tray magnifique
...if i do say so myself.
not shown: holiday cookies #googolplex and #goodgodijustburnedmyselfout (same as previous years).
December 17, 2005
December 16, 2005
holiday cookies #umpteen and #infinity
to round out the pack, we have a winner and a loser.
citrus cookies, from an old recipe mom made yeeeears ago. i've added the innovation of rolling the dough log in colored sparkling sugar before slicing. it adds a lovely crunch and makes them even more realistic looking. the orange are better than the lemon, and they look better, too — it was easy to tint the orange dough just enough to differentiate it from the rind but not so much that it looks fluorescent; the yellow was harder to work with.
the loser are these peppermint cheesecake squares from a grocery store magazine. they taste very good, although peppermint and cheesecake is kind of a weird combination and you don't want more than one or two, but they look horrible: the black cookie crumbs from the crust got all over everything as i sliced them, and the red is just too vivid. these are the closest thing to a failure i made this year, but i'm including them anyway because, as this year's motto proclaims, it's only cookies, for crying out loud.
December 03, 2005
holiday cookies #11 and #12
first up, cranberry pecan tassies. it's a cream cheese dough mashed down into mini muffin cups, filled with brown sugar, egg, pecans, chopped fresh cranberries, and orange extract.
yum.
every year i wish i'd made more of them, so this year i doubled the recipe. it might be the most labor intensive cookie i make, more so even than the linzers, which pack a greater visual punch. with one thing and another, this ended up being a two-day batch. so please eat them slowly.
(last night i was packing up cookie tins to take to the nice ladies who ran the preemie playgroup. paul helpfully brought in the cookies from the freezer, "but not," he said, "the tassies or the pretzels." "why not?" i asked. "because more for me." i told him i'd give the ladies my portion, not his. he grudgingly agreed: "okay. but then i fully intend to put a sign on the tray saying, NONE FOR JULIE.")
we also have these funky chocolate/mint bars. i shouldn't say this in front of people who might eventually be eating them, but this is the only batch so far that's been a disappointment. year before last i got these nice andes mint chips — andes candies cut into tiny bits for baking. because my grocery store doesn't carry them, i tried to replicate them by chopping the regular mints into flinders. but they were still too big for this recipe, which calls for mini chocolate chips, so the dough tore in spots, revealing the filling.
speaking of the filling, it's a white chocolate concoction flavored with mint extract. the recipe called for two to three drops of food coloring "to tint it a faint pastel green." since i am no fool, i added one drop, which turned the whole batch this unfortunate neon color.
look, they taste good, i promise. just close your eyes and pretend they're lovely.