“If the world comes to an end, I’m going to want cookies.”

Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life As We Knew It

Last weekend I watched the thoroughly enjoyable Palm Springs on Hulu. In the comedy, Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti) find themselves stuck together in an escapable “Groundhog’s Day” wedding party scenario. While the tone of the film is lighthearted, given our current seemingly endless bleak news cycle, I found it undeniably prophetic. Raise your hand if you’ve woken up everyday for the last five months feeling like you’re stuck in an evil infinite time loop.

It’s virtually impossible these days for me to watch more than ten minutes of news without getting antsy and begin channel hopping from MSNBC to CNN to local news, then back to MSNBC, etc. in a vain attempt to break free of the “bad news” cycle…knowing full well the outcome will still be the same. Okay, I’ll admit news of the Biden/Harris Democratic ticket offered a brief respite from the general doom and gloom perpetuated by the steaming hot mess known as the Trump administration. Nevertheless, I still can’t help feeling anxious and impatient about everything.

Worse, my attention span has shrunken in direct proportion to the elastic in my yoga pants–a vicious cycle really. I subsist, lately, on a steady diet of twenty minute (thirty tops) YouTube videos, more than half involving food, which in turn compel me to cook or bake something to expend some of that pent-up creative energy normally reserved for work. I try not to indulge too much the fruits of my labor….but you know how it goes…sometimes calories will be ingested. At least I share those calories with willing participants.

Despite wreaking havoc on my waistline, I am disinclined to cut back on the comfort baking because if indeed our world is imploding, I will most certainly need cookies. I know I’ve professed my love for cake. However, cookies are essential to one’s survival. They travel better and have a much better shelf life…that is if not all consumed in one sitting. You can eat them better huddling under a blanket…which is where you’ll find me in the event of an apocalypse. Think of all those Brits in WWII, cradling their cuppa tea and biscuit in bomb shelters.

And, unless you favor baking the fancy pants variety, like macarons (which really don’t travel well and should be refrigerated anyway), cookies (or biscuits) require far less effort and time to make–perfect for anxious, impatient people like me.

Although my cookie portfolio is expansive, owing to decades as a professional baker, to be honest, there’s probably only about a dozen or so varieties I bake at home on a regular basis, not counting holiday cookies. No surprise, the most requested cookies are chocolate chip (or some variation thereof), snickerdoodle, and ginger molasses (Laura’s all-time favorite).

A personal favorite is the sweet corn cookie (from Christina Tosi’s Momofuku Milkbar), but it’s one of those recipes that call for specialty ingredients (i.e. freeze-dried corn and corn flour) that you’d have to place an Amazon Prime order days before pulling out the eggs and butter. What makes it so worth making? Well, like much of her oeuvre, Tosi’s sweet corn cookie is a masterful, nuanced balance of flavor, texture, and nostalgia.

One bite of the cookie and I’m transported to my childhood–up early with a bowl of cereal sitting in front of the television watching a marathon of Saturday morning cartoons. You don’t have to be a fan of Captain Crunch (I wasn’t as a kid) to appreciate the evocative power of this cookie.

Recently, I read an essay in the Vittles newsletter (highly recommended) by Gemma Croffie meditating on the “life-changing magic of cookbooks,” in particular, the joy and comfort our favorite dogeared cookbooks provide us. She had me thinking of the ones I go back to time and again, often for merely a few select recipes, because they unfailingly reassure me that all is right in the world. I have three cookie cookbooks that do this for me–The Betty Crocker Cooky Book, Rose’s Christmas Cookies (by Rose Levy Beranbaum), and The Good Cookie (by Tish Boyle).

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I’ve had the Betty Crocker since middle school. Like the old Picture Cookbook, it’s a veritable time capsule of a bygone era. Rose’s book has been used so often over the last few decades that the binding has completely fallen apart. I rarely follow any of the recipes in The Good Cookie verbatim, though the recipes invariably provide a great springboard for experimentation.

These days, I find a good deal of inspiration from social media. As with any recipe, whether it be from the internet, a publication, or a cookbook, I make it a habit to scrutinize the ingredients and instructions, no matter how ostensibly detailed and precise. That’s not to say I won’t follow it exactly as is it written, at least for the first time. Oftentimes, it’s more a matter of adjusting a recipe to work with ingredients or equipment I have on hand. For example, if I only have all-purpose flour but the recipe calls for a combination of all-purpose and cake, I’ll sub a little cornstarch to lower the overall protein content.

One recipe that immediately caught my eye was the Peanut Butter-Miso Cookies from NYT Cooking. I adore the flavor of peanut butter–I’ll use it in just about anything, sweet or savory– but I’m not really a fan of traditional peanut butter cookies, or more specifically its somewhat sandy texture, which has a tendency to suck all the saliva out of your mouth. This recipe promised a crisp chewy texture, packed with the umami punch of miso paste. Now that’s a concept I can get behind.

