Emelia Jackson’s Greek-Macedonian baba (grandmother) was a key ingredient in her rise to cookie queen. The Masterchef winner’s latest cookbook, Some of My Best Friends Are Cookies, is dedicated to her (“One of the great loves of my life,” Jackson writes). It features twists on the Hellenic sweets she made, like buttery, braided koulourakia and melt-in-your-mouth kourabiedes. Thankfully, Jackson left out some of baba’s methods.
“I don’t know if I should tell this story,” she laughs. “But my grandfather was Serbian and my grandmother would make these Serbian cookies [called] vanilice – it’s basically an icing-sugar-dusted shortbread sandwiched with jam – and I absolutely loved them. Then one day I was at her house watching her make them, and the jam would ooze out the sides and she didn’t like that, so she licked the entire perimeter of the cookie. I was like, ‘Have you been doing that the whole time!?’ … I didn’t write that story in the book!”
Biccies have been a lifetime love for the pastry cook. Some of her earliest memories are of being in the kitchen baking chocolate-chip cookies and gingerbread biscuits with her mum. “It was the beginning of my love for food and also my love of feeding people,” Jackson tells Broadsheet.
Now she’s doing the same for her three-year-old daughter, Addie. “She’s getting really good at cracking eggs … we do lots of chocolate chips and Scottish shortbread.
“My son, Mac, is one, so he’s just happy to sit with a block of butter.”
Jackson got her start after a first run at Masterchef in 2014, where she placed third. The dessert doyen returned in 2020 for the show’s Back to Win series and left victorious. She’d already started working as a cake designer between appearances, but the win catapulted her into the public eye. “I got lucky being on that show during Covid – everyone was glued to their screens.” She’s currently back on air for another Masterchef spin-off, Dessert Masters. “I owe Masterchef a lot of my career – if they come knocking, I say yes.”
Adding icing on the cake, Jackson followed up her win with a bestselling baking guide in 2022, First, Cream the Butter and Sugar: The Essential Baking Companion. “I had about six months to write the manuscript, and I spent a good two months of that time on the first chapter, which is the cookie chapter,” she says. “Then it got published and someone on Instagram said, ‘Do you have a good Anzac biscuit recipe?’ I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve just written an Australian baking bible and I didn’t put an Anzac biscuit in there’. So, I knew book two was all about cookies and biscuits.”
Her new compendium has more than 80 recipes for cookies (and biscuits) of every kind, plus tips, tricks and tools of the trade. There are bar cookies, drop cookies, sandwich cookies, rolled cookies, pressed cookies and no-bake cookies. You’ll find the basics, including jammy thumbprints, “the only chocolate-chip cookie recipe you’ll ever need” and, yes, an Anzac biscuit, which Jackson tested 14 times. Plus, there are “quirky” recipes like sticky date whoopie pies, Iced Vovos and a “cookimisu” alongside “classy” numbers like Earl Grey millionaire shortbread, and limoncello spritz bars. She’s also included festive treats from around the world, including crisp Italian crostoli, spiced German Pfeffernuesse; Puerto Rican besitos de coco (coconut kisses) and baba’s aforementioned vanilice.
For anyone with a bone to pick about using “cookie” in an Australian context, Jackson sees equal room for it and the Aussie biscuit on the proverbial baking tray. “For me, a cookie is soft in the middle with a nice, bendy, chewy nature. And a biscuit snaps – like a Tim Tam. But call it what you want!”
Or, as she writes in her opening pages: “Some of my best friends are cookies and some of them are biscuits. And you’ll find them all hanging out together in this book. They’re getting along just fine.”
Try the only chocolate chip cookie recipe you'll ever need, according to Emelia Jackson, here.
This article first appeared in Domain Review, in partnership with Broadsheet.
