Brown Butter Peanut Butter Cookies Re-Boot · Monday April 13, 2026 by colin newell
When I make cookies, I do not mess around. As someone who has company over — coffee guests… music students… my music teachers… there has to be something to put out that is going to satisfy and delight.
I’ll admit – I make good coffee. And there is nothing that pairs up with a big ole’ mug of black java than a cookie treat.
And I am torn between two worlds – peanut butter or chocolate chip. Sometimes I do both in the same cookie — there are recipes here for that – go look. Use the search button. It is your friend.
One of the key secret ingredients here is brown butter – brown butter is the charm. Making brown butter is outside of the realm of this blog entry – but suffice it to say, you need 115g of it — so you start with around 145g of cold or room temperature butter in a sauce pan… why this amount you ask? Because the butter is going to lose moisture as it browns. Google this subject for a tutorial.
Brown butter brings an entirely new dimension to any cookie. But oh no, we are not stopping there – our other secret ingredient is miso paste. Yes. Miso paste. Trust me.
Ok – once you have created your 115G (give or take) of the browned butter, let it cool a bit then put it in the fridge for a minimum of one half hour — it has to solidify again before the next step.
Dry Mix
What you could do while you wait for the butter to cool and solidify is prepare your dry ingredients.
That would be: 330g all purpose flour or gluten free flour. Up to you.
Add the baking powder and baking soda.
This recipe asks for 12g of salt (any artisanal salt will do…) – but I would back off on the salt a bit because there is salt in miso paste… so try 7G of salt, OK?
Don’t risk it — whisk it! Whisk your dry mix for several minutes – there is nothing worse than a batch of cookie dough that does not have the leavening and/or salt properly distributed.
Creaming the wet ingredients…
Pull your cooled brown butter from the fridge. Scrape it all into your mixing bowl (I use a kitchen-aid mix-master…)
Don’t forget the deep brown bits of the browned butter – this is where the magic is.
Add the 115g of the room temperature butter on top of this.
Add your peanut butter. Whether you use creamy or crunchy… that is a secret between you and your jar.
You could bend the rules here and mix in a blend of tahini or cashew butter… the sky is the limit. You do you.
Put in your sugars. It may seem like there’s a lot of sugar in these cookies. You’re not hallucinating. Apologize to your pancreas later.
Add the honey or maple syrup… then the white miso paste…
Cream on low speed for 5 to 7 minutes.
Do not add the eggs and the vanilla until after this initial creaming phaseOK – breathe. Add your egg(s) and vanilla to the mix and blend on low for 2 minutes or so.
Dry into Wet…
Add your flour mixture into your creamed concoction and blend on LOW until everything is just mixed.
Prolonged mixing will develop gluten and make for a less desirable cookie.
Jump down for baking instructions.
The Wet Stuff…
* 115g (1 stick) butter, softened
* 115g (1/2 cup) brown butter, cooled and semi-solid (start with ~145g to account for water loss)
* 350g (1 1/3 cups) peanut butter
* 185g (scant 1 cup) granulated sugar
* 185g (1 cup packed) brown sugar
* 25g (1 1/4 Tbsp) honey or Maple Syrup
* 65g (1/4 cup) white miso
* 90g (6 Tbsp) whole egg, beaten (about 1½ large eggs)
* 20g (4 tsp) vanilla extract
The Dry Stuff…
* 330g (2 2/3 cups) all-purpose flour or gluten free flour
* 7g (1 1/2 tsp) baking powder
* 7g (1 1/4 tsp) baking soda
* 12g (2 tsp) salt read extra notes above!
Baking!
Ok – here is where I go off script a bit. I chill my dough! I chill my dough for as little as 4 hours and as long as 24-48 hours.
After I mix the dough, I turn it out of the mixing bowl onto a sheet of (plastic wrap) saran wrap and fashion it into a “log”. The objective is to create a sausage-like wrapped log of cookie dough that is air tight. This batch makes enough dough for upwards of 30 cookies and I strongly advise against baking all of this dough at once unless you are feeding a small army. In my case, I have created enough dough for three baking sessions or more (small house here…)
I’ll reiterate: I like to chill my dough overnight. Whether or not you do this is up to you. I find chilled dough, say 24 hours worth, has a better flavor profile. I may be out of my mind – that is entirely possible.
For those of you who need immediate gratification, you can spoon out “balls” of dough onto a parchment covered cookie sheet.
The size of the individual dough balls is entirely arbitrary – some folks use an ice cream scoop. I use a tablespoon for a smaller cookie. This is entirely subjective.
I do not press the cookie dough down with a fork… that is old school. The dough settles and spreads quite nicely by itself.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 15 minutes – or until a hint of golden browning appears at the base of the cookie.
