Spice Cake Ravioli
Some friends graciously invited me to a Christmas cookie contest, which took place last Friday. After tasting (and reading about) my painstakingly perfected pumpkin pie, expectations were unreasonably high, and I had to deliver or face undying shame. Thanks to the timing of the school year, I spent the previous week eating leftovers and doing math. There was no time to experiment in the kitchen; so this week I had to iterate fast.
The categories were “best tasting”, “best looking”, and “most original”, and “best overall”. My instinct, naturally, was to go for all three, with a bias toward “most original”.
Over the next few days, requirements for the cookie began to form in my head. It should taste good, obviously. It should have a delightful surprise, perhaps in the middle. It shouldn’t have peanut butter, because I need to expand my culinary horizons.
The resulting idea was “spice cake ravioli”: a soft cookie like a spice cake, with pumpkin-cheesecake filling, and neatly packaged like ravioli. My sister told me the name “sounded elegant”, so I knew I had a winner.
Research
Clearly, typing “spice cake ravioli” into Google was not going to get me anywhere, so I started by looking at recipes for spice cake, gingerbread, and snickerdoodles. One of my core beliefs about cooking is that all baked goods can be described as nodes on a graph, and the key to making something you haven’t made before is to understand the edge traversals you need to make to move from one recipe to another. More on this in a later post.
For those of you who prefer linear algebra to graph theory, you could describe it by saying that baked goods lie in a multidimensional space (sweetness, moistness, fluffiness, etc), and that every possible item really just a linear combination of existing recipes.
For those of you who would rather read about cookies than math, I apologize for the previous two paragraphs.
Zero
I wanted to make a quick and easy dessert for an event on campus, so I made cake mix cookies (cake mix + oil + egg). While the first batch was baking, I threw some cinnamon and nutmeg into the remaining dough. They were ok.
One and Two
Based on my research I started with a snickerdoodle recipe and poured in a generous amount of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice. I put a few spoonfuls of dough in to bake, and then started concocting the filling. I mixed cream cheese, pumpkin puree, and a bit of sugar together, and attempted to stir out the lumps. Then I beat an egg white, mostly out of curiosity. It was ten minutes before I got anything resembling a foam, but I eventually did, and folded it into the mix.
I added some flour to the cookie dough, bringing it to the point where I could roll it out flat and work it. I put a spoonful of filling on the dough and tried different methods of rolling and folding and cutting to seal up the cookies. I had originally fantasized about making a ravioli cutter by bending a piece of metal in the machine shop, but that was clearly overkill. An empty tin can and a small cup were sufficient, and readily available. Besides, you can buy round ravioli, so the name still worked.
The end results were oddly sized, misshapen, and busted open, but they tasted excellent.
In order to perform a true comparison test, I put some filling with egg white alongside some without, and baked it. The egg-white filling was the unequivocal winner.
A follow-up conversation with my wise and experienced mother confirmed that yes, beating egg whites by hand takes forever.
Three
I made practically the same recipe as Experiment Two, so I didn’t learn much from the recipe. I did, however, greatly improve my technique.
First, I mixed the sugar and cream cheese alone, before adding the pumpkin. This eliminated the lumps. Second, I refined my egg-whipping technique. Instead of a bowl, I dropped the egg white into a mug, and rolled the handle of the whisk back and forth between my palms. I had a stiff foam inside of two minutes.
Third, I found a quick and effective method to cut cookies. Cutting out a circle with a straight push of the tin can did not work particularly well, since it didn’t seal the top and bottom edges together. However, by rolling the lip of the can around the cookie, I could quickly pinch the edges together while making a neat circle.
The cookies were good - so good, in fact, that I ate them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner until they were gone - at which point I made Experiment Four. But there were several shortcomings:
- The dough was too flat and dry, more like pie crust than a cookie. I had used too much flour, especially given that I had to liberally flour the working surface when rolling out the cookies.
- The inside was too runny, tending to form a small puddle inside the cookie instead of a robust ball of creamy goodness. I needed a way to remove some liquid from the pumpkin puree, or perhaps a way to thicken the mixture.
- They weren’t decorated. Yet.
Four
Four was my first attempt at decorating. I envisioned snowflakes and Christmas trees drawn with powdered sugar and cinnamon, but wasn’t sure how to pull it off. After watching a couple YouTube videos, I had some ideas to test.
I drew the stencils in Inkscape, and printed them out.
I scavenged a plastic milk jug from the recyling bin and began to cut. My original dream included using the school’s laser cutter, but that will have to wait for another time.
After spending half an hour on the snowflake, I decided that one stencil was enough, and went to the kitchen.
It’s nearly impossible to neatly stencil something that isn’t flat - such as a puffy baked spice cake ravioli - so I used the stencil on the dough, carfully dropped the stenciled piece over the filling, and baked. Stenciling with cinnamon was quick and easy, but powdered sugar turned out to be a bear. It tends to clump together, and would stick to the stencil instead of the dough. Adding table sugar didn’t help much. Neither did cornstarch.
When the cookies came out of the oven, the cinnamon stencils looked good, but the sugar had melted, dissolved, or otherwise been subsumed by the cookies. I was going to have to live with brown snowflakes.
Five
There’s not a lot to say about Five. I made cookies. They were delicious. The cookie competition was fierce, and mine received the second place award for most unique cookie.
Here’s the final recipe:
Dough
- 1 cup (2 sticks) butter or margerine
- 1 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 whole egg
- 1 egg yolk (use the white for filling)
- Some vanilla extract
- 1 tsp baking soda
- Pinch of salt
- Cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, and ginger
- 3 cups flour
Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs, vanilla, and spices. Stir in flour slowly. Add more flour as necessary to make the dough workable.
Filling
- 1 (12oz) package cream cheese, softened
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup pumpkin puree (the less water, the better)
- 1 egg white, whipped
Cream cream cheese and sugar. Mix in pumpkin pureee and egg white.
