Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Saffron Vanilla Biscuits

I visited SF a couple of months ago and visited Blue Bottle Coffee. My soy decaf mocha and Belgian waffle were both fantastic, and thus began a deep affection for Blue Bottle. One of the baked goods that I noted was their saffron vanilla snickerdoodles, which I eyed but resisted (can't have both a cookie AND a waffle, that's just too gluttonous). 

Later on, I stumbled on the snickerdoodle recipe, taken directly from the Blue Bottle Cookbook, and I knew that I had to give it a try. 

Whole Foods was having sale on spices so I bought a thing of saffron. It came in a huge bottle which initially surprised me, but then I realized they were just being stupid with the packaging, because inside the enormous bottle was this tiny pouch of saffron threads ಠ_ಠ

Unfortunately, I encountered a huge mishap in the recipe. I didn't realize that my parents' kitchen (I'm home for the holidays) isn't as well stocked as my apartment kitchen, probably because they don't bake as much as I do. It turns out that they didn't have either granulated sugar or brown sugar. I was already halfway into the recipe when I realized this, and the only sugar they had was powdered sugar so I just substituted that for both of the sugars that the recipe called for.

The cornstarch in the powdered sugar made the cookies more biscuit-like, and since powdered sugar is much less dense than regular sugar, it also came out only lightly sweetened. Thus, I dub these saffron vanilla biscuits and they tasted surprisingly decent. The texture was light and fluffy, and the saffron added a delicious aroma (I typically dislike saffron since it's hard to get it right). I definitely need to try these again in the future and follow the recipe to a T, or perhaps enhance it by rolling in vanilla sugar or adding white chocolate chips. That sounds divine.

Would I make these again? Yes, but I'll follow the recipe the second time around

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