dreaming@echonyc.com

these come from regan daley's in the sweet kitchen, the brownie version of her chocolate cherry toffee cookies.

instead of using chocolate chunks, on a suggestion from terry i used nestle's chocolate/caramel morsels. i colored white chocolate with powdered food coloring to festive up the tops. and all i have to say is this:

do not eat them. they are poison. please, i beg of you, leave them untouched on the platter. then return them to me for safe and proper disposal.

remember: poison! do not eat!

this has been a public service announcement.

Posted by dreaming at 08:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

behold the mighty pretzel! these are made from a recipe for light spice cookies in the king arthur flour cookie companion. the dough rolled and cut beautifully, and if my pretzel cookie cutter clung a little bit too stubbornly to the interior scraps where there should have been holes, i was in a forgiving mood. (i'm pretty sure i was high as a kite from the stupefying waft of anise and cinnamon.)

i brushed each pretzel with egg white, then sprinkled them all with coarse white sanding sugar. i wanted them to have the look of real pretzels. unfortunately, the sugar wasn't as opaque and white after baking as pretzel salt would have been. maybe i'll use that next time instead.

special bonus cookie: after rolling and cutting four dozen pretzels, i was pretty sure i had enough, so i used the remaining dough to make animal cutouts. i doubt they'll get decorated any more than this, but what's not to like about a giraffe with a necklace?

Posted by dreaming at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

please enjoy a chocolate milkshake.

(don't worry. we also give charlie water.)

Posted by dreaming at 05:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

all hail martha stewart! but all hail terry even harder. it was she who introduced the innovation of maple to martha's cream cheese walnut cookie recipe, an improvement that deserves some fanfare.

you replace some of the sugar with maple sugar in a straight 1:1 ratio, and add maple flavoring instead of vanilla. in addition, with a generous assist from paul, who built a mold, i sliced the cookies into rectangles instead of the usual rounds, since i needed a different shape in the mix. i did not, as martha suggests, roll the dough in chopped walnuts before baking, since cookie #5 had already had that treatment. but i am toying with the idea of adding a drizzle of maple glaze (as seen here) to punch up the maple flavor a bit, as it's currently pretty subtle.

Posted by dreaming at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

these beauties come from martha stewart's jaw-dropping holiday cookie magazine — not only is it bursting with dozens of recipes i wish i had time to try, it's gorgeous to look at. its finest asset is its two indexes, one sorted by cookie category and one alphabetical, both of which feature pictures of the cookies so you can decide at a glance which look most appetizing.

these cookies. oh, these cookies. they're made by pulverizing roasted, salted cashews with oil, then doing the whole butter/sugar/flour thing, mixing in some additional chopped nuts, and baking. you flatten the cookies halfway through their bake time, and finally drizzle the cooled cookies with a mixture of melted caramels and cream.

yum.

i was initially worried that they'd taste like nothing more than glorified peanut butter cookies, but they're unspeakably delicious.

wait a minute, so are peanut butter cookies. but you get the idea, anyway.

i didn't do a very good job with my drizzle. the recipe called for letting the caramel cool after melting, and i let it cool too long. i was going for a thin stripe like in martha's picture; while my results aren't as pretty, they might taste even richer with the extra payload of goo. the only drawback is that the caramel is fairly soft even after it sets. to store the cookies, i froze them on cookie sheets to harden the caramel, then packed them between layers of parchment. as i packed, i worked in the garage where it was cold, hence the dark green hood of our car visible in the photo.

never let it be said that i am not a world-class baker with access to state-of-the-art facilities and technology.

Posted by dreaming at 06:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

both of these cookies come from carole walter's master icebox cookie recipe in great cookies. the first are cinnamon nut swirls. you knead cinnamon sugar into a plug of dough, being careful not to overmix. then you form the dough into a cylinder, chill, brush it with egg white, roll it in finely-chopped toasted walnuts, chill again, then slice and bake.

because i am a dork, i didn't notice that this variation, which uses only one-sixth of the yield of the master recipe, makes only two dozen cookies. so it ended up being a fair amount of work for only a handful of cookies. they're very pretty, but i didn't taste one because, hey, i've only got 24 to begin with.

these are simply the master dough rolled, chilled, brushed, rolled in red and white nonpareils, chilled, sliced, and baked. i did taste one of these because i baked the lumpy ends from the cylinders along with the pristine rounds.

one of my goals this year is to incorporate more plain old cookies into my assortment — not fancy, not elegant, but homey, familiar, and, well, soothing rather than challenging. these fill the bill perfectly. they're a very good plain old cookie: not too sweet, golden-tasting, and tender. call it a good eatin' cookie. and ignore the fact that my fingertips are now stained red from the nonpareils.

Posted by dreaming at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Posted by dreaming at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

when mom made these a few years ago, i enjoyed them so much that i asked for the recipe. the name of the cookie, according to the recipe? mrs. claus's cookies, "rumored to be one of santa's favorites." i happen to know that the santa of my childhood strongly prefers oreos, so i have unilaterally renamed them — the candied fruit and rum in them coupled with their chewy texture make fruitcake cookies a much more accurate name.

Posted by dreaming at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

adapted from eleanor burns' quilt in a day: star log cabin. a day? one freakin' day?

as if, eleanor. as if.

i thought i'd be working on this forever. realistically, it only felt like forever because i had to snatch an hour here and hour there instead of devoting longer stretches of time to just plowing through it. but now it's finished, ready to be sent off to its new home, having raised $1000 as a raffle quilt.

not bad for fifty years' work.

here you can see the full quilt, a close-up of a few blocks, the little patch i made to repair a tiny tear in one of the blocks that was incurred after quilting, and the label on the back.

it's finished. it's leaving today. i'm happy and ready. onward!

Posted by dreaming at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)