Dodge wrote The American Baker with Elaine Ratner when he served as the pastry chef at
San Francisco’s elegant Stanford Court Hotel. His cookbook, which received a
James Beard Award, is outstanding. It is precise without being dull and aloof. It
presents a broad range of desserts that, to my tastes, are very appealing: a
Strawberry Goat Cheese Tart; a Coconut Cream Pie; a Blackberry Cake; and cream
Eclairs. In her introduction to Dodge’s cookbook, the pastry chef and cookbook
author Maida Heatter writes: “[t]he first word to describe [Dodge’s] desserts
is simple: pure and clean in design, and natural and undiluted in taste.”
My copy of The American Baker is full of notes
proclaiming that a short dough recipe is my family’s favorite for pies, or that
a butter cookie recipe is among one of the best around. I particularly like Dodge’s
approach to cookies: they “should be small, perhaps an inch across, so that as
you pick up each one you can’t help but look at it and pause in conversation to
see how it tastes.” Dodge continues: “I almost never serve just one kind of
cookie. I arrange four or five different kinds in neat rows on a small, round,
silver pedestal tray and invite guests to pick and choose.”
If invited to help assemble such a tray, I most certainly would include Dodge’s Hussar’s Love: a petite, toasted hazelnut cookie dusted with sugar and topped with a dot of raspberry jam. This tender, buttery cookie is simply delicious.
½ cup toasted
hazelnuts (filberts)
7 tablespoons
unsalted butter (room temperature)
3 tablespoons
sugar
1 ¼ cups cake
flour
2 tablespoons
powdered sugar
½ cup seedless red
raspberry jam
Finely grind the
nuts. Cut the butter into pieces. Place the filberts, butter, sugar, and flour
in the bowl of an electric mixer. Using the paddle attachment, mix at medium
speed until combined and then at medium-high until the dough comes together.
Remove the dough from the mixer and divide it into 4 equal parts. Roll each
part with your hands into a cylinder 8 inches long and ¾ inch in diameter. Put
the cylinders on a tray and refrigerate until firm, about 1 hour.
Preheat the oven
to 325°F. Line two cookie sheets with parchment.
Cut
the cylinders into ¼-inch-thick slices. Place the slices on the cookie sheets
and bake until golden brown, 10 to 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and
immediately slide the parchment onto a counter or table. Cool to room
temperature.
When
cool, place the cookies very close together on one sheet. Put the powdered sugar
in a shaker or a fine sieve; shake a thin coating of sugar over the cookies.
Heat the jam gently until liquid. Pass it through a fine sieve, then spoon it into
a parchment cone with a ¼-inch opening cut in the tip. Top each cookie with a
dot of jam. Makes 90 cookies.
