I am, in fact, quite excited that it’s snowing outside. It has given me that wee impetus to press publish on this recipe, which has been lurking around in my drafts folder for a while.
On an aside: say aloud with me, ‘lurking around for awhile’. Doesn’t it conjure up that horrible childhood fear of a shadowy bogeyman patiently waiting to catch you in the middle of a long, dark corridor? Mind you, saying the whole of that first sentence out loud now brings up a ridiculous image of a recipe like a white vapour, snaking out of a metal filing cabinet. It’s not quite the way that I’d planned to introduce this recipe to you.
So, back to the recurring theme of this post. Essentially, it’s about ideas remaining dormant and not being actualised because of whatever reason.
You see, I’d been wanting to bake these peanut and rosemary cookies ever since one of my colleagues passed me a newspaper clipping with this recipe on it. That was about 18 months ago. The timing of this recipe landing on my desk was perfect because I had just been thinking about combining rosemary or thyme with a sweet dessert for a wee while. But I just didn’t get round to it, or I forgot. Maybe some student emergency came up before I fully committed to baking the recipe, or something! You get the idea. The recipe continued to lurk in between the covers of other recipe books.
When summer came around, my tastebuds changed and my mind started exploring the idea of combining lemons and black pepper. So, one afternoon I invented a lemon, fig, nut and black pepper cookie recipe, which Val promptly decided were her favourite cookies.
When the nights started drawing in and the temperatures dropped, my tastebuds hankered after a more pungent flavour. I pulled out this recipe, sent myself off to go to the shops to buy some salted peanuts and snipped off some fresh rosemary. It’s as simple as that really. I think, that most of you, will have the other ingredients as standard store cupboard items already. The other joy of this recipe, I discovered, is that you can pretty much make this in one bowl, mix it within 5 minutes and be biting into your first batch within 20 minutes of starting out on the recipe. I don’t know many other cookie recipes out there that can beat that!
And boy, did I enjoy eating them.
These are fast becoming my favourite cookies: I baked them twice within 5 days. Elegant, fragrant, crunchy and very more-ish. If you want an alternative sweet grown up sweet this season, or you’d like to do something different with your leftover bag of salted peanuts which you offer to your guests, then I’d recommend this recipe to you. I know that rosemary and salted peanuts cookies sound odd but I have to congratulate Dan Lepard on this fine flavour combination.
Dan Lepards’ Peanut and Rosemary Cookies.
Ingredients
- 100ml sunflower oil
- 200g golden caster sugar
- 1tsp honey
- 2tsp very finely chopped rosemary – I used one very long sprig
- ½ tsp ground cinnamon
- 1 egg
- 150g salted peanuts
- 200g plain flour
- ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 and line two baking trays with baking or greaseproof paper. I tried out the pizza stone for one batch but found that the baking trays did a better job than the stone.
2. Mix the oil, sugar, honey, rosemary and cinnamon in a bowl until it is like a paste. I use a metal spoon for this,
3. Add in the peanuts and egg and mix well.
4. Finally stir in the flour and bicarb of soda. Naturally you start mixing this in with the metal spoon, but soon, it becomes clear that it’ll be much easier to get hands-on stuck in with your hands and finish mixing in the flour.
5. Press together 30g balls of dough. That’s ping pong sized balls, for those of you who don’t really want to measure out them out. Lay them out on the baking tray, spaced 5-6cm apart because they spread a lot. Last time I made them, the peanuts rebelled a bit and didn’t want to stay on the cookie dough. Tell them who’s boss and push them on.
6. Bake them in the oven for 12-14 minutes, depending on how chewy you like them. I aim to take them out when they’re a golden colour, rather than bronzed all over. The bronzed ones are fine warmed up, but otherwise they get a bit hard when they cool. Lift the baking paper with the cookies, off the baking tray and let them cool on a wire rack for a minute, then carefully peel them off to the wire rack.
They make 24 cookies, so I bake these in batches.
If you find them a bit too salty, Dan suggests that washing the salt off the peanuts first. Personally, I like salty sweetness. To top it off, I’ve got a kitchen fragrant of rosemary.