We’re going to get straight into the recipe this week folks! No updates, no recommendations, just pure unadulterated sugar-butter-flour up in here.

Actually, just kidding — my update is I’m going to start including PDFs of the recipes at the bottom of the post. I hope that helps you if you keep recipes on your desktop or print them out to keep in your kitchen. And maybe I’ll get around to doing this for past recipes too.

This Week’s Recipe

So if you read last week’s newsletter (with the miso caramel peach crisp) then you’ll know all about the blue corn cookies I tried to make work, and the tough lesson I re-learned about doubling down or giving up. Spoiler, I gave up. But I kept thinking about corn cookies and despite how scattered my brain is most of the time, I kind of have a one-track mind when it comes to these things (food).

Enter: yellow corn. I was able to pivot away from my flop week of recipe testing and make the recipe base work — just with yellow cornmeal. The flours in the recipe are a ratio of about one-third all-purpose and two-thirds cornmeal. Fine cornmeal. I used Indian Head Old-Fashioned Stone Ground Yellow Cornmeal. Take a look at the image and caption above: The cornmeal on the left (Indian Head) is ground fine, but it’s not as fine as the masa harina on the right. (Plus, they’re just made differently.) The cornmeal in the center (Bob’s Red Mill Medium Grind) was too coarse for this recipe; you can see how large the yellow specks of unground corn are in comparison. And I really enjoyed the test batches with masa harina but I figured more of the folks who read this would have cornmeal at home and I’d rather ask you to buy just one ingredient instead of two.

I wanted to drag up these would-be simple cookies a bit so I tossed together a lime zest sugar and a simple lime juice glaze. You have options here: you can toss the dough balls in the sugar pre-baking or shimmy the cookies into the sugar post-bake. I like doing both. If you opt for the glaze, I would only do a sugar coating pre-bake (or no coating) and drizzle over one-third of each cookie. Sprinkling the glaze with a dash of lime zest or the lime zest sugar was also a nice touch. Might be too hat-on-a-hat at a certain point but we’re not in the business of subtlety!

So that’s it! So many options for you to customize these to your tastes. I just had the crazy idea to put some citric acid powder in the lime zest sugar??? Would that be crazy???

Brown Butter Corn Cookies with Lime Sugar

Makes 10-12 large cookies