The Cookie Game

I’ve never had much of a sweet tooth. When I was a little kid and I’d turn down a slice of cake spread thick with cloying frosting, my mom would tell people it was because I was so sweet already. I’m happy to stick with that explanation, particularly because it has the same shape as what I’ve noticed recently: I actually do enjoy sweets, but my tastebuds are easily overwhelmed by sweetness. This is similar to my relationship to spiciness as I described it in last week’s post: I enjoy these flavors when they are part of a complex array of tastes, even if I am sensitive to too much of them.

So the desserts I enjoy most are ones with other strong flavors in addition to sweetness. I need another taste note—I need complexity—to keep me interested or to temper the sweetness. I love tart fruit pies and exotic, borderline savory ice cream flavors, like cinnamon, black sesame, or—and I swear this really is delicious—wasabi.

I think as a kid I felt at odds with all my friends’ craving for sweet things, but now that I’m an adult, I do really feel that a sweet thing finishes off a meal. I get why desserts exist. I’ll eat a dessert if it’s there for me, but most nights in my house it’s not, and I don’t miss it. But there is one night when I do miss a dessert if it’s not there, and that’s Movie Tuesday.

Movie Tuesday almost never happens on a Tuesday, but it’s one evening a week when a friend of mine and I watch a movie over the phone. My friend’s dessert game is tight and I often listen with envy to their munching throughout the film. This was my main impetus toward baking cookies, the perfect thing to munch while watching and chatting.

But what kind of cookie? It can’t be too sweet. It can’t have chocolate because—I feel like I’m about to lose a bunch of readers here—I’ve never liked the taste. And it has to have some intriguing flavor dimension. I found just the ticket when I discovered two recipes on NYT Cooking: earl grey sugar cookies and miso peanut butter cookies.

The first are pretty straightforward: they’re a simple sugar cookie, leaning more toward toward chewy than crisp. But before you cream the sugar with the butter, you melt the butter in a pot, cut open a couple bags of earl grey and pour the tea into the butter. You stir and heat until the butter froths. Then you take the butter off the heat and let it steep for a few minutes. A lemon’s worth of zest rubbed into the sugar complements the floral notes of the tea nicely. The result is a more multi-dimensional cookie whose added flavors are delicate, though not too subtle.

The miso peanut butter cookies are bit weirder and a bit wilder, but really I think they are just a doubling down on what’s great about a peanut butter cookie. And so you might not even notice the miso as a distinct flavor from the peanut butter. The saltiness and nuttiness get deeper and darker, and the cookie takes on a malted, almost tangy note. The funkiest version is with red miso. But if you use white miso and you let the dough sit in the fridge for a few hours, the flavors are mellower.