Note - Cookies continue to bake while they cool – do not bake until they start browning at the top of the cookie!
Cool on the stove counter top for a minimum of 20 minutes before transferring to a wire rack – and then let the cookies cool further for an additional 10 minutes. Trust me: They need time to set up. Failure to acknowledge this patience-testing exercise will be rewarded with fall apart cookies… or cookies that seem to be under-cooked… they are not.
Enjoy!
Enjoy with black coffee or tea or even a glass of milk.
Colin Newell is a Victoria B.C. resident and long time coffee expert... his rambling has appeared everywhere from the New York times to the Wall Street journal, CTV Newsworld and in-flight magazines from carriers like Air Canada to Air Transat... he has been doing this blog thing since the dawn of internet time...
Best condiment ever - pickled red onions · Monday April 6, 2026 by colin newell
We have been embracing the Mediterranean diet lately… what is that you say?
The Mediterranean diet is a heart-healthy eating pattern modeled on the traditional cuisines of Greece, Spain, and Italy. It emphasizes plant-based foods (vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts, legumes), healthy fats like olive oil, and regular consumption of fish. It limits red meat, added sugars, and processed foods, reducing risks of cardiovascular disease and supporting overall health.
So – who wouldn’t want that? So far we have found most of the dishes that we have cooked up to be mega-yummy…
… And that is yummy to the power of 6… for your math types.
This Spring and Summer we will be featuring lots of recipes and combos with this dietary approach.
Let’s start with one of our favorite condiments… Pickled Red Onions.
Make thy brine
- 1/4 cup distilled white vinegar
- 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
- 1/2 cup water
- 1/2 tablespoons maple syrup or honey
- 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
- 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes or 1/2 teaspoon peppercorns or…
Mix this slurry together – you can sub in a wide variety of spices in lieu of pepper, pepper flakes, peppercorns…
consider rosemary, thyme, oregano… Better yet, make multiple batches and experiment to your hearts content.
Grab a red onion…
There are a variety of ways to slice up an onion — and I am not going to tell you that there is a right way or wrong way…
Suffice to say: Slice it up into 1/8” slices. And be careful!
Stuff as much of these onion slices into a 1 pint mason jar.
Pour as much of your brine as you need to just cover the onions — hopefully the onion slices top out at around 1/2” below the top of the mason jar. Ideally, the brine covers the onion slices.
Cover or cap the mason jar – stick it in the fridge for a minimum of 24 Hours – it will last for over 6 months… but trust me, you’ll use this condiment up quickly — and make more! You can put pickled onions on hot dogs, salads, sandwiches, hamburgers, in salads… and yes, as part of the sensible Mediterranean diet!Colin Newell is a Victoria resident and subject expert within the realm of coffee culture… his website is Canada’s original tome on the resource of home and office coffee…
The Fermi Paradox - a casual look at why we are alone · Sunday March 15, 2026 by colin newell
The Fermi Paradox – I’ve have never written about it. Maybe the time has come. See what I did there?
The Fermi Paradox: sometimes pitched as “where are they?” – It is a question about the apparent lack of intelligent detected alien life in the universe.
The universe is very old relative to the speed of light so Light has been able to traverse our galaxy a thousand times since the ancient reptiles died out, and since radio waves travel at the speed of light (give or take…) too – why haven’t we heard anything?
I have some ideas on the subject…
We’re not looking very carefully.
We are a speck surrounded by the vast reaches of space – which stretches out almost infinitely in every direction – not quite “infinite” (as a subscriber of the big pa-boom theory…) we can only focus our attention on very minute segments of “the big out there…”
And living in the era of Tik-tok and the one minute Chinese internet drama, it is entirely unlikely that we have the staying power to find anything — that attention span issue is a subject for another day… Oh, look! A squirrel…
Suffice to say, all the stuff around us is huge, exponentially huge and with all that’s available to look at, it would be much like having a Mount Everest bin of popcorn dumped on us and trying to focus on one kernel.
So, with our astronomers wearing the equivalent of dental hygienist 7x googles, we’re not going to discover intelligent life unless it’s very close by… like a handful of light years away… with ET sending big radio signals formatted for talk radio, news and weather together or the Alpha Centauri equivalent of Fox News… modulated in a way that would make sense to us… you know… AM, FM, Morse code… and the like.
