Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, interest in election cake resurfaced from its heyday more than 200 years ago. While mentions of the cake predate the American Revolution, the first-known published recipe is in the 1796 book “American Cookery” by Amelia Simmons. That yeast-risen butter cake called for a pint of wine and quart of brandy, which sounds pretty great.
Election cake is a sturdy dessert that takes days to prepare and lasts for weeks, so it may have been just the thing to prepare while waiting for results. Waiting’s the one sure thing in any election, and the same is true of baking. Whatever goes in the oven takes time, and among baked goods, cookies are the least likely to fail.
Cakes require more attention than cookies, the easiest of which call for only dropping dough on a baking sheet. If you’re new to baking or distracted while in the kitchen, your cookies will come out fine, even if they’re shaped like amoebas. Chocolate chip cookies, invented nearly a century ago by Ruth Wakefield in Massachusetts, seem like the obvious choice, ideal for just about every occasion, but the fleeting high they induce doesn’t feel right for Election Day. Instead, these chewy brown butter cookies sustain with a grounded maple sweetness and strata of buttery richness.
Recipe: Chewy Brown Butter Cookies
They’re designed for Election Day baking: The recipe can be made in stages (during breaks from watching results roll in), and both raw dough and baked rounds last for weeks in the freezer. They also reflect tastes beloved in America at this moment, chewy and toasty with brown butter and edged with salt, nutty with Southern pecans and autumnal with Northern maple syrup.
When butter cooks long enough for its dairy solids to separate and darken from gold to copper, it develops a savory nuttiness. That flavor is magnified in this dough: Pecans are stirred into the butter as its milky bits turn tan, and both toast to a deep brown. The scent is as warming as a wood fire and lingers nearly as long.
To make sure this pair doesn’t burn to bitterness in the residual heat of the pan, oats and salt are stirred in. The butter stops cooking and instead soaks into the oats, seasoning and moistening them.
This blend can, in fact, become even more delicious if made with Elliot pecans, grown predominantly in Georgia. Tubby and round, these squat little nuts have a higher fat content than most other pecans and an almost creamy sweetness.
Fresh, still-yellow butter forms the foundation for the rest of the dough. With its solid emulsion of fat and liquid, it gives the cookies a milky taste and an airy-yet-chewy structure. Pure maple syrup balances that with its depth, all the more so if it’s dark and robust.
Jenna Baird and Jacob Powsner, who run the maple syrup business of Baird Farm in Chittenden, Vt., explained that light amber syrup comes from sap early in the season when everything begins to thaw, and dark syrups are from later-season sap.
“It’s just a couple of weeks that separate a light amber from a dark amber syrup,” Mr. Powsner said. “When you boil a later-season sap, you get a different caramelization.”
The seasonal shift in sugars, along with changes in naturally occurring airborne yeast and bacteria that break down the sap, can affect flavor. “There’s a lot going on in some of the really dark ones,” Ms. Baird said. “Some are almost molasses in flavor. There’s an almost bitter aftertaste.” That may not be what you want poured onto pancakes, but it will amaze you with its complexity in baked goods.
Given more time in the fridge, this dough evolves to have increasingly nuanced notes of nuts and toffee. But it starts with enough intrigue to bake into delicious cookies right away — so they can be one thing you don’t have to keep waiting for this election season.
Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.
The post The Cookies You Want to Bake on Election Day appeared first on New York Times.