Cookies with a Japanese Touch - Miso Cookies -

Miso Cookies Sounds weird, doesn’t it? That’s exactly why I wanted to give it a try ;) I found 2 miso cookie recipes on the net: Marukome’s recipe and another one with peanut butter. This time I wanted to have it in a real Japanese-style, so I chose Marukome’s recipe. This one is very simple --- almost too simple --- so I couldn’t resist the temptation to give it just a little twist. I divided the miso cookie dough in half: the first half for plain miso cookies and the rest for an experiment. As soon as the plain ones came out of the oven, I took a bite and found that they taste rather light. I didn’t recognize miso flavor so much at the first bite, but after eating one whole piece, I felt the mild miso taste filling my mouth, with the taste of butter and sugar. Not bad. Not bad at all :) Though plain ones tasted good, I wanted something more. Now what could I do with the rest of the dough? I thought about it for a while and divided the dough in half again. 1) The first half of the dough was colored with pureed purple sweet potatoes. (Yes, I still had some left in the freezer...) The cookies turned out in lovely light pink, but the taste was even lighter. I should’ve sweetened the puree more beforehand. 2) With the other half of the dough, I tried to enhance the sweetness and give a little spiciness with special toppings. What I prepared was granulated sugar+ ichimi (Japanese chili powder) mixture and granulated sugar+sansho (Japanese pepper) mixture. These toppings successfully added some extra flavor to my miso cookies :D Just to make the photos look nicer with another color, I added some green tea cookies left in my cookie jar. I’m still working on this green tea cookie recipe. These ones don't taste the way I wanted. Give me some more time to work on the recipe.... OK. Here's some pics showing how I played with these Japanese style cookies. (I wanted them to look like photos in "Guidebook of Kyoto" or something, you know. ) (Click above 2 pics to enlarge) Want to see where this beautiful maple leaf came from? Check this. It's my little present from Kochi, Japan :) *To tell you the truth, this post was written last month. I waited to publish it until the maple leaves around here turn colors and their photos are posted on my another blog.