Recipe: Fresh Coconut Macaroons

Due to an abundance of fresh coconut in our house, I have been looking up recipes that call for fresh coconut in order to use up some of this wonderful bounty. My grandma makes a sweet, sticky coconut in syrup, but I wanted to try something different. I found a few recipes, but settled on macaroons for my first try at baking with fresh coconut meat. The result was a delicious, moist batch of macaroons with a very delicate flavor and texture.

I made a few modifications to the recipe to suit my taste, so here is my version.

[Gricel’s] Coconut Macaroons

Made on February 3, 2010

Based on the recipe by: Penny Ann Habeck on allrecipes.com

Prep Time: 10 Minutes

Cook Time: 20 Minutes

Ready In: 30 Minutes

Servings: 9/10

INGREDIENTS:

(my modifications in red)

1 1/3 cups flaked coconut (I used freshly grated coconut, made for a very moist, delicate cookie)
1/3 cup turbinado raw sugar
2 tablespoons whole wheat pastry flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 egg whites
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

DIRECTIONS:

In a small bowl, combine the coconut, sugar, flour and salt. Stir in egg whites and vanilla; mix well.
Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls onto greased baking sheets.
Bake at 325 degrees F for 18-20 minutes or until golden brown.
Cool on a wire rack.

This is what the process looked like. Overall, the easiest batch of cookies I have ever made.

Christmas Cookies

I was forced to keep the baking light this Christmas. My mom’s Christmas Eve roast feast is going to take a good long time to make, so I was ordered out of the kitchen this morning. Luckily, I’ve had this batch of cookie dough waiting in the freezer since I made the mix in November, so it was only a matter of slicing, rolling, and sprinkling.

I think the time spent in the freezer actually improved the flavor of the dough, these almost taste like Royal Dansk cookies 🙂

sugary sweet

Yesterday was my b-chan’s birthday so I made him a batch of fresh-baked lemon sugar cookies as a sweet birthday treat 🙂 . It’s been a while since I’ve baked cookies and I wanted to try something different, so I look for a recipe with a lemon twist and found this one on myrecipes.com, lemon sugar cookies from Sunset magazine.

I decided to make the dough a day in advance, so that I would have plenty of time to shape, bake, and ice the cookies before having to pack them up. At first, the recipe seemed simple enough… sugar, check, butter, check, eggs, check… until I got to the part where I had to mix the dry ingredients. This recipe calls for two cups of sugar (I used turbinado instead of refined), so I assumed there would need to be a lot of butter and flour to bring it all together. What I did not anticipate was the reality of 5 cups of flour. Have you seen what five cups of flour looks like? Apparently, I had not or I would not have had a mild panic attack wherein I jumped to the conclusion that I must have printed a faulty copy. Surely, the recipe could not call for 5 cups of flour? But it did. I double checked and forged ahead, hoping that I wouldn’t have to scrap the whole thing and buy a box of sugar cookie mix (for shame, think of all that wasted butter, sugar, and flour).

Mixing all that stuff proved to be harder than I thought it would be. I’m a poor baker, no fancy kitchenaid mixer here. I have to rely on my handheld and pray that the baking fairies are on my side (and that I won’t burn out the motor again, had that happen once). Well, my mixer couldn’t take it, this required physical labor to mix. I had to press my mom into mixing service, but between the two of us we managed to get something that resembled semi-solid concrete.

Wrapping it up, I waited til the next day.

This dough is dense. It’s hard and solid when chilled. Let’s not get into how hard it was to roll out.

Suffice it to say, the cookies were more work than a cake would have been.

Regardless, they taste great, though not as lemony as I would have liked. No matter, half the dough was enough to make 18 shaped cookies and 5 sample drop cookies for taste testing. I’ve frozen the rest of the dough for Thanksgiving and Christmas. This recipe can certainly go a long way.

Next time, I’ll add more lemon… and take over auntie Em’s mixer.