Brandy Snaps from July 1949

This is what the Brandy Snap is supposed to look like, or actually, it should be even lighter and thinner than the above. Only four out of 20 of my cookies ended up looking like this. I'm not sure why but they ended up mostly like this:



The recipe calls for one to cook up the ingredients in a saucepan and then add the flour. One then drops the dough, which is supposed to be liquidy, onto the pan and cooks it slow for about ten minutes or so. When it comes out of the oven, one is supposed to be able to roll the cooky around a dowel of some sort and make an ultra thin cone/roll shape.



The first pan's worth, I guess, was still liquid-y enough to spread and become a consistency which was able to be rolled. After that, the dough's consistency hardened up and the cooky came out of the oven kind of hard and crumbly. Not able to be rolled...

__ok, its a snow day right now and I'm typing this up while watching the first Smoky and the Bandit and I just laughed out loud at the sound of Paul Williams making a pony sound as he counted out a stack of money for Burt___

...into a nice cone shape. The second pan's worth quickly turned rigid and crumbly. The third pan I gave up on, for the most part, and after they came out of the oven I wrapped them up in foil and hopefully later I will be able to enjoy a soft-ish molasses cooky (because I have had enough cooky for now).

Don't forget to brush.

Souvaroffs + Cloudt's Pecan Treats

It has been a while since last I've posted here. I've been busy doing many things not including baking. During the long weekend of new years I did fabricate a "baked good," or pastry rather, but not from this cooky book. I fried yeast donuts in hot oil and then I glazed and sugared them and then I filled these donuts with a rum cream and whattayaknow, I had a bunch of fresh donuts which wouldn't keep overnight. Lucky, there was a place I knew where friendly people were gathered and I was able to interest them in gobbling up donuts. They were yummy. DbR mentioned them on his blog.

Today I had a snow day from work, which is exciting, we don't have snow days usually. Since I have been planning to make cookys and add to this blog for weeks, I decided I would go ahead and make two kinds of cookies. I made them concurrently and it worked out pretty well. I started with the Souvaroffs because I had been planning on making jelly cookies for a while. I threw the dough together, cutting the recipe in half and when one is finishing the dough before refrigerating, the recipe asks for two tbls ice cold water but I forgot to half that amount like I had the previous ingredients and went ahead and put in the whole 2 tbls. I exclaimed aloud with dismay and DbR, in the other room, asked, "What?" The dough survived and turned out pretty well as I found out a half hour later when I rolled it, cut out the round shapes and baked them off (perfect amount of 24 small cookies). I filled them with the strawberry jelly David had bought earlier this week for his pb + j sandwiches.



While that dough was chilling, I made the bottom layer of shortbread cookie for the Cloudt's Pecan Treats from 1981. I found out that a cookie sheet with that little lip around the edges is called a jelly roll pan and that was what I used to bake this bottom half. After taking the bottom piece out of the 375d oven I turned the oven down to 325 and baked off the jelly cookie forms. When I got all of the pretty albeit imperfect shapes out of the oven, I mixed together and cooked the topping to this treat. I diverged from the recipe here. Instead of one and a third cups light brown sugar I used one cup dark brown sugar (it was all I had). I added one square unsweetened chocolate, just because I wanted some cocoa. Instead of using chopped pecans, since I didn't have any, I used up DbR's pecan granola. I turned the oven back to 375, poured the mixture over the jelly roll pan shortbread and stuck that back in the oven.



I cut them up and took a bite of one. I don't know if I like them yet. Later, I cut them up to triangles much smaller than the 2 x 2 recommended in the recipe. I was pleased by their texture and taste and gave some to friends who live upstairs from Magpie. I do plan to bring some Treats to work tomorrow (as the jelly flowers are all eaten up!) and make some positive vibes float around The Office.



Don't forget to brush.