My Dessert Dilemma

Sometimes it seems just impossible to please everyone in my family with one dessert. We have some who love nuts in their brownies and others who won’t eat them with nuts. My one daughter loves whip cream as a cake topping, and my son wants frosting. Hot fudge is a favorite with some while others just like a cold chocolate sauce. Pumpkin pie pleases three of my children, and the other two want chocolate. Even a simple chocolate cake brings the struggle between white or chocolate frosting. I love to make desserts, but I hate the look of disappointment on my child’s face when they ask what I am making, and it’s not what they like. It is hard to please everyone, and yet they all think that is my job!

Last week, I decided to make a dessert pizza. I knew four of my children would be excited, and one would be very disappointed. I had this great idea to make extra cookie dough and make sugar cookies for the non-fruit dessert lover. I also had been eyeing this cookie recipe in my King Arthur’s Whole Grain Baking Book. And now I have created more dessert dilemmas. My husband and one daughter loved the flavor of this recipe as the crust, and another preferred the simple sugar cookie dough I made before. I am definitely in a cookie quandary!

Soft Barley-Sugar Cookies

1 cup unsalted butter

1 3/4 cups sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

2 tablespoons vanilla extract

2 tablespoons lemon juice

2 large eggs

3 cups barley flour

1 cup spelt flour*

2/3 cup sour cream

Coarse white or granulated sugar for topping

Cream the butter, sugar, baking powder, soda, salt, nutmeg, vanilla, and lemon juice in a medium bowl. Add the eggs and beat until smooth.

Whisk together the flours in a separate bowl. Add half the flour mixture to the butter mixture, beating to combine. Beat in the sour cream, then the remaining flour. Refrigerate the dough overnight.

Scoop out dough and form into a ball and roll in sugar. Bake on a greased baking sheet in a 450 degree preheated oven for 8 minutes.

I rolled out about 2/3 of this dough and placed on a greased cookie sheet for my dessert pizza crust.

* Original recipe called for unbleached all-purpose flour, but I used spelt flour instead.