The final version of the cookies has a very special mix of sweet, salty, buttery, crunchy, chewy, and earthy. Taste for yourself.
Some of my most memorable recipe breakthroughs are a result of error, mistakes, and happenstance. I try to reframe even the most upsetting accidents as a potential victory or chance for growth: Does it help me examine a recipe or dish from another angle? Is there something I can learn from my failure? Can I repurpose my mistake in some way? The answer is yes!
In the process of revising my favorite biscotti recipe, I accidentally doubled the amount of butter and sugar. Butter isn’t even a traditional ingredient in biscotti, so what happens when you add twice as much? In the oven, the log spreads like inching lava, finally settling into a flat, bronzed disc. Once the disk is cooled, sliced into thin spears, and baked again, the result is a super-crisp cookie, studded with toasted fennel seeds, dark chocolate, and whole hazelnuts.
A small tumbler of vin santo or espresso for dunking would be a heavenly accompaniment. Cheers to happy accidents and faux biscotti.
Almond flour has been a pantry staple in Paris for as long as anyone can remember. It happens to be less expensive than it is here and, perhaps because of the turnover, usually quite fresh. In the States, it’s still seen primarily as an alternative to flour for people with gluten sensitivity or for the health conscious, who like it for its protein content. Almond flour provides texture and taste, and it keeps a cake moist, as almonds are naturally high in fat. It’s for this reason that I use less oil than in an all-flour yogurt cake. The downside is that almond flour cakes don’t rise quite as high. Made with equal portions of flour and almond flour, however, lets you capture the best of both worlds. This cake is light, tender and moist and lasts for days. Like the classic yogurt cake, it plays well with spices, extracts, liqueur, syrups and floral waters. Here I’ve added sliced almonds to the top, for crunch.
These cookies are an amalgamation of various recipes I have made throughout my life: my family’s macarrones de almendra, which are still made at the pastry shop; the macarons at Maison Adam in Saint-Jean-de-Luz; and Moroccan ghriba or ghoriba. They are very simple to put together—a mixture of almonds, sugar, and egg—and as the name indicates, they are cracked on the outside and chewy on the inside. If you prefer not to use orange-flower water, substitute with 2 additional teaspoons of finely grated orange zest. You can flavor the crinkles with vanilla, cinnamon, rose water, lemon zest, or anything you prefer.
Crispy around the edges, chewy in the middle, and delicious all over -- it's virtually impossible not to fall in love with these tahini cookies. As their name suggests, the star of the show is the sesame paste that you may know as the crucial component of hummus, but it also works wonders in sweet treats. In this recipe, tahini gives an incredible depth of flavor, and a coating of sesame seeds makes the cookies as pretty as they are delicious.
This cookie is like a well-made cardigan: it always presents handsomely and requires very little fuss. Almond flour gives the cookie a tender bite and a subtle nutty flavor. Replace the almond flour with hazelnut, pecan, or pistachio flour if you prefer. I make these cookies year-round and always have a log or two in the freezer.
This dish is an inventive crossbreeding of two classic dishes: sole amandine, in which the fish is finished with sautéed sliced almonds, and sole meunière, in which the fish, often whole, is sautéed in browned butter. In my version, I use baby flounder (easier to find in the market here than true sole), lightly coat the fillets with ground almonds, sauté them in browned butter, and serve them with toasted almonds and a sprinkling of parsley (borrowed from the meunière). It's a marriage of equal partners and one that I think would easily win familial approval on both sides of the aisle.
Kir Jensen, a pastry chef and owner of The Sugar Cube food cart in Portland, Oregon, created these crepes to go with the roasted rhubarb and lemon cream recipes. But these nutty crepes would be great in many of the sweet recipes in this book, or eaten on their own with just a smear of butter and a drizzle of honey. Look for almond paste and almond meal in the baking section of your local supermarket. (When choosing almond paste, avoid marzipan, which is not the same thing.) Almond meal is very finely ground almonds; it's like a coarse flour.