With hacks for peanut butter and shortbread cookies, Edd Kimber celebrates small-batch baking

One is the loneliest number or so the song goes. Valentine's Day is full of prix fixe menus for couples and Galentine's get togethers around town. But if you're looking to stay in and celebrate with some self-care, Edd Kimber, the first ever winner of The Great British Bake Off, is the person to turn to. His ideas in Small Batch Cookies: Deliciously Easy Bakes for One to Six People hit all the right notes for anyone craving something sweet and small. 

Evan Kleiman: I live on my own and you famously have a recipe for one chocolate chip cookie. It's just lovely because I'm one of those people, the bigger the batch I bake, it pretty much ensures that I'll be eating more too. You say that if you were forced to make and enjoy only one type of treat, you would choose cookies. I would love to hear your reasoning.

Edd Kimber: I think it's because cookies can basically be anything. When we were originally thinking about this book, my editor basically sat me down and we had to have this quite funny discussion about what a cookie is. I think to an American audience, it might seem like a really silly question, but to a British audience and to a European audience, cookie means something quite different. In the UK, especially, we have biscuits, and biscuits are not cookies, because cookies, if you ask the average Joe on the street, they would say it resembles something that looks like a chocolate chip cookie. But the thing that I love about American baking and the American definition of cookie is that it can basically be anything. 

You have your classic drop cookies, you have your shortbread cookies, but you also have your bar cookies, which are really brownies or blondies. Then you have cookies that are really cake and they're whoopie pies. I like the fact that cookies can really be any texture, any flavor, any kind of style you want. They are really just a kind of a term for a small individual treat.

"Small Batch Cookies" celebrates small, everyday moments. Photo courtesy of Octopus Books.

And that's what makes it so difficult to choose which one to make.

Exactly.

Baking is often seen as celebratory and something that you share with people. So small bakes fit into a different category. When is the opportunity ripe for small bakes?

For me, the thing that I found when I was thinking about this book is that almost every baking book, regardless of whether it declares it or not, is purely about celebration. It's for baking for big events, big occasions. I think for me, that's not the baking that I grew up with, really. 

I grew up with the everyday, a small batch of scones for my family or an apple crumble for the four of us on a weekend. It was small moments. We still had the birthday cake and all of those things as well but baking was more of a consistent thread that ran through our family. I realized that we don't really think of baking that way as much these days. So for me, this book and the previous book, Small Batch Bakes, was all about celebrating small moments.

Edd Kimber, aka The Boy Who Bakes, abides by a tongue-in-cheek cookie manifesto. Photo by Simon Kimber.

I love that. I would also love it if you would take us through your cookie manifesto, starting with if cookies need to be perfectly round. I am a very chaotic baker. Mine are never round.

The only reason I put that in the book is the cookie manifesto was meant to be a slightly tongue in cheek. Look at what I think makes the perfect cookie. And the round thing is, it's a little bit silly. I think I even admit in the book that not everyone has the kind of almost OCD desire to make cookies perfectly round. But I know that if the cookies in my book appear perfectly round, and that's not how they come out, people would have questions. I wanted to show the other people who require, for whatever reason, their cookies to be round, that you can make them round with a little bit of preparation and a little bit of trickery using a round cookie cutter.

It's like a magic trick. You put this larger biscuit cut around, or cookie cutter, around over the cookie so it touches the baking sheet, and you kind of just…

Swirl it around the edge of the cookie so it comes into contact with all sides of it and rounds off the edges. 

When I watch people do it in videos, I think, wow, that's such a magic trick. And boy, I would never spend my time doing that.

Do you know what? That's completely valid and fair.

Let's start baking. Let's talk about peanut butter in cookies. This is a favorite topic. You say that the flavor tends to dull, the bigger you make the cookie. So how do you counter that? 

I was trying to come up with a recipe that made a very soft peanut butter cookie. If you look at the pantheon of peanut butter recipes, they tend to be dense, really chewy or crisp, and in those textures, the peanut flavor comes through quite well, because there isn't lots of egg or tons and tons of flour against the ratio of peanut butter to take away from the flavor. But when you're making a softer, bigger cookie, the extra egg in the recipe tends to pull out the flavor.

