Twixster Cookies

I made biscuits from scratch on Saturday morning, and the discovery I made while making them is going to change how I cook for the rest of my life, and I am only barely exaggerating about that. So I want to write it down before the feeling fades.

The biscuits were the kind anybody’s grandmother makes if their grandmother was an Oklahoma woman who could roll out dough on a Formica counter without measuring. Two cups of flour, a teaspoon of salt, a tablespoon of baking powder. A third of a cup of cold butter cut into the flour with a fork until the mixture looked like coarse sand. Three-quarters of a cup of milk stirred in just until everything held together, and then the dough turned out onto a floured counter, patted into a half-inch slab with my hands, and cut into nine biscuits with the rim of a coffee mug because we don’t own a biscuit cutter and probably never will. Fourteen minutes at 425 in our oven, which runs hot, so I pulled them at twelve.

They came out of the oven gold on top and white on the inside and I stood at the stove with the door of the oven open and I just looked at them for about thirty seconds, because I had not believed they were going to come out right. The recipes my mama’s mama left behind are mostly written in the kind of shorthand that assumes you already know what you’re doing — biscuits, with the ingredients listed, and no mixing instructions, no oven temperature, no baking time, just the assumption that any woman in the family who needed to know would know. I had to look up everything I didn’t. I read three different versions of biscuit instructions on three different recipe sites at the school library, and I picked the parts that sounded most like the way Mama’s mama would have said it, and I went home and tried.

And they worked. They worked so well that Mama, who came out of the bathroom in her robe with her hair wet from the shower and stopped dead in the kitchen because of the smell, took one look at them and said, Kaylee, who made those. She didn’t say did you make those. She said who made those, like she was certain it had to be somebody else, and when I told her I did, from scratch, she did not respond right away. She picked one up, split it open, looked at the inside of it for a beat, and then ate half of it standing at the counter in her robe. And after she swallowed, she said, I have not had a biscuit this good since my mama was alive.

Then she did not say anything else for a while, because Grandma Carol has been gone twelve years and Mama does not always have words for that, and I knew the silence and I let it be the silence. We have agreements in this house about which silences get respected. That was one of them.

I am writing this down because I want to tell you about the math. The math is the part that has changed everything. The thing I figured out in the kitchen on Saturday morning, while I was scraping the dough off my fingers and dusting flour off the counter, is that almost every shortcut Mama has ever bought at the grocery store — every tube of Pillsbury Grands biscuits, every box of Bisquick, every jar of pre-made marinara, every can of cream-of-something soup, every bag of pre-shredded cheese — is a tax on poor people who do not have the time to learn the long way. Eight biscuits in a tube of Pillsbury at Walmart is $2.49. Nine biscuits made from scratch with flour and butter and milk and a teaspoon of baking powder, where the flour bag was $1.79 and will get me thirty more batches and the butter was $1.99 and will get me fifteen more, costs me thirty-five cents.

Thirty-five cents.

I sat down at the kitchen table on Saturday afternoon and I checked the math three times because I did not believe it. And then I wrote it in red pen in the back column of my notebook, and underneath it I wrote: The wall is made of paper. The wall I am talking about is the wall between cooking from a box and cooking from scratch. I have always assumed it was a wall. I have always assumed scratch baking was a thing that happened in fancy kitchens with stand mixers and marble counters and ingredients I could not afford. And what I learned on Saturday is that it was a wall made of paper, and the paper was a tube of Pillsbury, and I just punched through it for thirty-five cents.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the cookies.

I have a recipe in my notebook for what the magazine called Twixster Cookies — a homemade version of a Twix bar in cookie form, with a shortbread base, a soft caramel layer, and chocolate on top. I copied it down two months ago and I have been carrying it around like a love letter ever since. I cannot make Twixster cookies yet. I want to be honest about that. The recipe needs sweetened condensed milk for the caramel, and corn syrup, and a bag of chocolate chips, and the kind of cookie ingredients that add up fast, and the moment when I have eight or nine extra dollars in the budget for a discretionary cookie project is not this week. Maybe not this month.