I made a single batch of dough, mixing toffee chips into 1/3 of the dough for pure indulgence, and rolling the plain dough in coarse raw sugar per instructions. As expected the toffee chips took the cookies to another level. While I liked the textural contrast of the crunchy sugar coating, the buttery sweet crunch of the baked toffee bits not only played off the chewy center but amplified the toasty savory notes of the peanut butter and miso. I used red miso instead of the white miso in the recipe, which gave my cookies an even more intense earthy flavor. If you’re not a huge miso fan, I’d suggest using the milder white miso.

When I think of comforting cookies from my childhood, not of the homemade variety that is, two types come to mind–Mother’s Brand crisp cookies packaged in a trio of flavors (chocolate chip, oatmeal, and coconut) favored by Mom and assorted Danish butter cookies in the ubiquitous blue tin my grandparents usually kept on hand for snacking with afternoon tea. The dryer texture of Mother’s cookies made them ideal for milk dunking, which was probably one of the few occasions I drank milk as a kid. There was just something about the way those cookies absorbed and flavored the milk. I could dunk my way through half a package in one afternoon.

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The Danish butter cookies, on the other hand, weren’t what I would consider dunking cookies. Their crumblier texture made them better suited as an accompaniment for tea (or coffee), which was what my grandparents drank all the time, and why I’ve been a tea drinker since the age of three. The cookies themselves were divided into five different shapes stacked in fluted paper cups, some crusted with coarse sugar, some plain, and one studded with dried currants and flecks of coconut, which was my favorite.

To create my ultimate nostalgic comfort cookie I had to find a way to marry the best elements from both types of cookie–the dunkably crunchy texture of a Mother’s trio, paired with the buttery flavor and toothsome chew of dried currants in my Danish favorite. I found the answer in a hobnob, or more precisely the hobnob I made a couple weeks ago for my Killing Eve tribute. I tweaked the crisp oatmeal cookie recipe by adding a combination of shredded sweet and desiccated unsweetened coconut and a little coconut extract to heighten the coconut flavor, as well as the all important dried currants.

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Now this is a cookie I’d happily munch under a blanket, along with the some Peanut Butter-Miso Toffee …and maybe a few chocolate chip, snickerdoodle, and sweet corn thrown in for good measure.

Peanut Butter-Miso Toffee Cookies (adapted from NYT Cooking)

Yield: about 2 dozen

• 1 3/4 c. all-purpose flour
• 3/4 t. baking soda
• 1/2 t. baking powder
• 4 oz. or 1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 c. light brown sugar
• 1/2 c. sugar
• 1/3 c. white or red miso paste
• 1/4 c. chunky peanut butter
• 1 large egg
• 1 1/2 t. vanilla extract
• 1 c. toffee bits (e.g. Heath baking bits)

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1. Whisk together flour, baking soda and baking powder; set aside.
2. With an electric mixer or stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream together butter and sugars until light and fluffy.
3. Beat in egg and vanilla extract.
4. Mix in about half the flour, then toss the toffee chips in with the remaining flour and mix until just incorporated.
5. Chill the dough for at least 2 hours. Scoop dough out into 3/4 oz. balls and arrange on a parchment-lined sheet pan.
6. Bake in a preheated 350F degree oven for about 12-15 mins. or until crisp at the edges. Pull the sheets out of the oven and bang them against the counter to deflate the cookies, then return them to the oven and bake for another 3-4 mins. Cookies should be firm at the edges and slightly puffed in the center.
7. Pull the sheets out of the oven and bank them against the counter again.
8. Cool cookies on a rack.

Coconut Currant Hobnobs

Yield: 3 dozen

• 8 oz. (or 2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temp.
• 1/2 c. + 2 T. sugar
• 2 T. light brown sugar
• 2 t. Lyle’s Golden Syrup (or honey)
• 2 T. whole milk
• 1 1/2 t. sea salt
• 1 t. coconut extract
• 1 t. vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 c. old-fashion rolled oats
• 1/4 c. sweet shredded coconut
• 1/4 c. unsweetened desiccated coconut
• 2/3 c. dried currants

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1. With an electric mixer, cream the butter, sugars, and Golden Syrup until light and fluffy. Beat in milk, salt, and extracts. 
2. Combine the flour, oats, coconuts and dried currants, then stir into the beaten butter mixture, just until well-incorporated. 
3. Scoop approximately .75 oz or a rounded tablespoon of dough onto a parchment-lined sheet pan, leaving about 2″ between each ball of dough. Gently press down on each ball.
4. Bake in a preheated 300F degree oven for about 25-30 mins. until light golden and crispy.