Treacle Cookies
My long, sticky, and nearly fatal adventure in pleasing everyone
Some days are for swimming upstream: for challenging expectations and changing hearts and minds. But other days? They’re for stopping, blowing up our rubber rings, and floating down that sweet, lazy river called “give the people what they want.”
Today is that day. For episode five of The Buttery we’re pausing the hard work of making people love with British food and instead cooking up a treat that’s evidently impossible for human beings to dislike: cookies.
That was the plan. I would set aside my masochistic quest for one week and just make a kumbaya-cookie with no funny business for everyone to enjoy.
But I just couldn’t get excited about Perfection™. I couldn’t do the repetitive, notepad-destroying work of recipe development for a dish with no spice*. No matter how much I wanted to make a non-nonsense cookie of truly universal appeal, my shelf of silly Victorian pantry staples just kept winking at me and I
couldn’t stop myself from sneaking in a stodgy secret.
(*Yes the spice is sugar. No it’s not actually spicy.)
If the easiest thing to hide in a forest is a leaf, I thought, then the easiest ingredient to hide in a cookie is sugar. And if you’ve followed The Buttery from its beginning, you know that means one thing: treacle.
As soon as I set my mind on treacle, I realized this cookie may not be the compromise I had resigned myself to at all. Happily, the treacle tart filling we made in Episode 1 is only about two tablespoons of flour away from being a cookie itself - one with a crisp edge and a gooey center, that pulls apart longingly and won’t be satisfied until it’s in your belly. The more I thought about it, in fact, the more I realized that in many ways, cookies are the most British of worldwide treats: Not a single fresh ingredient. Medically inadvisable sugar content. Exclusively shades of brown and beige.
Looks like we may have a kumbaya cookie after all.
The long journey away from and then back to my senses
I had the vision. Now came the small matter of execution. For my cookie base, I knew I wanted an all-American chocolate chip cookie-style, so I turned to two greats, the Serious Eats Food Lab’s hair-splittingly perfect chocolate chip cookie, and Kitchen Projects’ thoughtful recipe for 4 different textures (I went with crispy crunchy). The Serious Eats cookie tasted unbelievable, but so did Nicola’s, which was ten times easier, and frankly, less swottish.
For the treacle part? I had fantasies of a crisp bank of American-style cookie around a glistening treacle pool. Anticipating that spreading would be a problem, I increased the breadcrumbs in my treacle tart filling by 33%, and let the mixture sit overnight to get thoroughly starchy. And it worked…a bit better than I’d hoped. I ended up with fried treacle eggs, which were utterly delicious. Caramelly, sweet in five different ways, shot through with lemon, and all perfectly balanced with salt. At least I knew I was onto something. Maybe I should have stopped there, but this being the internet I knew I had to make a cookie that looked as good as it tasted.
Further attempts with a looser treacle filling were equally delicious, and equally disheartening. The doming nature of cookies and the melting point of butter were having none of my treacle pool vision, so after too many “this time it’ll be different” attempts I knew I needed to change my strategy.
There were two paths ahead of me. 1) The full blend and 2) The sandwich.
I tried the full blend a number of ways, coating the cookie center in golden syrup, swirling the fridge-solid treacle filling amongst the cookie dough, and even just mashing the two together (in frustration), but each led to the same endpoint, a murky-brown puck that looked more misshapen than innovative. I’m not sure what I had expected, but that cookie wasn’t beckoning to me, it was asking for privacy.
The sandwich held much more promise. I had a new vision of a surprise treacle center, which would ooze out the middle of a perfectly gooey cookie. But once again, I had underestimated butter’s ability to conduct heat and my treacle filling cooked up good and firm before the cookie was crisp, like a backwards soft-boiled egg. I managed to convince myself that I’d see a magical colour contrast here, but the brown-on-brown sort of took away the ‘surprise’ element.
Darkness descended. I did not feel like I was floating on a sweet, lazy river. Not at all. Adding sugar to sugar was much harder than I thought.
I needed to go back to the source. I had been so proud of my treacle filling recipe I hadn’t even considered the pure stuff. How had I been so blind? I wanted glisten, and I wanted ooze, in other words, everything un-processed golden syrup already gives us.
It suddenly all became clear: bake the treacle tart flavours into the cookies, and leave the pure golden syrup to shine in the middle.
These were everything I wanted a treacle cookie to look like, but I took a pea-sized bite and the room started spinning. I’d been winded by the sweetness. When I came to I was gripping the kitchen counter. That’s too sweet even for me.
