I love colorful macarons filled with tasty rich buttercream, chewy chocolate chip cookies studded with nuts and buttery shortbread just as much as the next person. Sometimes however, I want something more simple, more wholesome. A cookie that is not too rich or too sweet, something a little old fashioned, rustic, that I can enjoy with my morning coffee. The kind of hard cookie that softens perfectly when you dunk it into a glass of cold milk without crumbling.
I am a sucker for anything with cornflour/meal in it. I like corn muffins, cakes and cookies, especially when they have an unrefined, almost gritty texture. A friend bought some at a farmer's market a few weeks ago that were perfect: not too sweet, not too delicate, just buttery enough. I was set on replicating them in my kitchen.
When I started hunting for recipes, most of them called for more regular flour than cornflour/meal, but I wanted the latter to really shine through. Then I finally found one that had a higher cornflour/meal content. I tweeked it a little, increasing the minimal amount of butter suggested and using polenta (which is supposedly not ground as finely). Next time I will also cut the sugar, because the cookies were a touch sweet for my taste, but besides that they turned out just right, as Goldilocks would say.
Ingredients
200gr polenta
120gr flour
1tsp baking powder
1/2tsp vanilla extract
130gr sugar (next time I will use less!)
90gr butter
90gr butter
1 egg
Melt the butter and let cool. Whisk the egg with the sugar and butter until smooth and then add in the polenta and the regular flour (after sifting it with the baking powder). Kneed the dough and let rest in the fridge for a half hour and then roll it out between two sheets of baking paper. I found the kneeding a little tricky because I couldn't get the dough to stick together. The recipe I found in a forum called for half the amount of butter but the dough was much too "sandy" to stick so I doubled it. Use a shot glass (like I did) or a cookie cutter, cut out the cookies, lay them on a baking sheet and bake for approximately 10 minutes in a 360°F/180°C preheated oven.
