mix, mix…stir, stir

I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe. Exactly how would a cookie primarily based on wheat germ taste?

Much to my surprise they are really good. I quite like the sweet nutty taste of wheat germ. As a kid I used to eat wheat germ like cereal with milk. Not because I loved wheat germ so much, but when rooting around the kitchen hungry, it’s what I could find to snack on. Can you tell I grew up in the 70s and my mother was an Adelle Davis fan? Now I’m in a baking group that bakes very non-Adelle Davis sweet treats every week, but the value of good nutrition did imprint on my young developing brain all those years ago.  I still keep wheat germ on hand; I just don’t tend to eat it by the bowlful any more.

Honey and lemon are the star flavors in this cookie and the wheat germ just fades into the structural ingredients rather undetected. As I was mixing up the dough I began to obsess over adding nuts, almonds in particular. Once I saw that I had no almonds, toasted pine nuts seemed like an excellent choice. I mixed ¼ cup into half the batter. Having tasted “with nuts” next to ”without nuts”, I pick with nuts. The texture of the cookie is slightly cakey and soft and the softness of the pine nuts works well, adding a nice textural contrast without being jarringly crunchy. They also add a great flavor that is complemented by the lemon and honey.

Initially I thought the cookies seemed a little dry and in need of, well, a sugar coating; so much for the healthy cookie idea. I mixed up a quick powdered sugar icing infused with fresh thyme and dipped each cookie.  The added icing really made these cookies work for me.

Thyme Infused Icing
½ cup milk or butter milk
2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
nice bunch of fresh time

Heat the milk in the microwave until hot, but not boiling.  Add the fresh thyme and let steep for 10-15 minutes, then strain. Whisk the milk, a little at a time, into the powdered sugar until you reach the desired consistency. A thicker icing will result in an opaque coating, and if thinned out the icing will be translucent once it dries on the cookies.

Thanks to Michelle of Flourchild for picking this most interesting recipe. She has it posted on her blog if you happen to have some wheat germ laying around that you want to put to good use.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 114 recipes completed 107 to go! Look we are over the hump!

All photos by David Peterman unless otherwise noted

Tags: Wheat germ

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Tuesdays with Dorie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.