Pinwheel Cookies

I’ve gotten ahead on the baking and behind on the blogging, the result is, hopefully, two posts this week.

My mom had a rather meagre selection of cook books when I was young, and even fewer on baking, but I can still remember looking through them and thinking the few pictures were amazing and inspiring. Looking back now those same photos look horribly dated and, worse, very pedestrian, but they served their purpose at the time and got me to experiment with new recipes all the same.

 

One of the favourite experiments were the pinwheel cookies, as my sister Heather said, “They weren’t made very often but when they were made they were good.” Well, they weren't made very often because I was the only one who made them, and I did share baking duties with my sisters and mom.  The pinwheels sparked my love of icebox cookies as the ultimate in convenience baking and the swirls of vanilla and chocolate cookie dough always raised the question of how do you make that? Which made me feel very smart because I was the one who could do it. My mom recently claimed on one of her visits that she used to make the pinwheel cookies as well, but when she watched me make them for the blog (and to send some to Allana and Dad), she then backed down from her claim saying she doesn’t remember ever having to roll out and sandwich together two flavours of dough, I’ll let her off the hook for trying to steal my thunder because she backed down so readily.

 

Pinwheel Cookies

 

Mix together until smooth

2/3 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar

 

then add and mix well

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

 

In a separate bowl, mix together

2 cups flour

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

then stir into the batter until smooth.

 

To make the pinwheels, divide the dough in half, put half onto a sheet of baking paper and leave the other half in the mixing bowl.

 

Add to the dough in the bowl

2 tbsp cocoa powder (make sure it's dark cocoa powder)

and mix until the dough is chocolate

 

Roll out the chocolate and vanilla doughs on separate sheets of baking paper to 1/8 inch thick and to the same length, but make the chocolate one a bit narrower.  A trick I have for making them very rectangular when they start to go oval is to cut off the rounded ends of the oval, then cut those pieces in half, turn the two halves so that the corners are to the outside and patch them back onto the main piece of dough.  The dough is really forgiving and you're going to roll everything up into a log so no one will see any of the patchwork.  If they're not rectangular you get quite a few 'dud' cookies when you start cutting the ends.

Then sandwich together, chocolate on top of vanilla, try to get the chocolate in the middle of the vanilla so there is a border on both sides.  You want a border on both sides so the centre of the pinwheel has a nice tight curl in the middle and so the vanilla seals the chocolate on the outside of the roll.  I didn't do a very good job, it's been a while since I made these and it requires more conviction than I had to flip the chocolate over.

Then roll into a log, wrap with one of the sheets of paper and freeze for at least an hour.  At this point you can take the dough out of the freezer to slice and bake or divide into portions to freeze to use later (it'll keep in the freezer for 1 - 3 months depending on how cold your freezer is).

Preheat the oven to 350^F (around 175^C), slice the log into 1/4 inch cookies, the size of the cookie is not based on the thickness of the slice but the fatness of the log, don't be tempted to cut them thicker to make them bigger, it won't work.  Bake for 6 - 10 minutes, oven temperatures vary as well as the coldness of the dough, as the dough warms up by sitting on the kitchen counter while waiting for successive trays to bake they will need less time.

You can see what I mean about not getting a tight curl in the middle, I didn't have enough border of vanilla on the inside edge of the roll.  They were still delicious.