We all have our favorite flavors, be it ice cream, cake, or any other
dessert. While almost every one I know has chocolate for his favorite,
mine is ube. In fact, I always bought ube cake even without reason,
except that I wanted one... that is, until I made
my own. And, those who have tasted my ube cake all say that it's the best. And I like
playing around with it.
Ube is purple yam. While it is a starchy root vegetable, like potatoes, taro, sweet potatoes, it is NOT a potato, taro or sweet potato. And, although it is a vegetable, we use it in sweets and desserts - ube jam or halaya, ube cake, ube bread, ube rice cakes, ice cream, candy, etc.
As for me, I'm trying it out on cookies!
To
be honest, though, I didn't know how to make the cookies. I knew that I
did not want an all-ube cookie. I thought perhaps an marbled ube
cookie would be perfect. The question was: make 2 doughs to marble
together? But I thought that would dilute the ube flavor too much that
there might not be enough "ube-ness" in the cookie. Besides, I wanted a
simple cookie. Making 2 doughs seemed twice the work...
It
was then that I saw an opened bottle of ube jam from the Good Shepherd
Convent in the fridge. It was more than half full and I thought: why
not use the ube jam to marble some basic drop cookies!? And to
accentuate the ube flavor in the basic cookie dough, I could use coconut
extract instead of vanilla...
And the result was quite
good! Frankly I loved how the cookies looked with that lovely purple
marbling. They tasted wonderfully too! As for the texture, the cookies
were the soft type, which we prefer, too...
To make the cookies, I used a basic cookie recipe similar to this
recipe
but I halved the recipe and omitted the chocolate pieces and the nuts.
After mixing the dough I gently folded the ube jam (a little more than a
cup) but only for a few turns, so that the ube jam would not fully
incorporate into the dough. Dropped the dough onto paper-lined cookie
sheets and baked them as the recipe instructed. I got about 36 pieces.
Yum!
