Coffee Sugar Cookies

What news? The only news is these cookies with a coffee-sugar coating.

As I was playing around with a recipe for ultra-soft and chewy sugar cookies, I landed on sweetened condensed milk as a secret ingredient.

The milk sugars and proteins in the sweetened condensed milk help prevent gluten formation, so the cookie stays tender and yielding and the center pleasantly dense. It adds caramel notes, which are boosted by a small amount of sugar and vanilla in the recipe.

The recipe for my self-proclaimed Ultimate Sugar Cookie was posted earlier this week on my Substack newsletter, but my cookie-addled brain can never leave well enough alone, so I wondered: Sweetened condensed milk is a key ingredient in Vietnamese iced coffee (Cà phê sữa đá), so ipso facto, adding coffee to the cookie would be a good idea.

It was a great idea.

I dissolved instant espresso coffee in the sweetened condensed milk, and the result retains all the lush softness of the original cookie, now with the flavor of a milky coffee. If you are jonesing for a deeper coffee flavor and more of a buzz, throw some granulated sugar and more instant coffee into a food processor, hit pulse a few times, and sprinkle that newly invigorated coffee sugar on top of the cookies before baking. WHEEEEEEEEE.

(For more on Vietnamese coffee, including a history of coffee in the country, Serious Eats has a useful article, along with a recipe for a real Vietnamese iced coffee.)

For those worried that a cookie made with sweetened condensed milk and sugar will taste brain-bustingly sugary, fear not. I wouldn’t do that to you. I add only 2 tablespoons of sugar, just enough to help aerate the cookie dough and ensure a puffy cookie.

Did you notice that I didn’t once mention the news? That’s right, mostly because my friend E. Jean Carroll is now under investigation by the Trump Department of Justice for perjury, and it fills me with anger (more anger than usual). I suppose it’s to be expected, as the president has his cronies paging diligently on the daily through his Burn Book. (Remember when Congress got so upset with Richard Nixon for using the IRS and FBI that, knowing impeachment was certain, Nixon resigned? Ach, never mind.)

COOKIES. Hi, yes, where was I? Soft, tender — quiet and soothing — cookies are what we all need. Make some for yourself. Share with a friend in need of cookies.

Note: I like to roll the tops of the cookies in sugar, cinnamon-sugar, or as mentioned above, coffee-sugar.

Marissa Rothkopf Bates writes about food for the New York Times, Newsweek (RIP) and Publishers’ Weekly among others. Her newest book, “The Secret Life of Chocolate Chip Cookies,” is available wherever fine books are sold. Find her on Substack here.

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