But what I want to tell you is that two days ago, I would have looked at that recipe and felt it was too far away to think about. Two days ago, I would have read shortbread base and assumed it was a thing for other people, in other kitchens. And then I made nine biscuits for thirty-five cents, and I watched my mother eat one of them and remember her mother, and I figured out the math, and now I look at the Twixster cookie recipe and I think: shortbread is just flour and sugar and butter. I have flour. I have sugar. I have butter on sale at Aldi for $1.99. The wall is made of paper here too. I might have to wait on the caramel. I might have to wait on the chocolate. But I see the recipe differently now. I see it the way a person on the outside of a fence sees the gate.

So I am bookmarking the Twixster cookies. I am taping the page in deeper into my notebook, in the section labeled For When I Can. And I am keeping a separate list, on the next page, of all the things I have figured out I can do already, the list that started Saturday morning with biscuits. Pie crust is going on the list. Pancakes from scratch. The Greek salad dressing from last week. The biscuits. Eventually the shortbread, when I can spring for one extra stick of butter and a bag of chocolate chips on a week the bills are not screaming.

One day I am going to make these Twixster cookies. Probably not soon. But one day. And when I do, I am going to write the date next to the recipe in pencil, the same way I wrote it next to the biscuits, because I have decided that documenting the day I get there is part of the work of getting there. The biscuits worked. The wall is made of paper. Everything else is a matter of time.

Here is the Twixster Cookie recipe the way the magazine printed it, because I want it to be ready for whoever has the budget for it this week, which might be you, and might also be a future-me who has finally figured out how to fit a stick of extra butter and a bag of chocolate chips into the math. Shortbread, caramel, chocolate — three layers, three small acts, one cookie that tastes like the candy bar your mama used to put in your Christmas stocking when there was money to put things in stockings. Make them. Eat one warm. Save the rest for the people you love.

Prep Time: 25 min | Cook Time: 11 min | Total Time: 31 min | Servings: 36

Ingredients

1 cup salted butter (softened)
2/3 cup granulated sugar
3 egg yolks
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
9 ounces soft caramels for about 1 cup melted (see note)
A tablespoon or so of cream or milk
1 cup semisweet or milk chocolate for drizzling

Instructions

Cream the butter and sugar. In a large bowl with an electric handheld mixer (or in the bowl of a stand mixer), mix the butter and sugar until light and creamy, 1-2 minutes. Add the egg yolks and vanilla and mix until combined, scraping the bowl as needed.
Add the dry ingredients. Add the flour and salt and mix until it comes together. Once it forms pea-size crumbs, abandon the mixer and get in there with your hands to mush it together into a uniform ball.
Shape and indent the dough. Shape the soft dough into small balls — about 2 teaspoons of dough or .65 ounces for each cookie. Place the balls close together on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Press a small indentation in each cookie ball — don’t make it too wide. Use your thumb and press down; it’s ok if the sides crack a bit, just press them together. They’ll look like little nests. Refrigerate for an hour (or longer).
Bake the cookies. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Space the cookies about an inch or so apart on several parchment-lined baking sheets. They’ll puff and spread just slightly but not very much. Bake for 10-11 minutes until set and lightly browned on the edges — the longer they bake (without burning, of course) the more like shortbread they’ll be in texture (versus being too soft). The centers may puff up while baking; just press them back down lightly after they come out of the oven. Let the cookies cool completely.
Fill with caramel. If using storebought caramels, unwrap and melt the caramels with a tablespoon or so of milk or cream over low heat in the microwave or on the stovetop until creamy and smooth. Homemade caramel can usually be melted over low heat as well without the need for extra cream or milk. Dollop a bit of caramel into the center of each cooled cookie.
Drizzle with chocolate. Let the cookies sit until the caramel cools and sets. Melt the chocolate over low heat in the microwave (or in a double boiler on the stove) and either drizzle chocolate over the cookies or spread a circle of chocolate over each caramel center. Let the chocolate set until hardened (can speed this up by refrigerating the cookies).

Nutrition (per serving)

Twixster Cookies — The Recipe I Bookmarked the Week I Cracked the Biscuit Code