Pistachio butter-cream cookies and an anniversary

These little inventions are a simple sugar cookie topped with pistachio butter-cream frosting and a pinch of crushed pistachios. I nabbed the frosting (only the frosting) from Nigella’s macaron recipe, and used a basic sugar cookie for the base. The VIPs of this cookie are really the pistachios and salt. Without a food processor, I used my coffee grinder to pulverize some pistachios for smooth, creamy frosting. Finally, crushing a few more with a rolling pin and tossing them onto the finished product supplied crunchiness and, according to Justin, “drew out the pistachio-iness of the frosting.”

After some experimentation, I discovered that sprinkling sea salt over the plain cookie resulted in a pleasant salty-sweet taste once I'd slapped on the frosting. I know next to nothing about how ingredients interact during the baking process, and I wondered how the addition of salt at various stages of baking might impact the final product. I played with salting the cookies immediately before or after they went into the oven, though I didn’t bother adding salt to the pre-rolled dough because I wanted to retain that crunchy sea salt texture. Salting beforehand resulted in a slightly warped cookie when compared with the consistently smooth, white results of salting afterward. I didn’t really detect much of a taste difference, and the warped effect may have been caused by some other factor. Sadly, I can’t offer anything really conclusive about the addition of salt to cookies, but would very much love to know more, if anyone happens to have, say, minored in that in college.

Unsurprisingly, this little adventure ended with a massive sugar headache (I don’t recommend baking desserts before breakfast). While I poured myself a fistful of asprin, Justin offered his sympathy and took over as taste-tester. He bit into a cookie, squinted, and chewed skeptically for way too long before pronouncing the thing tasty. It’s good to live with a tough critic, even though at least half the time his judgments make me stomp my feet and pronounce him wrong, wrong, wrong-- at which point he smiles knowingly. I’ve worn a hole in the kitchen floor with all my stomping. As of last Friday, we’ve been married for five years. Laissez les bon temps rouler.