I was trying to think of ways to add some of that flavor back in. You could go down the route of adding peanut oil or sesame oil to boost the flavor but the way that I found that worked really nicely was to add some miso to the dough. The miso isn't adding nuttiness but it adds this savory depth and tang. The tang is not part of the peanut equation but the savoriness really helped to amplify the peanut flavor, almost as if you were seasoning the cookie with the miso. It just helped bring out all the flavor that's already there. 

Love that. You talk about when you go through different techniques, how we're free to interchange methods of bringing butter and sugar together in a cookie recipe, which is nearly always the first step in making them. How do cookies differ if we've creamed butter and sugar or if we're using melted butter? 

It's all about air really. If you cream butter and sugar together, the effect of that is the butter beats thousands and thousands of tiny little holes that become air pockets into the butter. That can make cookies that are very light, very airy. If it's a chocolate chip cookie-style recipe, where it's a drop cookie, that can make for a more cakey texture. Whereas if you melt the butter, there's no opportunity for air to be included in that mix, so you tend to end up with denser textures. 

So if you're making, say, shortbread, you have to make a decision between "don't incorporate some air to make the shortbread light and crumbly" or "do I want to use melted butter to make something that's dense." With a shortbread, you probably want to add a little bit of air to make sure it's not a very compacted disc of dough. But with a chocolate chip cookie, for example, you can really play around with the textures to get exactly what you think is the perfect chocolate chip cookie. If you like that really fudgy cookie, then melting the butter can actually make for a much better version of that than if you cream the butter and sugar together.

Combining a small batch and melting the butter means that you're going to get to eating your chocolate chip cookie really fast.

Exactly. Actually, what I did find when I wrote this book is mainly because of the amount of ingredients you were using, it also was much more convenient to melt butter or melt the fat. If I was writing a full-scale cookie book, there might be more of an even distribution of creaming versus melting. But in this book, it definitely favors the melting technique because it makes more sense for such a small recipe.

You mentioned shortbread. Tell us about the traditional method of making shortbread that's kind of fallen out of favor. And in which recipes do you apply that technique? 

The technique for that recipe is quite interesting. I almost put it in the book because I thought it was interesting. I thought it was something that people wouldn't necessarily have heard about before and would be kind of novel but also does create a really interesting result. 

It's a very, very old technique of taking hard boiled egg yolks and then grating them or beating them into the mixture. What it does is it helps to tenderize the dough because it's basically pure fat or almost pure fat that coats the flour and helps to create something especially tender. It's a very, very good way of making an incredibly tender and light shortbread. 

It's not the only way to do that. It's not necessarily the best way to do that. But I just thought it was a very interesting technique, and it's also a great way of using up eggs, if you have them.

We're looking at the upcoming holiday, Valentine's Day. Is Valentine's Day celebrated in the UK?

 It is, yes, yes. We felt for the corporate holiday, too.

I feel like it's the perfect small batch holiday, whether you're coupled up in some way, or if you are a loner but you're not unhappy. You want to treat yourself. What is your idea of the perfect cookie or small batch bake to celebrate oneself or one's sweetie?

It's funny. When I think about the book, I don't necessarily think about it in terms of exact people. I kind of think of it as groups of people. But there was one memory that stuck in my head, which was my twin brother, years and years ago. He's the only single person in the family, and my mom gave him this book at Christmas. It was after all the presents had been done, we were sitting at the dinner table having Christmas dinner, and she said, "Oh, I forgotten to give you a present." In front of everybody, he opened this book, and it was Cooking for One, and it was quite depressing and quite a sad book. So when I wrote the book, I knew that it would be a conversation about it being a very useful book for single-person households. 

I didn't want the book to feel depressing in that way. But that's not to say there isn't great recipes in here for smaller people. Obviously, that's the whole point of the book. I would say for me, there is one recipe that I specifically wrote as a date night cookie. It's a kind of small skillet cookie that's baked until it's very, very barely set, and then you serve it with vanilla ice cream. It's a perfect date recipe. If you are feeling down and single and not happy about it, then you can just have one, and it's also perfect.

Is it a chocolate cookie? 

It's a triple chocolate cookie that's baked inside a skillet. The edges go really nice and crisp, but then the inside is almost like a molten cake. It's still very gooey in the center, and you serve it hot with vanilla ice cream on it so the ice cream starts to melt into it, and you kind of create a cross between a cookie and a dessert.