Day 111: Lemon Poppy Seed Sugar Cookies

Over the next little while, I hope to have my site become a little more interesting.  I am learning a lot about adding pictures and such to the blog.  But since, quite frankly, I suck at it, it may take a little while.  So don't be afraid if things look different from time to time.  I'm also trying out blogger's new editing program, so please be patient.  : )

On to today's recipe.  I watched some DO demos at the world championships and I wanted to try some of the techniques that I learned.  I also wanted to do something that most people would never think of doing in a DO...cookies!  Yep, cookies.  I figured I could bake them like you would anything else, but that they would be hard to get out of the pot in one piece.  So I flipped the pot upside down and cooked them on the lid.  I won't say it was a success, but it wasn't a failure either.  We will call these a work in progress; a learning experience.

There was one major drawback to baking cookies on the average DO lid.  When the lid is turned upside down, its concave.  If you are using a cookie recipe that spreads, guess what direction they are going to go?  You guessed it, with gravity, right to the center of the lid.  Now that isn't a bad thing, it just effects the appearance of the final product. 
There are 2 ways to fix the problem.  First, use a DO with a flat, deep set lid.  Camp Chef makes a great one that has little legs on the lid just so you can turn it upside down to cook on it.  I have one, but it is only a 10", so it won't hold very many cookies.  Second, you can use a larger lid.  I used a 12" because I only had enough coals left to get a 12" up to temperature.  The larger the lid, the more gradual the slope, so the smallest I would use is a 14", but a 16" would be better.  I guess you could cook them with the oven right side up, but where's the challenge in that?  On to the recipe and the extra pics to help you see what I did!

Lemon Poppy Seed Sugar Cookies
dutch oven lid

2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1 Tbs. poppy seeds
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar

1 large egg

1/4 cup buttermilk
1/2 tsp. vanilla
zest of one lemon

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt, baking soda and poppy seeds; set aside.
In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugars until light and fluffy.  Add the egg, vanilla and lemon zest and mix well.  Add the dry ingredients and buttermilk.  Mix well.
Drop the dough by tablespoonfuls onto a greased DO.  Bake 10-12 minutes, until the edges are set but not browned.  They should be puffy and light in color when they are done.  Cool on a wire rack.  Makes 2 1/2 dozen.

On the left is my lid supported by 2 bricks with coals underneath.  On the right is the cookies ready to bake.  I put them too close together!

During baking.

The Finished Product

What I Learned

This may not have been the best way to bake cookies, but it worked.  It probably would have been much easier to bake them with the oven right side up.  I'm going to try this method again with different cookie recipes to see if I can make it work, and I am going to do pizza this way too.  I watched Dave Herzog bake a perfectly cooked pizza in an upside down dutch oven.  I'm still surprised by how versitale dutch ovens really are!

The Review

As a general rule, I try to reserve sugar cookies for Christmas and Valentine's Day.  I prefer hearty cookie with lots of chocolate, but since someone (read me) ate all the chocolate chips over the last few days, I did these cookies.  They were pretty good.  Not my favorite, but that didn't stop me from eating 6 of them.  They were easy to throw together and the light lemon flavor was a switch from normal sugar cookies.  I'll give these a B, they were good, I just prefer chocolate!