Killer Zebras test recipe 3

Ok, these ones turned out really well. So cute! Great chocolate flavor and texture like shortbread. Didn't spread at all while baking (higher temperature and shorter baking time - don't know if that is what did the trick). However, perhaps they were just a tad dry.

The recipe was from the cookbook "277 sorters kakor":

80 g powdered sugar + 20 g vanilla sugar, 300 g butter, and 400 g flour. That's it. Oh, and 20 g of cocoa in half of the dough.

I need to re-do my spreadsheet and put everything in the metric system so I can compare ratios. So far, recipe number 2 was the most popular with the family. I liked this one better.

Killer Zebra test recipe 2

So much better but not perfect

This time I used the recipe for Icebox cookies from Cooks Illustrated:
2.5 cups flour, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 cup unsalted butter, 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 1/2 cup confectioner's sugar, 2 large egg yolks, 2 tsp vanilla extract.

The chocolate recipe version reduces to flour to 2 cups and you whisk in 1/4 cup cocoa and then add 2 oz. melted chocolate to the batter. i.e. there is 4 times as much chocolate in this recipe than in my first (if I remember correctly).

I divided each dough into 4 pieces and mushed them together in the hope that it would look like Zebra stripes. Not 100% happy. Next time I will roll out the dough in several layers to make stripes, but squish them together somehow since they shouldn't be perfectly straight (I think).

The results were: soooo much more chocolately flavor. They didn't spread as much (although more than to my liking, but that could be due to thickness or oven temperature maybe?). Maybe I need to cut them much smaller but thicker. I wish they were less crispy and more melt in the mouth-y.

I have continued to expand on my spreadsheet with Swedish recipes for icebox cookies. 2 out of 3 that I found don't use eggs at all. One of them uses confectioner's sugar but the other two use granulated. I am going to try the recipe for "Brysselkex" (Brussels cookies but not like American Brussels cookies - these are like shortbread but with more butter). This is supposedly known as 1-3-4 dough by bakers, since there is 1 part sugar, 3 parts butter, and 4 parts flour. HOWEVER I have not been able to find any other example of this online so I'm wondering if it's not a mistake in the cookbook. I have found 1-2-3 dough. Well, I am going to give it a chance anyway (might add extra chocolate though).

After Killer Zebras test 1 Boo hoo

After my cinnamon roll tests, I should have been prepared for failure. However, since the pinwheel cookie recipes on my spreadsheet were so overwhelmingly similar, I was 90% sure that my first attempt would be a success.

I was wrong.

I whipped together the recipe last night since my curiosity was killing me. I decided to do sloppy pinwheels since I just basically wanted to see what it was like to mix and roll out this dough. The dough was very easy to work with and I was pretty happy with the appearance, since I didn’t even try to make it look good.

This was my result:

 

 

HOWEVER. Taste: bland. No chocolate to speak of. Texture: too cakey and chewy. Bubbly on the surface. Spread too much.

Major disappointment.

This morning I remembered that I had a Cooks Illustrated cookie recipe for refrigerator cookies. When I found it (”Icebox Cookies” from Holiday Baking, 2007) I realized 1: Pinwheels or Killer Zebras are just refrigerator/icebox/slice-and-bake cookies (duh) and 2. the baker from Cooks Illustrated had encountered my problems EXACTLY and the solution was: eliminate baking powder, use only egg yolk, use a granulated/powdered sugar combo, don’t cream the sugar/butter for too long, and add extra melted chocolate (sounds good to me!).

I will go through my cookbooks again, adding refrigerator cookies to my spreadsheet for comparison. The Cooks Illustrated recipe shows how to do marbled cookies, but I think that I would rather do the Zebra cookie pattern on a baking sheet, as shown by the blogger Vivian Pang. I think Sunshine would take the easiest route, and mushing the dough on a sheet is easy, plus you can just cut out the cookies in rectangles instead of trying to get perfect cylinders of dough in the fridge. I can’t wait to try this!

Killer Zebras test recipe 1



 

 

Now on to the next challenge: Sunshine's Killer Zebra cookies

 

Here’s hoping it won’t take a whole year like the cinnamon rolls. Getting those right nearly sank me.

As I have previously written, I am not alone in my obsession. One person named her company "Killer Zebras" after Sunshine.

Killer Zebras

Killer Zebras are based on Pinwheel cookies, i.e. vanilla and chocolate cookie dough: in the case of pinwheels, the dough would be in a spiral pattern.

 

My trip down the Internet rabbit hole plus several cookbooks, has taught me that these can be formed into stripes (aka simple zebra pattern), crazy stripes (i.e. Killer Zebras), marbled, checkered, oh yes…the list goes on and on. Robin McKinley writes that she based them on ”Harlequin” cookies, which are the above-mentioned cookies in yet another pattern:

"Killer Zebras certainly exist.  I’m also bemused that this, with Death of Marat, are probably the two that get asked for the most often.  Death of Marat, as above, is vexed.  But I can absolutely give you Killer Zebras, with perhaps some head-scratching and furrowedness of brow, because they’re really only slightly dressed-up what-you-call-’em, I think I first met them in an old Betty Crocker cookbook under the name Harlequin Cookies.  You make a basic cookie dough, divide it in half, add chocolate to one, and then roll each out and squidge ’em together.  But I’ll post that recipe.  One of these days." 

I wish.

This blogger has a great description of how to make Zebra cookies (although I wonder about her recipe...we'll see once I start my testing....) Killer zebra recipe

And lookie here!  Another Killer Zebra fan I can see that the BBC recipe she used was all wrong.

