Traditional, twisted.

I made marmalade a few weekends ago. The meyer lemons I’ve been buying at People’s are so floral and sweet that I’ve been eating them straight up. And the oranges… and the grapefruit... It’s citrus season! I couldn’t NOT try marmalade.

This being my first attempt, I got two books on preserves and jams. Perused them, then decided that I prefer to read the useful-but-detailed instructions and the science behind jam-making AFTER I make my mistakes. Plus I watched a 2-minute video online, which I naively thought was sufficient to give me an idea of what set jam would look like. So… I made a ruby red grapefruit-orange-lemon marmalade that’s tasty, albeit with a very stiff set. Then I made a meyer lemon marmalade that tastes... not unlike a bunch of lemons. Seems like the sweetness and the floral notes that I covet in the meyer lemon grew wings and flew out of the pan as quickly as they could.

Both are bitter, that's the MO of marmalade. Nary a sliver of pith sneaked into the gooey mixture, maybe the pith's bitterness oozed out of the pip bag, where I included it to develop the pectin? I need to test these marmalades on my favorite Irishman, who is a jam-and-marmalade fanatic.

Until then, I have 8 jars of marmalade waiting to be given purpose. So I made sugar cookies filled with lemon marmalade, hoping that the sweetness of the cookie would balance the tartness of the jam. It did okay...the richness of shortbread might stand up better to the preserves.

Half the dough went toward this experimental lemon sandwich, half went to the traditional frosted sugar cookie. And I might have been convinced that the lemon cookies were pretty good. Good, until the old standby stole the show back from this interloper.

Sugar cookie recipes are all pretty much the same. There are slight variations in butter or eggs, it seems one balances the other. Some leave out the cream of tartar. The older recipes I've found use less butter. This recipe is adapted from my favorite of mom's cookbooks: the 1970s orange hard-back Betty Crocker cookbook. There are two sugar cookie recipes in there: the Traditional (here, minus the cream of tartar) and the Deluxe (more butter, powdered sugar, cream of tartar).

A side-by-side bake-off revealed that I am, after all, a traditional sort of girl.

Traditional Sugar Cookies
3/4 c butter
1 c sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2.5 c all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cream of tartar (optional)

Cream together butter and sugar until light. Add vanilla, then eggs- 1 at a time. Mix until incorporated. Combine dry ingredients in a separate bowl and add in 3 batches, mix just until combined. Chill dough at least 1 hr, overnight is better. Roll out on a well-floured surface, cut out cookies. Bake at 350.

If you take the preserves-filled route: spread marmalade/jam between 2 raw cookies. Use a fork to seal the edges so that jam doesn't leak out everywhere. Bake it as a sandwich.

If you take the frosting route: Cream 1 stick butter and 1 tsp vanilla together in a mixer, add powdered sugar to taste along with 1-3 tablespoons milk to achieve desired consistency. It usually takes about 1 of those cardboard boxes of confectioners' sugar for 1 stick of butter. Frost when cookies are cool.

Here's a better view of the marmalade cookies:




post script: Not all is lost on the marmalade front. A versatile condiment, the orange one goes with everything from roasted pork tenderloin, to mashed sweet potatoes, to butternut squash.