Tags
baking, cookies, fails, jelly, quad cities, recipes, strawberries
A week or so ago, I mentioned that I’d made some cookies that were too ugly to blog about. Cat piped up that there’s certainly nothing wrong with ugly cookies and I saw her point. Before I get into the cookies themselves, I should tell you a little more about why I felt called to deviate from my normal snickerdoodle/boxed brownies/pecan square rotation.
Simply put, I have a lot of jelly in my freezer.
Every year, my in-laws acquire an absurd amount of strawberries and make a huge batch of freezer jelly. This year, our cut was 6 or 7 jars — at least 5 of which are still in our freezer. (There may be more. I didn’t feel like digging through everything.)
Wanting to find a way to get jelly in my face without having to eat more peanut butter, I decided to make some cookies.
Using this book:
And this recipe:
Except, I didn’t really use that recipe because I didn’t have pecans in the house and I had no intention of making butter cream for the filling. Nevertheless, I set out to make some thumbprint cookies that would impress my friends and mother-in-law.
Merrily, I set up my green friend to get to work. I think my first clue that these cookies were going to be less-than-picture perfect was the state of the dough.
But I persevered.
I forgot to take an “after” shot, but the long and short of it is that the cookies spread all over the place and never really firmed up. They tasted alright, but it was almost impossible to pick up the cookies without the weight of the jelly crumbling the whole thing.
Ultimately, I think the spreading issue could have been prevented if I refrigerated the dough before I scooped it out for baking. What I can’t quite figure out is how I could have made the cookies more structurally sound.
Any thoughts? Tips?
Super Swell Times 