White Chocolate, Tahini, What’s A Snickerdoodle

On stage fright and the morning

It is early on Sunday morning and I am out of bed thinking about brown butter and tahini. I had a panic attack on Friday, and ideally I would have no more going forwards. One is plenty! One is, as they say, un oeuf! 

Which means baking. 

It means sunshine, and fresh air, and kimchi on toast, and queer romcoms, and Best In Miniature Season 1, and baking. I know my drugs. 

Also, I have kind of developed a sugar habit. Did you know if you eat enough ginger biscuits and salted caramel Tony’s Chocolonely you can give yourself a sweet tooth? It’s true. Or it feels true from over here. I’ve always been a Marmite toast, salt-and-vinegar crisps kind of person; but the last six weeks have been fairly brutal, proportionately speaking, vis-á-vis the rental market, and I have been simply mainlining refined sugar like there is no tomorrow. In the new house, I say boldly, there will be no more of this. There will be no more of this nonsense. 

And yet, having made these cookies, can I imagine life without them? Here’s the deal: if you swap out some of the butter in a cookie batter for pure tahini, and you brown what butter remains, and you stud them with slivers of white chocolate, and roll them in toasted and cinnamon-scented sesame seeds and brown sugar, and bake juuuuust enough, and then (please bear with me here) drop from a school-ruler height onto the cooling rack…well, it’s good, is what I’m saying. Good enough that we are on batch three.