I’ve had one or two people ask why this blog is called Domestic Dilettante, since–according to them–I am crazy domestic and do wonderful things involving fruit and sugar and jars and alchemy.
To those people who are wondering, I give you this entry. Actually, I can just give you a picture. Here:
…what, that’s not enough for you?
Okay. I was trying to make these cookies, but there were a few issues. Issues like how I don’t really like to read recipes all the way through, preferring to charge ahead and hope for the best. Issues like how I have this habit of trying to do half a dozen things at once. Issues like how I’m not good at following recipes.
Ribbon cookies sounded so easy, and to be fair, the dough tasted fantastic.
I followed the ingredients more or less as written–sure, the white dough got coconut extract and chopped coconut, and okay, the white dough didn’t get mint or confectioner’s sugar, but that wasn’t really a big deal. The hard part came when I finished making the dough and immediately tried to roll it out.
Yeah. Not really so much. When it was clear that my approach wasn’t working, I returned to the computer and saw that you’re supposed to chill the dough. Into the fridge went the dough, all safe and sound in Ziplocks.
The next afternoon, I pulled the dough out and started to roll it, only to find that it would not roll. What the hell.
I went back to the computer. Again. Apparently, the dough was supposed to be put between pieces of parchment and rolled out immediately after the dough was made. Guess who’d missed that tidbit in their first three reads of the recipe? (If you guessed me, you’re right. Shocking, I know.)
Maura and I figured that we’d soldier on anyhow–it wasn’t like we were going to start this chilling and rolling nonsense over again, so we ended up grabbing handfuls of dough and flattening them onto the cookie sheet. After spending some indeterminate amount of time in an oven of indeterminate temperature, the cookies were pronounced done. They even tasted more or less okay–they were a great balance of coconut and chocolate, and they had the thick, crumbly texture as swirl cookies. The dough baked at different rates, though, so the white parts of the cookie are more done than they should be. Some of the bottoms burned, probably because my oven sucks. And, obviously, none of them look like ribbons.
One of these days I’m going to figure out how to bake without burning, exploding, losing, mauling, mutilating, or setting fire to anything, but I’m not especially hopefully that it’s going to be any day soon.
Okay, you mention some fails here, which I cannot dispute (being three and a half hours away), but these cookies LOOK delicious!
At least they cooked all of the way. Last time I made cookies they were really thick. Yum, right? Wrong. I thought they were all done so I took them out of the oven. The centers were still pure dough. Surprisingly my kids still ate them ALL.
ok as long as they tasted good who cares about the fact that they don’t look like ribbons? You wern’t going to enter them into the village bake off were you? No? then I’m sure it’s fine.