Since my cinnamon roll spread sheet was the key to coming up with the ultimate recipe, I decided to do the same for the pinwheel cookie recipes. I found recipes in three of my cookbooks, and compared these with regular shortbread, as well as with recipes I found online, including Swedish versions of these cookies (so famous they got their own stamps last year! See the pinwheels, plus the checkered version?!). I have to admit that I do not own a Swedish cookie cookbook and I must get one ASAP since the recipes online are dubious.

 

  

It quickly became obvious that the basic recipe for pinwheels differs from shortbread in that there is more sugar, plus the addition of eggs and baking powder, as well as vanilla and cocoa.

The ratios differed in the recipes but the most common amounts were:

1 cup butter
1.5 cups sugar or 1.3 cups superfine sugar (perhaps powdered sugar would be ok?)
2 eggs
2.5-3 cups flour
½ tsp baking powder
2 tsp vanilla
2 oz cocoa powder

The recipes say to divide the dough in two, and then blend in the cocoa in one half. I can imagine all kinds of trouble from this step: how will the powder be evenly mixed? Won’t the dough be overworked and become tough? Isn’t it better to make two batches of dough (1 for vanilla and 1 for chocolate)? That way you could mix the cocoa with the dry ingredients and avoid those problems. I really can’t wait to be able to test my theories…

Ok, I'm going to test it today. I will post the recipes. One of these days...

Finally! Cinnamon rolls as big as your head ultimate recipe

Today I re-read Robin McKinley's comments on cinnamon rolls where she said they should just be good old white bread rolled around cinnamon sugar. That made me realize that the Cinnabon-type recipes I tried were all wrong: too sweet, too gooey, too much of everything.

I realized that I would have to make a spread sheet in order to get some understanding of what was wrong with the cinnamon roll recipes I was trying. I made three categories: Swedish cinnamon rolls, American cinnamon rolls, and white bread. One recipe in each row, and in columns were the different ingredients.

After comparing over 20 recipes I realized that the rolls I had tried were more like American dinner rolls, with lots of butter, sugar, eggs, and salt in the dough.

However, one American recipe: "Sweet-Roll Dough" caught my eye since it had less butter and sugar. I found it in the Fanny Famer Baking Book by Marion Cunningham:

In the spread sheet I noticed that the dough ingredients from that recipe were almost the same as another recipe I found online:
Leila's American sticky buns

I sort of combined the recipes and tested this:
1 pkg yeast (25 g fresh yeast), 1/4 cup butter, about 3/4 cup milk, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/4 tsp. salt, 3 cups flour, 1 egg. In the filling I used 1/4 cup butter, 1/2 cup brown sugar, and 3/4 Tbs. cinnamon. Instead of a cream cheese frosting I made a vanilla glaze: 1 cup powdered sugar, 1 Tbs. softened butter, 1/2 tsp vanilla, and enough milk to make it into an icing.

Next time I will cut down the butter in the filling to less than 1/4 cup - that much isn't needed. I will also roll the dough more tightly, since I noticed that a lot of filling melted into the bottom of the pan (hmmm...more searching on how to avoid this will be needed I guess).

The rolls were just perfect: more like a fluffy white bread, with a lovely cinnamon flavor (it could be increased but I noticed before that 1 Tbs cinnamon was grainy). I cut the dough into 8 rolls instead of 10 to make them extra big.

I will write a proper recipe soon but I just had to write this so I wouldn't forget. I can truly imagine Sunshine serving these!

Back to cinnamon bun business

I happened upon a list of cinnamon roll recipes the other day on some site (Huffington Post perhaps?) and one of the links was this:

Perhaps ultimate Cinnamon Roll recipe?

Not only does this recipe make just 8 rolls (thus they will be larger than 12, approaching head-size perhaps?) their icing sounds more like what I'm looking for: less creaminess and more crunch (no added butter and more sugar).

And the origin of the recipe is supposedly Cooks Illustrated, which I have found to be one of the absolute best sources for good recipes. I need to get a subscription again! I listen to their podcast America's Test Kitchen Radio and it is an amazing source of information and laughs.

How could I not have found this recipe in my quest? Is it because they are called "buns" instead of "rolls"?

The butter is downstairs softening. Time for perhaps my last test, so that I can check at least one recipe off my list?

UPDATE:

Complete disaster. When the liquid was added to the flour mixture it became a dry cement-like mess. Impossible to add butter to it. I ended up throwing it away. I read that it was supposed to be a brioche-like recipe but there must have been somthing wrong with it, or it must be difficult to make brioches?...

So I thought I would instead go back to my original recipe (Test recipe 1) and adjust it according to my first comments, and use the filling and glaze from the above recipe. Well, that dough turned out beautifully so I am going to keep that. I let it rise to twice its size and also baked it a few minutes longer than before and it turned out very fluffy - perfect. Test recipe 1 dough is the best (this time I used unsalted butter and added 1 tsp salt to the dough - I think either unsalted or salted is fine).

The filling had too much brown sugar and cinnamon, even when I cut back, so that is still a problem. 1/4 cup of butter is perfect. Next time I'll try 3/4 cup brown sugar and 1 Tbs. cinnamon.

The glaze contained no butter this time but more sugar and vanilla. Delicious.

I actually made 12 rolls since I'm thinking of bringing them to work tomorrow.

I think one more test of this recipe and I will have the ultimate Sunshine rolls.