting of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter. The dough is forced through a cylinder with a calibrated plunger of some type. The cookies emerge onto the pan in special shapes because they are squeezed through a patterned disk at one end of the cylinder. 

The word spritz seems to have come from the German word spritzen, meaning to spray or squirt. In Germany, the popular Christmas confection called Spritzgebäck is made using a cookie press. Although the Germans have been credited with inventing the cookie press, some evidence indicates that the Scandinavians might have been the originators. A little cookie-history controversy is always fun. Food historians seem to agree that the cookie press originated in the 16^th Century. I wonder what the inventor was searching for when he or she designed the cookie press. Did he visualize uniform, visually appealing cookies, or was there some thought of mass production? One thing is for certain; if you ever need to produce a pile of treats hastily, the cookie press allows you to do this in under an hour. 

Every few decades, the idea of pressing cookies resurges. The Five Roses Cookbook, redesigned and printed in the early sixties, contains two recipes for spritz cookies. Old cookbooks, produced by local ladies’ groups, often provide spritz recipes. Today, you will find spritz cookie recipes on the Internet which contain pumpkin, ginger, chocolate, or cheese. 

Every press comes with a booklet of recipes. This is true, even for the oldest press we tried, which dates back to the 1940s. I look for presses with narrower cylinders because they produce small, crisp cookies. In antique stores and at garage sales, you will sometimes find a press still in the manufacturer’s box, with recipes and an original price sticker as low as seventy-nine cents.

Using a cookie press with your children and grandchildren can be the start of a memorable afternoon. Make the dough (no chilling required), press and bake the cookies, dust them with icing sugar, and then have a tea party. Let the children serve, using your finest dishes, teapots, and teaspoons. They can practise pouring from various teapots, and once they have eaten their fill of cookies, they can wrap some to give to others. Encourage the use of good manners and fabulous conversation, and above all, have fun!

My spritz cookie recipe was passed down from my girlfriend’s mom to her, and from me to my daughters, and now to you. I won a Blue Ribbon for Marion's Mom's Spritz Cookies recipe from Just a Pinch. Their test kitchen coloured their dough green and made Christmas trees. They were festive, and I am glad they gave this amazing recipe a ribbon!  

Marion’s Mom’s Spritz Cookies

(Each of my grandchildren, while still preschool age, made these cookies.)

1 cup of butter

1 cup of white sugar

1½ teaspoons of vanilla

2 eggs, unbeaten

3 cups of flour

¼ teaspoon of salt

Cream together the butter, sugar, and vanilla. Add eggs and beat well.

Add flour and salt and mix until blended.

Press through a cookie maker onto an ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake the cookies at 375°F for 10 to12 minutes.

Cooking time varies with the type of pan and oven used. Also, cookie presses produce varying sizes of cookies, requiring different cooking times. Check on them often. 

Leave the cookies on the pan for three minutes after removing them from the oven. Then place them on a wire cooling rack. Sprinkle the cookies with icing sugar. These cookies can be frozen, but they keep well in a tin for a week. After a week, the tin is usually empty.

A serving of these delightful treats should be about one ounce, but the boy from the Get a Bigger Wagon stories thinks that is completely inadequate. 

Watch me make spritz cookies with my grandchildren HERE.  

Easy Jam-filled Cookies

I am always happy and content while mixing, cooking, and baking in my kitchen. Preparing food is creative, therapeutic, healing, and it makes my house smell like a home. Cooking is familiar, and I cling to it in times of chaos. Old recipes put me in touch with my ancestors and connect me with the smiling faces of my grandchildren. My husband, the boy from the stories in the book, Get a Bigger Wagon, comes directly to the kitchen when he smells these jam-filled cookies baking.  

Easy Jam-filled Cookies

Generations of women in my family have baked this recipe to serve with tea, brighten lunch boxes, or add variety to a Christmas offering. 

Ingredients:

1½ cups packed brown sugar

1 cup butter

2 eggs

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

A pinch of salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 cups all-purpose flour

Raspberry jam

Instructions:

Cream butter and sugar together, add eggs and vanilla, beating until smooth. In a separate bowl, mix soda, cream of tartar, salt, and flour. Add dry ingredients to the butter mixture, blending thoroughly.

This dough will be very stiff. Roll dough into small balls, no more than one inch in diameter. Place on greased cookie sheets, leaving room for cookies to spread. Make impressions in balls with a blunt object and fill each impression with ½ teaspoon of raspberry jam. 

Bake the cookies in a 350°F oven for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown. Leave cookies on the pan for a few minutes after they come out of the oven before removing them to cooling racks.

NOTE: There is absolutely nothing wrong with serving irregular-looking cookies. Love and cookies bring joy to the recipient, regardless of presentation. However, a tray of uniformly shaped tea treats with precisely the right amount of jam in the very middle is a thing of beauty and brings a sense of pride to the cook.

Using a one-inch scoop helps to keep the cookie size uniform. Making the impressions with a blunt object about ½ an inch across allows for consistency. I use the wooden handle that fell off my soup ladle to make impressions in my cookies. Measuring the jam is always better than guessing at the desired amount. I think these cookies look like little wreaths. Try making some this Christmas.  

Crispy Caramel Oatmeal Cookies

To try one of these cookies is to have another. There are only seven ingredients in the recipe, and your family will rave about them from the first bite. They taste a bit like caramel popcorn and are just as easy to make.  

If there are delicious oatmeal crisps in the oven, the boy, from the  Get a Bigger Wagon stories, identifies them enthusiastically as soon as he opens the door. His mom discovered this recipe in the early fifties and made them regularly. The boy can’t remember life before these cookies, and he believes it takes four to make a serving.

The Boy's Favourite Crispy Caramel Oatmeal Cookies

Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees

Combine the following dry ingredients in a large bowl
1½ cups all-purpose flour
1½ cups rolled oats
1 cup of granulated sugar

Melt the butter in a pot with the syrup and water
1 tablespoon golden syrup
2 tablespoons water
½ pound butter
Add
½ teaspoon soda to the butter mixture
Add the butter mixture to the dry ingredients, all at once. Mix well. Using a one-inch scoop or a spoon, drop dough in small quantities onto a baking sheet or roll the dough into balls. Flatten the mounds of dough using a floured flat-bottomed custard cup or your hand.

Bake until golden, which can take 7 to 11 minutes, depending on the type of bakeware you are using. This batch was baked on heavy non-stick bakeware and took exactly seven minutes to bake. Notice that they do spread. 

Cool the cookies, while still on the baking sheet, for 4 to 6 minutes, then remove them to a cooling rack.

Placing cookies farther apart leads to faster cooking and thinner, crisper cookies. Have fun.