thursday and etc

today I made the bourbon balls.


One is supposed to let them keep for a week before eating. I am tempted to send them to friends in San Francisco where we will join them in about a week and enjoy them while vacationing. Nice plan, I think.


Then I made date bars. They are good.

I'm actually bordering on exhausted at the moment so I will not elaborate. Also, Pickles is whining nearby, anxious to cuddle up on couch with me.
I would like to cuddle too.


Don't forget to brush.

Rainy, Snowy, Icy Saturday

Last night Roma came over and acted interested as I spoke to her about my blog and cookies, etc. I asked her to pick the cooky I would make next and she picked two: the Brown Butter Cookies, featured from 1961 and the fabulous bourbon balls from 1980. The bourbon balls sound delicious but the only ingredient I have on hand for that is bourbon. Since I don't have raisins, chocolate wafer crumbs, pecans or ground ginger, I opted for the brown butter cookies since for those you merely need butter, sugar, vanilla, flour and baking powder and then it calls for a blanched almond stuck in the middle.

I've never browned butter before but with DbR's help, I did so successfully and then I was thwarted because the dough didn't beat to a "smooth dough" as described. I added more butter, not browned.



In recipe notes it does say "the dough is very crumbly, must be kneaded to make it come together in a smooth mass; do not be gentle" but I never got to reading that until after I was grumpily rolling out the crumbly dough, pressing them and putting the nut in. I used praline coated pecans cut in half instead of the almond.
It says bake in a slow oven for 20 minutes. When I took them out after 19 minutes, they were over done. They do taste nice, though.



Don't forget to brush.

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.

Scotch Oat Crunchies-January 1943

Don't forget to brush.

I'd rather be embroidering

Sometimes when I make food or cookies or anything, especially if it is a new recipe, I don't usually taste it as well as I would like. I'm distracted by the event of creating and presenting and then the ordeal of clean up and I am very poor at tasting and enjoying calmly. If I am entertaining, FORGET it!

So last Sunday when I made those cookies with the walnuts, I liked them okay, enough to enjoy them and mark the enjoyment, especially with walnuts. We did bring them to the show that night and people liked them, mostly hippies who hadn't eaten dinner. I had one during the night's event and noted my enjoyment then but I was distracted by my EggEggs embroidery project, the people and the music.

Monday I woke up having barely slept. The insomnia struck again and really put me off. Coupled with a minor low blood sugar event in the early a.m., I was feeling sorry for myself enough to call in sick. I got my eight hours sleeping until noon and dragged myself downstairs around 1:30 feeling out of sorts, kind of hungry, kind of not. I drooped around a little, poured myself a cup of coffee, thought better of it and after pouring it down the sink, I turned to the walnut acorn cookies which had evaded being packed up for the night at Feeding Tube Records and gobbled one down, followed by the remaining four acorn cookies.

I've never appreciated walnuts. I don't like a nut cookie. I enjoy the occasional thumbprint rolled in walnuts but that was my only oh, wow, walnuts pleasure moment. Monday afternoon I had my "wow-walnuts!" moment for reals. The time I took carefully mincing the cup and a half of nuts without them mushing into nut dust was worth the slightly sore back. David had described how the walnut flavor was deep and long-lasting and he was right. Even though the taste and the mouth feel bordered on heavy, the substantialness was perfect for me at that moment in the kitchen. Hearty, not mushy but soft enough not to be a crunchy trouble. The flair of the melted chocolate and nut dip wasn't needed but a happy accent.

I didn't appreciate this cookie the day I made it but the day-after gobbling has convinced me to go back to the wow-walnut neighborhood.

Don't forget to brush.

I don't like walnuts

Today I woke up grumpy. I went to bed around 1:30 and didn't get to sleep until past 4:30, not exactly sure why. I have been planning on making the Walnut Acorn Cookies (published in Dec 2000) all week. I bought the walnuts last Tuesday, when I was buying the ingredients for the last cooky I made for this blog. I woke up grumpy, thinking about these cookies and eager to have the adventure.

I don't really like nuts, generally, so I wasn't particularly excited about making these for the taste but happy for the procedure. I melted the butter as the recipe requested and chopped the walnuts finely, taking my time to enjoy the procedure. I didn't want walnut mush, as a food processor might create so I took the walnuts one or two at a time and chopped chopped chopped. The cookies were easy to mix and form and at 375 degrees, they took a minute less than the 10 minutes to bake.

I had trouble with the melted chocolate for dipping so I used a different pan and put it directly over the flame (instead of the double boiler) and since I had less than the one cup of chips called for, ended up with half a cup semi sweet chips and one oz unsweetened chocolate melted together and dipped the cookies into that. It was plenty sweet.


These cookies were fun and easy to make and even though I don't like walnuts particularly, I think this cooky is delicious. David is very happy to eat these and is somewhat reluctant regarding my plans to bring the bulk of these to a feeding tube records event tonight.


Don't forget to brush.

Grand Marnier Glazed Pain D'epice Cookies

This cookie was the cooky chosen to represent 2009. They are very festive. The recipe called for grand marnier to be added to the glaze recipe but I used what we had on hand, Gran Gala Orange Liqueur, instead. It also describes a decorating ingredient which I have never heard of before, luster dust, which one adds to vodka and then dots onto the candied orange peel which is also decorating the cooky (besides the glaze) and although one eats the "luster", it isn't food. It's nontoxic, but not food. I found that really weird. I bought dried orange peel and dried lemon peel (the lemon peel was $5 more expensive per ounce!-also weird, I thought) and sprinkled that onto the glazed and fruit accent instead of "luster". I didn't get candied orange peel either, I bought dried pineapple and cut that up into tiny triangle for the accent. The only other change in the recipe I made was I only made a half recipe.



These cookies are delicious and they call for certain procedures unfamiliar to me. No eggs are called for but many spices. One is supposed to roll it out to a 10 x 10 square and refrigerate for 12 or so hours to make the spices come forward. Then one is to cut the dough into strips about one half inch by two inches and bake those off.



That is a small rectangle of dough. A nice effect, though, although I did overbake them for a minute or two. They call for 13-15 minutes. I baked 12 minutes and it was too long, as you can see in the pic. They were still delicious. I might try making them again and making them 2 inches by one inch.




Don't forget to brush.