I say calamansi, you say lime

I went to a cookie exchange party last month and made Martha Stewart’s Lime Meltaways, which were a crazy amount of work because a) I tripled the batch, and b) my oven was far too small to handle baking that many cookies in a timely fashion, and c) I followed the recipe to the letter, including the part that called for shaking the cookies in a bag of confectioner’s sugar.

The whole process turned my little kitchen into a tornado with four stations: cookie cutting, baking, cooling, and shaking, and I was switching between all of them at once — turning pans around in the oven, slicing, refilling the sugar bag, resetting the timer to remind myself not to leave the cookie trays too long in one spot… two hands was barely enough for my chaotic assembly line.

Well, this time I’m not doing it Martha Stewart’s way. Don’t get me wrong — those cookies were a hit, different from everyone else’s, and they were very tasty, but I needed a recipe that wasn’t going to consume half of my day.

Then came along this craving last week for calamansi, the citrus fruit of the Philippines. It’s my favourite juice, one that I haven’t had for YEARS (I’ve never seen it in a Canadian grocery store), and I spotted a container of it in a nondescript little Filipino takeaway in Parkdale. At first I balked at the nearly $8 price when I pulled it off the shelf last Thursday, but I had a change of heart by Monday. If you’ve never tasted calamansi, it looks like a lime but smaller, the skin is very thin and sweet, but the juice is strong. I remember it tasting sweeter than lime, but that just may be nostalgia talking.

Now, what do you do with calamansi? The same as what you would do with lime: put it in drinks, savoury dishes, desserts, what-have-you. Since I bought it in powder form, it won’t have the fresh tang of zest. I decided to make the best of its dry ingredient form and try it in cookies, because I’m a cookie monster.

the snow-free version

I searched around for a calamansi recipe and went for the one that looked the simplest and didn’t require a slew of specialty ingredients. I adapted this one for Calamansi Chewies, but I’ll direct you to this one called Kalamansi Meltaway Cookies for the pictures and presentation.

the winter wonderland version

I took liberties with adapted this recipe, but this recipe was already adapted from another. So maybe mine needs a new name? After all, I didn’t use honey. My substitutions are marked:

CALAMANSI CHEWIES with HONEY

*Adapted from The Cookiepedia by S. Adimando

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt coarse pickling salt, left over from the Martha Stewart recipe
½ cup unsalted butter, room temperature
½ cup sugar brown sugar, which I use in oatmeal (I don’t use sugar for anything else)
2 packets frozen calamansi concentrate (about 2 Tablespoons total) 2.5-ish (?) tablespoons of calamansi powder
1 egg
1/3 cup honey liberal drizzlings of maple syrup
Powdered sugar for sprinkling

I went to the grocery store and didn’t feel like buying refined sugar just for this recipe, nor could I decide on honey. I prefer cookies less sweet, anyway, and I have a small bottle of maple syrup from a wedding last winter. (You should see all the bottles of wedding f(l)avours I’ve stockpiled from weddings I’ve shot: pumpkin butter and homemade sweet chili sauce, for starters. I’m not sold on the pumpkin butter but I’m looking forward to trying out the sweet chili sauce.)

The result? After trying a few (by the way, the raw cookie dough was delicious), I could use more calamansi powder. I didn’t want to go overboard with the lime, but now that I tried it with about two and a half tablespoons, I know I could easily bump it up by another tablespoon. Maybe it’s because I used brown sugar instead of white and maple syrup instead of honey that the lime seemed dialled down. The other thing I wondered was whether skipping honey made the ingredients too dry, but I mixed the final ingredients by hand, which may have made the cookie a little denser, anyway.

Tomorrow I’ll bring the cookies to The Firm for some independent taste testing, and then I’ll refine the next batch for a housewarming on Sunday. A Chronic Revisionist’s work is never done, you know.

a browner cookie gives more contrast