Mission 7: Anisette Cookies
February 6th, 2010 
Goombah Gourmet 
Chris
The kitchen of an Italian grandmother typically smells like one of two things: tomato sauce or anise. Or maybe both, or maybe one (sauce) followed by another (anise). It’s just a fact. Any Italian knows it. When you smell anise in a cookie, you’re immediately transported back to that kitchen from your youth and back to those soft cake-like cookies that nonna used to make — which is exactly why I had to fire up the Kitchen-Aid and make a batch of those cookies of love.
UPDATE: Presentation: 9, Goombaliciousness: 9
There are so many types of Italian desserts out there to make it can be hard to know where a budding Goombah baker should begin. Of course, I’ve already been hammering out my cheesecake recipe (I made a strawberry cheesecake that was pretty good yesterday), so some baking has already been underway (I’m not going to talk about the bread failures). Cake isn’t enough, though: I wanted to add a cookie recipe to the menu. If you know Italian cookies, you know that a fairly high percentage of them contain either anise or almond – or both. So moving to cookies means stocking up on those ingredients, as you’ll likely need them.
To be honest, I don’t know why Italians love anise and almond, but they do. So if you don’t like either of them, you’ll probably want to go to the French bakery for your cookies instead. Of course, if you live in the ethic culinary wasteland that I live in, that means that you’ll be closing your eyes and munching on a Chips Ahoy while imagining that it is biscotti. Hey – what can you do? As my mother would say, holding court by nonchalantly uttering (always with some accompanying flip of her right hand upward) one of her endless snippets of East Coast Wisdom, “it is what it is.” Only my mother can say something entirely empty and vacuous like “A=A” and make it seem deep and profound (well, maybe everyone’s mother has that effect on their kids, I don’t know).
Before you make these love drops, remember that not everyone loves anise. As a matter of fact, my wife doesn’t seem to like it. It’s not for everyone – it’s a licorice, and some people aren’t crazy about licorice. Sometimes you need to eat a cookie and ‘adjust’ to the taste. Some people dislike them right off (not used to anise) but then quickly grow to like it. Some – like me – like it right away. But you know, I’ve been eating these things since I was a kid. My binky was probably anise-flavored. In addition, it’s important to remember that the consistency of the cookie throws some people off. My wife thought I had messed up the batch when she tried it out. “This is cake” she pointed out, implying that I’d botched the recipe. Actually no – that’s exactly what they are supposed to come out like — many Italian cookies are really just little cake bits. There’s no “crunch” to them.
But these roadblocks (and fussy culinary know-nothings) are to be expected. In this instance, my wife was raised in the ethic food wasteland I live in, so anise makes her twitch and cake-like cookies freak her out. It is what it is. She doesn’t have to eat them. I will, and my kids will. So the Goombah Gourmet will forge ahead, recovering Italian culinary delights and mastering them, no matter what the Arkansan wife thinks. In the end, you may not be able to get to Arthur Avenue from Missouri (easily anyway), but you sure can drag a bit of Arthur Avenue to Missouri. So it’s cookie time!
Preparing the Love
Anisette cookies are pretty easy to make, so go ahead and give it a whirl. You won’t regret it. Alright, one thing is bad: the prep on these bad boys results in a big mess, even if you are like the Goombah and you clean up as you go. God help you if you clean up at the end. It’ll be like a dry goods grenade went off in your kitchen.
Ingredients:
Cookies
3 ½ cups of flour
1 stick of butter
6 eggs
1 cup of fine sugar
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1 tbsp of anise extract
Topping
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
3 cups of confectioner’s sugar
¼ cup of milk
Multi-colored sprinkles
Directions
1. In a medium sized bowl, mix 1 cup of sugar with the stick of butter. It’s best to soften the butter first, if not melt it in the microwave first. Use a pastry blender to mix the two together until they are entirely combined.
2. Fork-mix the six eggs and then add the eggs to the bowl in #1. Use a hand mixer and blend the ingredients on a medium to fast speed until the mixture is creamy.
3. In another bowl, add the 3 cups of flour to the 1 ½ teaspoons of baking powder and mix.
4. Put the egg-sugar-butter mixture into your mixer bowl (if you are using a Kitchen-Aid) and use the paddle attachment.
5. Turn onto a slow speed (1 or 2) and slowly put in the three cups of flour. The dough should begin to get pretty wet and sticky, but it should hang together pretty well. Usually this won’t happen until you add the remaining 1 cup of flour you have.
6. Preheat the oven to 400.
7. Grease up a cookie sheet with butter and then dust it with flour.
8. Use two spoons and figure out how to drop teaspoon sized balls of dough onto the sheet. This is not terribly easy to do, because the dough will be incredibly sticky. After a while, though, you get the hang of using the two spoons together. There’s no way you can use your hands to do this so don’t even bother. The dough is way too sticky. Remember, though: anisette cookies are supposed to come out like balls, not like pancakes. So give it your best shot at shaping them somewhat right. It’s not easy to do (I only partially succeeded myself).
9. Bake for 12 minutes minimum. The recipe I used said not to bake for more than 13 minutes, but I went up to 17 minutes each batch. What I was looking for was this: (a) the dough should, when pressed, spring back out after you remove your finger (remember it’s cake-like, not cookie-like) and (b) the bottom of the cookies should get somewhat brown and (c) a mild brown tinge should be seen on some of the tops in your batch (not all of them, just a few). The time required will differ because ovens differ – mine might just be messed up. No, mine is messed up. That’s a fact.
10. Let the cookies cool – 5 minutes.
11. To make the icing, you just add 3 cups of confectioner’s sugar with ¼ cup of milk and 1 tsp of vanilla extract. Stir it up until it has the right consistency. If you want to add more milk, go ahead – just get it so that it isn’t too thick but yet not too thin so that it runs off the cookies. Don’t lick your fingers, there’s like a billion calories in that icing.
12. When the cookies are cool, add the icing and then immediately add the sprinkles. Don’t wait too long or the icing will harden and then the sprinkles won’t stick to the cookies.
Yield: the recipe above will make about 50 cookies. Of course, it depends on how big your spoonfuls of dough turn out to be that you use to fill up the baking sheet.
Caloric Damage: the calories on this recipe are rough – 4850 total. If you make 50 to 60 cookies, that means around 85 calories per cookie. Not bad, but you can eat quite a few of these quickly, so it adds up!
At the same time, if you’re on a diet, you shouldn’t be making these things. Go get a salad.
Results:
Presentation: 9; Goombaliciousness: 9.
To be perfectly honest, it’s hard to goof up the looks of these things, unless you make them like pancakes. So I’m going to give it a 9. The goombaliciousness is also a 9. I can imagine a better batch, but it’s hard to get these wrong. Yum!
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