This month, in honor of the holidays, we’ve asked our Culinary Arts and Pastry & Baking Arts instructors to share their favorite festive recipes. Last week, Chef Kathryn Gordon shared an Australian holiday treat: mince tartelettes. Today, Chef Scott McMillen, one of our core Pastry & Baking Arts instructors, gets nostalgic about a classic American cookie.

My mom would make snickerdoodles once, and only once, each year. Every Christmas Eve we would leave a plate of cookies and a glass of milk for Santa. The crisp outside and soft interior highlight the sweet holiday spiciness that sticks in my memory. She used the recipe from her Betty Crocker Cookbook – one of the old ones with the recipe pages in a kind of loose leaf binder. Here, I adapt that recipe, substituting light brown sugar for a third of the granulated sugar, which makes the cookie chewier. Unsalted butter replaces the butter/shortening combination from the original recipe, and I use baking powder instead of baking soda and cream of tartar. A touch of freshly ground nutmeg also adds some extra flavor.

Snickerdoodles

Ingredients:

• 2 3/4 cups flour (345g)
• 2 tsp baking powder (9g)
• 1/2 tsp salt (3g)
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 2 sticks of unsalted butter (225g)
• 1 cup granulated sugar (200g)
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar (110g)
• 2 large eggs
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar (50 g)
• 1 tbsp cinnamon (8g)

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Beat the butter and sugars until light, airy and uniformly blended.
3. Add the eggs one at a time, waiting for each to be fully incorporated before the next addition. Scrape the bowl between additions.
4. Combine the flour, salt, baking powder and nutmeg and stir it into the butter mixture until the dough just pulls together. Do not continue to mix past this point or the cookies will be tough. The dough can be refrigerated for up to a week at this point.
5. Combine the additional 1/4 cup of sugar and tablespoon of cinnamon in a bowl.
6. Form the dough into about 40 one inch round balls. Roll each ball in the cinnamon sugar until completely and thickly coated.
7. Space them two inches apart on a greased or parchment lined cookie tray and bake for 8 minutes, or until the cookies’ surface starts to crack. (Bake for 10 minutes if you want a crisper cookie.)

This year, you can join the reigning Miss USA, Alyssa Campanella, for an exciting Valentine’s Day class at ICE that helps a very special cause.

Alyssa was named Miss USA in June 2011 and since then has been working as a spokeswoman for breast and ovarian cancer education, research and legislation — a platform that is close to her heart as it has personally affected a member of her family. In her free time, Alyssa also has a great love of cooking and baking and is enthusiastic about food. Earlier this January, Alyssa starred as one of the contestants on Rachael vs. Guy Celebrity Cook-Off (Did you catch our students in Episode 2?). Alyssa followed her interest in food into the kitchens at ICE to learn more, working with Chef Instructors Mike Schwartz and Anita Jacobson to master the culinary arts.

This Valentine’s Day, she will combine her passion for sweet treats and her charitable work by teaming up with Cookies for Kids’ Cancer founder Gretchen Holt-Witt to put those newly found skills to work in support of a good cause. Alyssa will host a one-of-a-kind cookie class with 100% of proceeds going to support pediatric cancer research. Whether you are planning a bake sale or simply looking to acquire some great cookie recipes for your personal repertoire, you will leave this class with new techniques — and the knowledge that you’re helping a good cause. More…

Inevitably over the course of every module that I teach, I share much of the same wisdom over and over. One of my most notable quotes being, “when you steal recipes don’t waste your time with the bad ones, steal from a great source.” Of course when I’m saying this I’m usually trying to express the idea that we have eaten the same foods over and over, for hundreds of years, because good food has staying power, it just gets revamped and hopefully improved over time. Like they say, “your parents hope you do better than they did,” so your recipes should be slightly better than the last version.

So of course with cookies, it would make sense to start with the best and go from there. I have my favorites, and as you might be noticing I am never shy to share an opinion. Dorie Greenspan is up there near the top. Not only did she spend time editing the books of some of my favorite pastry chefs, notably Pierre Hermé, but she has written many of her own, including her most recent, Around My French Table. When Dorie bakes cookies, it’s time to take notes as she has spent her life making every recipe better than before.

