From Chef L. Ivingded: Brain cookies!

“Brain cookies” may bring back memories of Hannibal Lecter to some, and when Emeril Lagasse made these many years ago on his Food Network show, he actually referred to “Chianti and fava beans.” But don’t let that bury your interest alive. This a recipe that requires a little extra work, but that I’ve found well-received.

I made them many years ago as contribution to a newsroom Halloween pot luck. They went over well, but the recipe has been dead to me ever since.

It became an undead recipe just in time for the scariest of holidays, if you dare serve them. I offered samples — mostly split cookies, half-wits, if you will — to this edition of the newsroom (well, MT, offered while I worked on some other stuff), and the reviews were pretty good.

“I like them even better than the cowboy cookies and the orange donuts, which were both pretty good,” Kevin Carroll said, referring to previous test kitchen samplings in the newsroom.

“It has a great golden color and tastes very good,” page designer Lyndsay Bartos said, “I heated up some coffee and you can’t deny that pairing.”

“It’s a pretty standard sugar cookie,” reporter Patrick Kernan said, though I don’t know if he heard both myself and MT mention that to others. “Which is one of my favorites. I like the little bit of icing, too. Two thumbs up.” He noted holiday sugar cookies in grocery stores tend to be cloyingly over-iced.

And veteran reporter Bill O’Boyle cracked wise, appropriate considering they are brain cookies. “I just ate a frontal lobe,” he quipped, later adding “They don’t taste like brains at all.” Then, presumably sensing the obvious question, he added “But I don’t really know what brains taste like.”

A few tips from experience, the first two closely related.

1) When the recipe calls for the walnuts to be “very finely chopped,” take it seriously. Maybe use a food processor. I figured I had them plenty “fine,” but still had pieces just large enough to start blocking the holes in the ricer.

2) Consider a ricer that lets you adjust the hole size, or just buy one with larger holes. That way you can make the “cortical folding” a bit more human-sized (my ricer, as the pics show, made very thin tubes, so it looks more like the brain of a small mammal). Larger holes should also reduce the odds of walnut bits jamming it.

3) In the original show, Emeril baked at 375 for 20 to 25 minutes, but his brains were much larger than mine, with only four to a cookie sheet. This recipe calls for 12-15 minutes at 350•, which worked well for these more petite piles of sweet cerebrum. Whatever you do, keep an eye on them near the end of time. This is one case where you don’t really want them to brown too much on top. It is gray matter, after all.

4) The glaze can be as red as you want, and exact amounts of milk and dye are to your tastes in thickness and blood. Emeril piped the glaze from a bag, which would give you more control, but I just drizzled it from the whisk.

I leave you with an apropos joke.

A brain and a pair of jumper cables walk into a bar, but the bartender refuses to serve them. The brain asks why.

“Well, you’re clearly out of your head, and I’m pretty sure your friend here is going to try to start something.”

Happy Halloween, and

“Dobru Chut!”

Brain Cookies (Emeril Lagasse)

Ingredients

1 cup (two sticks) unsalted butter, softened

1 cup sugar

3 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 large eggs

1/2 cup very finely chopped walnuts, or pecans

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

5 drops red food coloring

9 drops blue food coloring

for the glaze: 1 cup confectioner’s sugar, milk and red food dye.

Preheat oven to 350°. line cookie sheets with parchment paper

In a large bowl, cream the butter, then cream in the sugar. Beat in eggs, one at a time

In a separate bowl, sift together flour, baking soda and salt. Add to creamed butter/sugar eggs. Add nuts and vanilla and fold in or beat on low. Add food coloring and mix to gray.

put the dough in batches into a ricer and push through onto the baking sheet parchment, making a pile of long tubes. gently use a clean knife to push the edges into a brain shape, a bit like half a walnut shell.

Bake until the bottoms are golden brown, 12-14 minutes. Remove from oven, place on wire rack.

To make the blood glaze, in a small bowl whisk sugar, about 10-15 drops of dye and the milk (start with 1/4 cup or less and add until you get a desired consistency. Whisk smooth and either pipe on the brains with a pastry bag or drizzle with the whisk or a spoon.