Flax-seeded cookies

Somehow, the word cookie has always enticed me — almost as much as the stuff itself. Say biscuit, and you think of those arrowroot fellows that Bengalis love to serve with tea. But say cookie, and you think of plump baked goods filled with chocolate chips or those Danish butter biscuits of different sizes and shapes — and all equally delicious.

Cookies do that to me, even though a voice inside keeps reminding me that it’s just an American word for biscuits. But while we grew up with biscuits of all kinds — fruit-flavoured wafer biscuits, the thin arrowroot ones, home-baked biscuits or those with ginger — cookies came to us through American culture. Dennis the Menace, for instance, was always caught with his hand in the cookie jar. And James Hadley Chase’s The Way the Cookie Crumbles was a part of our growing up.

Chocolate pretzels

So when Sujan Mukherjee, the executive chef of Taj Bengal, told me that he had been experimenting with cookies, it piqued my interest. What’s more, he’s using all kinds of healthy grains for his cookies. If there’s one thing that’s terribly wrong with cookies it’s the fact that you can’t eat just one. The outcome of that is that with one cup of tea, you ingest as many calories as you would in a full meal, if not more. Multi-grained cookies, on the other hand, promised health — if you can ignore the amount of butter and sugar that goes into it. But chef Mukherjee has an answer to that as well — he bakes cookies with artificial sweeteners.

The chef tells me that cookies first reared their lovely heads in what was then Persia in the 7th century, though they were possibly not known by that name. The word cookie, I read, comes from Dutch word koekje or koekie which means a little cake. It came into mainstream language through the Dutch community in North America. But cookies in different forms spread across Europe after the Muslim conquest of Spain.

Almond cookies

Chef Mukherjee stresses that since Calcuttans are becoming more and more health conscious, his cookies seek to address that need. Made out of whole wheat, seeds and grains, these are some “unique creations” from the ovens of the Taj Bakery, he says. He uses sunflower seeds, flax seeds, multigrains, German rye and sprouted millets for the cookies.

And that leads to creations such as snickerdoodles, healthy macaroons and flax-seeded cookies. “These not only have a special texture and flavour but also contain essential minerals, vitamins, protein and fibres that help in digestion,” he adds.

For instance, the chef makes pretzels with oats and chocolate. He mixes ½ cup each of unsalted butter and castor sugar and makes a paste out of 1tsp coffee powder and 3tbsp boiling water. He adds salt and vanilla essence and beats an egg in slowly. He mixes ½cup cocoa powder, ¾cup oats and 1cup flour, adding it to the butter mixture. Then he divides it into 15 parts and shapes each part like a pretzel (heart-shaped with a knot). Then he glazes it with the yolk of one egg and sprinkles grains of sugar on top before baking them at 180°C for 10-12 minutes in a pre-heated oven.

One of my first cook books — it’s so dog-eared now that I fear it will crumble if I touch it — was a thick American tome that told me all about baking and grilling. Its cookie section is full of wonderful recipes — but all with huge amounts of sugar, butter and flour, which, we now know, won’t help a bit if we want to look like John and Bips. But it has some helpful tips.

To make your cookies smooth, flatten them with a floured glass before baking them. Two, on festive occasions, add fragments of coloured candy on top of the cookie before putting them into the oven. I am a little iffy about the third tip which advises us to put a slice of orange or apple in our biscuit tin to prevent soft cookies from drying up. I haven’t tried it out because I can’t store cookies — I eat them all (with selfless help from others in the family, who do their bit too) in one sitting.

Sugar-free malted wheat and multigrain cookies

Ingredients (for 20 cookies)

• 700g butter • 50g sugar-free sweetener • 4 eggs • 300g malted wheat • 300g multigrain • 600g flour

Method

Mix butter and sugar. Slowly add the beaten eggs to it. Mix all the dry ingredients together. Add these to the butter mixture. Divide the mixture into 20 balls. Roll out each portion and cut into a round shape. Sprinkle malted wheat and multigrain on top. Bake at 180 °C for about 15 minutes in a pre-heated oven. When cool, store in an air tight container. Will stay for three to four days.