Valentine's Brown Butter Spice Cookies

A few days ago I posted my desire to invent my first cookie. A Valentine's cookie. A "sexy" cookie, if you will (not some milksop sugar concoction with tastelessly sweet frosting). And voila, a few tries and a few cardboard-tasting failures later and I have found my cookie. A bit nutty, a bit chocolatey and a bit spicy. Mouth-meltingly soft. What more can you ask for? I'll still be playing around with this a bit; I had one try that came out perfectly and the others have been a bit varied, but I'll keep this recipe updated.

I knew I wanted browned butter, luscious brown sugar, cocoa powder and a smack of cloves, but getting the right combination was the issue. After my first misguided attempt came out hard, flat and tasteless, I turned to Deb over at Smitten Kitchen for guidance and she, unwitting culinary angel that she is, pointed me towards the hallowed pages of Gourmet magazine, where I found the recipe for Brown Sugar Brown Butter Shorties. They advised chilling the butter after you brown it so that it hardens and can be creamed again with the sugar. I think that really did the trick. The ones featured in these photographs aren't quite as red as I'd like (my first stinky awful loser batch were a lovely dark reddish-brown but I ran out of food coloring and I didn't buy any more cause I'm po') but I do think that their deep brown color is still quite appealing. And at the end? You get a one-two hit of rich, deep sweetness and a pleasant kick of spice. Yum.

So, here follows my first original recipe for Valentine's Brown Butter Spice Cookies! I hope you all like it.

Ingredients:

1 stick butter, salted
1 cup dark brown sugar, packed 
1 egg, room temperature, beaten
1 tsp vanilla
1 T red food coloring 
3/4 cup flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground allspice
3/4 tsp ground nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. (My oven runs hot so I actually set it to 325--if you have the same issue with your oven, adjust accordingly). Heat the butter in a skillet until melted, and then continue cooking until the butter starts to smell richly nutty and fragrant. Use a rubber spatula to scrape up the browned bits of butter. Once browned, transfer butter to a bowl and place in refrigerator to chill for 1 hour.

Meanwhile, sift the flour, cocoa, spices and salt together in a bowl. Once butter is chilled, transfer it to a separate large mixing bowl and cream, distributing the color. Add the sugar and cream together. Beat in egg until mixture becomes smooth and lightens in color. Add in vanilla and food coloring and mix. Gradually add in the flour mixture by 1/3rds, stirring gently to combine (take care not to overmix).

Roll dough out about 1/4 inch thick. The dough will be quite soft so re-chill the dough as necessary and roll it out on nonstick parchment paper. Using a heart-shaped cookie cutter, cut out your cookies and using a chilled metal spatula transfer them to a cookie sheet lined in parchment paper. Depending on the size of your cutter you should get roughly 35-40 cookies, and depending on how soft you want them to be (I like them quite soft, my sister prefers ever-so-slightly crunchy), bake for 7-10 minutes. Let cool completely before serving. Recommended serving technique is to hand-feed sections of cookie into the mouth of your beloved.

Enjoy!