dreaming@echonyc.com: montpelier's test kitchen

last night as sort of a warm-up for holiday cookie baking, i baked a batch of fall cookies using my maple-leaf cutter and nick malgieri's accidental cookie dough recipe. not fragile, handles cutting well, and actually tastes decent — hat trick. note to terry: i used a small maple leaf cutter for this instead of a bigger one, and am happy with that aspect of the results. i based my efforts on this method found on the gma recipe boards at work:

Use your favorite sugar cookie dough recipe. Divide in thirds. Use 3 colors, one for each division (orange, green and yellow or red). Tear off 3 sheets of waxed paper. Place dollops of each color sporadically on each piece of waxed paper, but not touching. Cover the dough with another piece of waxed paper. With rolling pin, roll to desired thickness (1/4"). (Final result is a marble effect.) Place in fridge for several hours or overnight. The next day, remove one dough at a time. Remove top sheet of waxed paper, sprinkle a little flour over top; flipover and do the same. Using a leaf cookie cutter, cut out shapes and place on cookie sheets. Bake according to your recipe. Makes beautifully colored leaves.

the first batch i baked according to the method above, putting globs of dough on a silpat and just rolling them all together. the resulting cookies were very cute, but the colors didn't blend at all — no marbled effect whatsoever. they're still pretty, and rather festive, but not quite the effect i was going for. (and right off the bat it became pretty clear that including brown instead of, say, orange was a big mistake.)

i wasn't entirely satisfied with the first batch; i'd been hoping for a more...grown-up-looking leaf. so for the second round, i took the scraps left from cutting the first batch and kneaded them in my hands until i felt they looked suitably marbled, then rolled them out and cut them. the resulting cookies look very realistic, if a bit muddy here and there. (i place the blame for that squarely on the brown dough, which was nasty from the outset.) the question remains whether artistic realism is something you actually want in a cookie. i think they're nice, and would be nicer still laid alongside a scoop of, say, cinnamon ice cream, but i realize some might find them unappetizing. here's a close-up so that you can savor the kitchen magic^TM.