Pie Crust Cookies



Okay, I will be the first to admit that when I was young I used to pray that my Mom would have left over pie dough so she could make pie crust cookies!  These cookies are simply made with whatever pie dough you have left over ( Quite frankly, I think they are good enough to warrant their own full fledged pie crust batch.)

  

You roll it out, spread it with butter and sprinkle it with a cinnamon-sugar mixture.  Then roll it up and slice and bake and voila!  You have the tastiest little cookies ever! 

They take me back, that is for sure!

Recipe Here

Cookies for Stella

My granddaughter has a birthday coming up and I always try to send her cookies along with her birthday gift. I was surfing around a bit and found these pretty cookies and thought that they would be a perfect choice to make for her.  

Glazed Almond Raspberry Hearts

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Happy Birthday Stella!

Lemon Macarons

Better but not there yet...I will have to give it another go.  These tasted really yummy (they were gone in a matter or minutes!) but they weren't smooth and some cracked. I will continue my quest to make the perfect macaron but for now I am going to give it a rest and move on to something else.

 Click for recipe

Chocolate Peanut Butter Macarons

                                                                            
For quite some time I have been enticed by the French Macaron.  They seem to be at a height of popularity, appearing in magazines and blogs...yet I was apprehensive in trying these delicate little treats because I read that they are fragile, tempermental and tricky.  How hard can it be to create a tiny simple shell of almonds, eggwhites and sugar?  Well, it was very daunting to this first time macaron baker. 

I did my homework and watched and read everything I could find.  Some would say to "age" the egg whites by letting them sit out at room temperature for at least 24 hours and some didn't.  Some would say to gently fold the almond/sugar mixture in the eggs and some would say not to be gentle; you want to deflate the egg whites.  I went with what all the french chefs said...  Age the egg whites and beat the heck out of the little devils! 

I thought I was doing just fine until I started to pipe them on the parchment.  They were a little bit runnier than I expected, and even though I went through all the trouble of making a circle template, they ran outside the lines and forming a much bigger wafer than I had planned.  I chalk that up to over beating and my piping inexperience.  In spite of the piping mishap, they came out of the oven beautifully and I was happy to see that they had feet!  Yay! Not perfect feet by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly was a confidence booster.   When I sandwiched them together I was not gentle enough and cracked their tops.  They tasted just as I thought they should...light and crispy on the outside and dense and moist on the inside.  Quite yummy and definitely worth another effort.  I am much to stubborn to let a little cookie get the best of me!!  So Mr. Macaron...you and I have another date. 

click for recipe

To be continued.....



Caramel Filled Pecan Brown Butter Cookies

My first experience with brown butter was with the Madeleines that I made previously, since then I have been obsessed with brown butter.  I love the deep rich nutty caramel kind of flavor you get when you brown the butter....who knew!  So I was going through some old magazine clippings and found this Pecan Brown Butter Cookie and thought they sounded yummy... I wanted to take it one step further and make them into sandwich cookies filled with caramel.  I still have lots of chocolate left over from Christmas so why not drizzle it with chocolate!

I had caramels also left over from Christmas so I cheated and just melted those down for the filling.  I realized after I had the cookies in the oven that I forgot to add the brown sugar....argh!  Well they turned out ok, but not quite sweet enough.  The brown sugar probably would have made them spread out a little flatter.  Oh well, I guess I will have to try them again.  They did taste good...I think adding the caramel and chocolate helped with the sweetness factor.  I used restraint and only ate half a cookie, but I very easily could have eaten a few more!

Pecan Brown Butter Cookies
printable recipe

Makes about 42 cookies

Active time 1 hr   Start to Finish 1 1/4 hours

1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter

1/2 cup light brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 cup all purpose flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

3/4 tsp salt

2 large eggs

2 cups pecans  (7 oz), toasted, cooled and chopped

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees with racks in the upper and lower thirds.
• Heat butter in a 10 inch heavy skillet over medium heat until milk solids on the bottom are dark chocolate brown.  Strain through a fine mesh strainer lined with a paper towel. 
• Blend cooled brown butter with sugars, flour, baking soda, salt and eggs in a food processor until smooth.  Transfer to a bowl and stir in pecans.
• Spoon tablespoons of batter onto  parchment-lined baking sheets, arranging them about 1 inch apart.
• Bake, switching positions of sheet halfway through, until browned, 15 to 18 minutes.  Transfer cookies to rack to cool ( cookies will crisp as they cool)

Enjoy!



ABC Evie Lieb's Processor Challah

My first ABC challenge effort went very well!  I did not have a dough hook for my food processor, and since I had the dough hook for my Kitchen Aid mixer, I used that instead.  The recipes in this Flo Braker cookbook are so easy to follow...it is almost like she is standing right next to you helping you along.  I have never made Challah bread, infact it has been years since I have made any kind of yeast bread. My house smelled glorious!!!  I found this recipe to be fairly quick and very easy.  I was worried about the braiding.....but it was a piece of cake!  I enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to the next challenge! Oh and by the way, the bread was as good as it looks

Madeleines

This is my first attempt at baking madeleines.  I have had the pan for probably 2 years now....just sitting with my other baking pans waiting to be used.  Well today was the day.  I found a recipe that I thought sounded delicious and set out to bake these adorable little french cakes.  Mine are not perfect, but they were buttery, lemony and I thought they were a good first effort.  They tasted good.  I think I was suppose to get more of a hump on the little buggers.  Awwww well, C'est la vie!  I will try it again soon.

Click for Recipe