Fat to the rescue. This time I boiled the golden syrup with 40% its weight in butter (a fairly standard ratio for caramel) but stayed light on heavy cream to not distract from the treacle flavour. A bit of lemon juice and a healthy sprinkle of salt later and we had a sticky filling that still looked and tasted like treacle (tart).
This time there were no surprises. It had worked a charm. The cookies themselves were fragrant with baked lemon oil and gently nutty from the toasted milk powder. The treacle caramel offset the salty, sour cookies with a shock of complex sweetness that turned this sandwich from a lil’ snack into a multi-sensory journey through the history of sugar processing. And most importantly, I got just the ooze I wanted.
(In truth, I haven’t quite let go of my original treacle moat vision, and since writing and editing and proof-reading this post I’ve had ten fresh ideas of how to approach this cookie. But that’s the thing with food. Especially British food. It’s never about perfection. It’s just the story of people having filthy ideas for a little treat, and making the best of it with the time and ingredients they had.)
The Recipe
Makes 15 cookies. 1 hr 30 mins active time. 2 hrs chilling ;)
For the golden syrup
This is a repeat of my recipe from the Treacle Tart post, copied here for convenience.
350g granulated sugar
50g dark brown sugar
150g water
1 tbsp lemon juice or white vinegar
Add the 350g sugar, 50g brown sugar and 150g water to a small heavy-bottomed saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat, then stir in the 1 tbsp lemon juice and reduce heat to the lowest it will go. You should see gentle bubbles rising under the surface, but the syrup won’t be boiling. Continue cooking on low heat for 45 mins to 1 hour, or until syrup reaches 240-250F.
Turn off heat and let cool. Then put in a jar and store in the fridge until stiff and spoonable.
For the cookies
113g / 1 stick softened butter
50g / ¼ cup brown sugar
1 tsp lemon zest (about half a lemon)
110g / generous ½ cup granulated sugar
1 large egg (around 50g)
135g / 1 cup all-purpose flour
10g non-fat milk powder
3g / ½ tsp baking soda
3g / ½ tsp salt
Preheat your oven to 325F / 165C.
Mix the softened butter (113g / 1 stick) with the brown sugar (50g / ¼ cup), granulated sugar (110g / generous ½ cup), and lemon zest (1 tsp), until uniform. You can use an electric whisk for a minute or so, or just do this by hand.
Sift in the all-purpose flour (135g / 1 cup), milk powder (10g), baking soda (3g / ½ tsp), and salt (3g / ½ tsp) and mix until no dry patches remain. You can rest the dough at this point for a deeper flavour, or use it right away, but a chilled dough does make for easier rolling.
For best results, portion out 15g balls of cookie dough (roughly the size of a cherry tomato) and space them out widely on a few parchment-lined baking sheets (they’ll spread!). You should get about 30 cookies. Sprinkle a touch of flaky sea salt on top of each then bake for 9-10 minutes until the edges are just turning brown. Remove and let cool until firm enough to pick up. They’ll feel really soft and gooey when you first take them out the oven, but as sugar cools it hardens, so don’t worry - you’ll get a sturdy cookie.
If you want neat round cookies, swizzle a circular cookie cutter or lid around the still-warm cookies and watch as they transform.
For the treacle caramel
300g golden syrup
120g / 1 stick plus 1 tbsp butter
½ tsp salt (or more to taste)
1 tsp lemon juice
2 tbsp heavy cream
Combine the 300g golden syrup and 120g butter in a saucepan over medium heat and cook until boiling. Let bubble for 2-3 minutes, then remove from heat and stir in salt, lemon juice, and heavy cream. Let cool until spoonable. To speed this up you can dunk the saucepan in an icebath. As it cools it will turn the beautiful creamy yellow of lemon curd.
Assembly
Make sure your treacle caramel is the right consistency. It should be cool enough that it doesn’t fall off a spoon (you’ll have to push it off the spoon with your finger). If it’s too stiff to even spoon, pop it in the microwave for 5s at a time.
Spoon a nice ~1 tsp dollop onto your bottom cookie until it’s about half covered, then, using the top cookie, squeeze until the syrup sploodges over the rim with a little belly. Continue with remaining sandwiches. Then marvel at your handiwork.
The caramel may ooze at room temperature, so store the cookies airtight in the fridge if you want a neater experience.
These cookies contain so much sugar they’ll probably outlive me, but for legal purposes I’m saying they should be stored airtight, either in the fridge or room temperature, and consumed within 4 days.
Sources
Serious Eats “The Food Lab’s Chocolate Chip Cookies”