Full Gastronomic Tilt

This adventure in baking began with an innocent idea. Two friends wanting to send some homemade deliciousness to those they love scattered far and wide. Two decent bakers + everybody loves cookies = failproof. I mean, it’s just a few batches of cookies, right?

Ha! Little did we know…

One weekend, we gathered our baking arsenal and set to work. One thing led to another, and I had to duck out early. We managed to whip up the dough for Martha’s Chocolate Gingerbread cookies, as well as some jelly thumbprints and almond crescents.

We’ll just let this dough rest overnight and come back to it in the morning. No problem.
Flattened into discs, wrapped in saran wrap, the dough sat.
For a week.

Oh, life.

And so we came back to our dough the next weekend, having complete faith that everything would turn out as promised. What we got was a now-obvious lesson in food chemistry and common sense.

Lesson #1: Baking even one batch of cookies is a serious undertaking with a wide berth for error. Baking 4-6 batches with the intent to parcel and deliver is madness.

It also cannot be achieved in one or even two days if you have anything remotely resembling a chaotic life.
Unless you are Martha Stewart. Or my mom.

Lesson #2: If you are attempting, for the first time, your mom’s tried & true, 40-year-old, 2 sticks of butter, tricky as hell almond crescent cookie recipe that she makes look effortless year after year, acknowledge that you must, must, must follow the recipe exactly, NO substitutions.

Except for that part about dipping the cookie in the chocolate. Whatever.

The crescents turned out okay, but were nowhere near the apex of flaky, buttery, melt in your mouth with a bit of crunch awesomeness that I was aiming for.

These jelly thumbprints? Beautiful picture, awful taste. The dough had a few Tablespoons of milk in it. Left for a week, well…by the time I baked them there was a sour note to them. I couldn’t justify feeding those cookies to my cat. And the jelly was a lingonberry jam. Great idea in principle, but a sweeter jam is needed to balance out the not too sweet cookie.

Lesson #3: Dough rests overnight so fats can emulsfy, gettin’ right with God down to some tasty business when they go in the oven. Dough resting for a week creates new lifeforms.

It over-emulsifies, leading to a sticky chocolatey gingerbread mess of goo. Still sorta tasty, really ugly.

After the first batch came out of the oven looking so frightening, Nikki cut her losses and busied herself flinging the rest of the gingerbread dough balls into the trash. Exactly as fun as it looks.

Lesson #4: By the time you bake, cool, taste and/or wreck five batches of cookies in an afternoon, you will never want to look at a cookie ever again.

Except for Heidi’s Triple-Ginger Cookies. Cookie Hall of Fame right there. Last batch of the day. Healthiest recipe of the bunch. Of course they came out perfectly.

These green-tea shortbreads were tasty. Except we ran out of green tea powder. So we ground up some green tea in a spice grinder. NOT THE SAME THING. I mean, it is the same thing, except…

I don’t know. Didn’t work. NEED MATCHA!

All in all, a great lesson learned, blah blah blah.
Kinda bummed about the epic disaster this became.
Then again…

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. ~Albert Einstein

Sorry folks. No cookies in the mail this year. Maybe in January.