Interstellar travel might be impossible
Our galaxy, The Milky Way is huge… 100,000 light years wide. And currently, you and I walk around 1 meter per second. We can drive safely at 100 meters per second… and fly at 300 to 500 meters per second… and ride with Mister Bezos for 9 minutes in space at around Mach 3 (2300 mph…) – that, by the way, takes us 65 miles into the space… the distance you might drive for your fav ice cream cone on Earth. In short: You ain’t gone nowhere yet. The closest star is 4 light years away… 25 trillion miles… so you had better pack lunch.
The great equalizer.
One of the main foundations of the Fermi Paradox is the “reality” that civilizations will exhaust their resources or self destruct before they achieve the ability to get very far beyond their own planetary borough. Currently Planet Earth is a very good example of this. Wars, more wars and more rumors of wars, skirmishes, neglect of our environment and the fragility of our ecosystem are among some of the factors inhibiting our ability to evolve. Let’s face it, we can’t have nice things.
The peril of observational conclusions
Consider the Fermi Paradox perspective from Robin Hansen’s work on Grabby Aliens – the universe appears to be empty and that cultural selection on expansionist aliens would lead to their rapid spread if they did occur to conclude that intelligent life must actually be very rare or that evolution must be very slow. Or, in other words, we are not that much more evolved than primates… and we’ve discovered that raccoons like solving puzzles without the expectation of reward.
My Universal three states of being(s)
a.) We observe no aliens. Good luck with that. I got suspicious when that Irish family moved in next door. My point: In a perfect World we would not see colour, cultural differentiation or class distinction. This is not that perfect World. In our current World, space aliens would move freely among us.
b.) We are so busy expressing our own version of apartheid on the peoples around us that we wouldn’t detect anything truly out of the ordinary… although a flaming plasma head-dress might be a give away.
c.) We are alone. As outlined in my thoughts above, below and as of yet unexpressed.
All these factors are potentially under-estimated when discussing the Fermi Paradox.
- If most of the planets in the universe are too far away for us to see alien life, then if we see it at all we’ll be seeing their space ships as they come to us… less warning than an Amazon Prime delivery on a Saturday.
- We won’t even see them launch to us, even with perfect telescopes staring out into the galaxy, until they’re almost here.
- In practice this means that, in the grand scheme of human history, the phase between becoming aware of aliens and meeting them is vanishingly short.
Example - Expanding alien life capable of sub-light travel will arrive minutes or hours after reaching the outer orbits of our solar system. This periodic table only has the element of surprise!
Conclusion… in part…
Modern culture has been peppered with references to alien arrival in media and film. Truth be told, if our brightest minds are to be considered… is that first contact is arguably tens of thousands or millions of years away… if at all.Are we alone in the Universe? Depending on your statistical model, no… we are very much not alone. That said, there is an overwhelming unlikelihood of someone tapping on our planetary door looking for a cup of sugar any time soon. Leave your comments below.
Colin Newell is a resident of Earth, a popular coffee drinker and talker on subjects far and wide… his brain blips have occupied this blog since the Year 2005!
We re-visit La Belle Patate - fine poutine on the West Coast · Saturday March 14, 2026 by colin newell
First open in late 2008 (bless their hearts!) La Belle Patate is at 1215 Esquimalt Road a block or two (maybe three) past the
Civic Center and Esquimalt’s original strip mall.
Their specialty is Montreal smoked meat sandwiches and Poutine.
Poutine – dish of French fries, topped with a thick beef (or vegan) gravy and a healthy scattering of cheese curds. And for those who feel that this might not be the most healthy combination of ingredients – We are completely ignorant to the fact that Poutine is a cruise missile with your arteries in the cross hairs. But good. So Good!And today we returned after a break… of a few years. Why?! – Why did we deny ourselves for so long!?
Walking through the doors, today, we were greeted with a hearty Colin Newell! (and Andrea! ) from Matty – We ordered two “Steamie” - the dreamiest of hot-dogs (dressed with kraut and mustard…) and a small order of BBQ Vegan gravied Poutine..
The hot dog is steamed and served on the standard bun with cheese, onions and any assortment of common condiments.
The Poutine, which arguably should be served on a skull and cross bones patterned plate, is as described above; fries, gravy, cheese curds… is so comfort food that every bite is yummy inducing. We washed it all down with a couple of samples of Matty’s private collection of Spruce Beer – - Spruce Beer is a carbonated water (with very little sugar ) and some curious botanicals. You love it or you don’t. I love it!
Lunch for two with more protein that is socially responsible – barely 14 dollars.
Matty is such a gentle giant – I regretted being away so long – but all the warmth and memories flooded back. No, you cannot have poutine every day – once in a while – when you need to feel the love that is all around you!Colin Newell is a Victoria resident (retired 2 years) and a big fan of friendly food and great coffee. With coffee mug in hand, he wanders the streets looking for the ultimate caffeine truth!
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