Poppy seeds are a strange little ingredient, but they lead to some delightful concoctions. I’m not sure that they necessarily lend flavor as much as a visual component. They are awfully cute.
We were at our neighborhood Penzey’s store (which recently opened in Austin), and I spotted a jar of poppy seeds. I had been wanting to try out a poppy seed cookie recipe for awhile, but never got around to it. Then I started thinking that I could also make lemon poppy seed muffins for breakfast. I was getting pretty excited at this point.
We made the cookie dough on Saturday night. We only made a half-recipe, and we STILL ended up using the entire jar of poppy seeds. OH NO! I already had my heart set on making muffins for breakfast the next day, so of COURSE, we had to go BACK to the grocery store and get more poppy seeds. The insanity begins…
Our first mistake was buying such a tiny jar of poppy seeds. Que lastima!
The first step in cookiedom is butter and sugar. Have you ever eaten just butter and sugar? Uhhhh, I mean, I never have…of course not….but it sounds like it could possibly be good, right? We also added vanilla extract and one egg to this mixture (but was it enough?!)
The dry ingredients are flour, 1/4 cup finely chopped almonds, and poppy seeds. The almonds add nice flavor to the cookie. I thought about adding almond extract, but I didn’t want to overdo it.
The flour mixture gets added to the butter mixture until it forms a dough. Then we put it on wax paper and formed it into a log. I twisted the ends to make it look like a giant tootsie roll!
Now’s the part where we decided to get a little funky with it. The original recipe says to roll the cookie dough in colored sugar. Well, we didn’t have colored sugar, so we decided to use sprinkles instead. It seemed like a good idea, except that sprinkles are remarkably similar in texture to poppy seeds. But look how fun it is!
A more juvenile blog would say this looks like unicorn poop. Thankfully, this is not that blog. (eww, she’s touching it.)
The dough needs to be chilled in the fridge for a couple of hours so that it is easier to slice into cookies. They bake for about 12 minutes in the oven.
We served the cookies with Haagen-Dazs’s Five-ingredient Lemon Ice Cream. We don’t ever buy premium ice creams like Haagen-Dazs because we’d rather just make our own. But we hadn’t really planned ahead at this point, so we just grabbed some at the store. We were blown away by this ice cream by the way. Wow, it’s amazing! It goes really well with these cookies, too.
* * * * * (this is a poppy seed page break) * * * * [the asterisks represent poppy seeds]
So I’ve already mentioned that we went back to the store to get more supplies for the muffins.
With all this cooking…. we kind of go to the store a lot.
Turns out, plain, full-fat yogurt is the secret ingredient. How come plain, full-fat yogurt is so hard to buy at the grocery store? It’s so rare that you find a single 8 oz container. It always comes in 32 oz. Dang it. Das a lot of yogurt.
We made a deliciously tart lemon glaze for the muffins. Mmmmm….so tangy…
A perfectly lazy Sunday morning, eating muffins and reading the paper.
Look at them seeds! Let’s hope neither of us have to take a drug test in the near future…according to Mythbusters, we would totally get nailed after this past weekend!
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