Dorie and her son and cookie-loving partner Joshua, will be selling their cookie wares at CookieBar, for 5 short days, February 7th through the 11th from 10am every morning until they run out. They are planning a larger bake than last year but I would suggest getting there early as last year I found out the hard way that those cookies go fast. Here is a preview at the menu (plus a recipe for one of Dorie’s cookies).

The Menu
THE SABLÉS
French butter cookies baked in our signature straight-sided rounds

SUGAR-TOPPED VANILLA SABLÉS — Crisp around the edges and just a tad tender in the center, these sparkly, sugar-sprinkled French shortbread cookies have the good taste of butter, butter and more butter, and pure, rich vanilla, too.

COCONUT-LIME SABLÉS — Lots of freshly grated lime zest rubbed into sugar, toasted coconut and a pinch of cardamom (impossible to place, but it ups the ante on all the flavors) give these cookies a taste of the tropics that makes them perfect for the dead of winter.

ESPRESSO-CHOCOLATE SABLÉS — A mix of butter, strong espresso and tiny hand-chopped bits of Valrhona Extra-Bitter Chocolate makes for a sophisticated cookie that’s as good as an afternoon pick-me-up as it is with a late-night drink. More…

My youngest son loves ribs. In fact, that is an understatement. Let’s just say he seems to have been born part caveman (definitely his father’s side). He will gnaw the life out of any bone as long as it’s dripping in some kind of barbeque sauce. He is also a bit of a “rib snob,” as he has barefacedly told a certain barbeque chef that he didn’t like his over peppered sauce. Needless to say, we have eaten at every rib joint in town several times over and Blue Smoke ranks up there as one of our family favorites. So when I heard that they had opened a bakery, I was excited, because as much as I like a good rib, I would much rather have a good slice of pie.

Blue Smoke Bake Shop, overseen by Pastry Chef Jennifer Giblin, is a cute little annex at the front of Blue Smoke. It is a cornucopia of classic American desserts with a daily selection of cookies, brownies, cupcakes and most importantly, mini pies, the true highlight of the menu. On my visit, I sampled the Bourbon Pecan, Pear Crumble and my favorite, the Tollhouse Cookie Pie. What can I say — to me, fruit is just a health food trying to pretend its way into dessert, but chocolate chip cookie dough pie, now we’re talking. The crusts are flaky and tender and at $3 a pie they are perfect to guiltlessly enjoy. The only thing that would be better was if you could get those pies à la mode. More…

Sometimes, Pastry & Baking Arts forces you outside your comfort zone. In my last posting, I expressed my less-than-enthusiastic feelings about making cakes. Of course, I do realize there are those that love making cakes and not everyone in my class shares my feeling. The point I’m taking away from this is that it’s nearly impossible to love every lesson. Some things you just have to learn, like preparing chocolate ribbon cake.

It started off as something different. In her dry, humorous way, Chef Kathryn instructed us to take a block of modeling chocolate and warm it up — in our hands, under our armpits or even sitting on it (with gloves and plastic wrap, of course). I thought, “Now this is fairly simple.” Once we warmed our chocolate into a pliable form and let it rest, we took out the pasta rollers and began what was for me, one of the most difficult class projects yet — pulling a pliable, but ready to crack into a million pieces piece of chocolate through the machines over and over again. On the second day of production, it got slightly easier when using a rolling pin. In the end, as I was painting on the 24-karat, edible gold on the edge of my ribbons, I did forget the frustrations of the previous day.

Cookies, however, are a different story. Chef Kathryn told us our cookie production days were going to be the closest thing in the curriculum to working in an actual kitchen. I was excited. Firstly, I love cookies and secondly, I absolutely love the energy of a true, working kitchen. We split into groups and worked out a production plan, ensuring we prepared our list as efficiently as possible, taking into consideration the time it would take to make doughs, shape and decorate cookies, as well as oven temperatures. More…