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8.31.2010

the early bird and the night owl

There is never enough time to get everything done.  Pick any day of the week, and there are several things I can list that didn't happen, that I either needed to put off for another day or indefinitely.  In the past, the attempt to accomplish things with my day has led to extremely late nights - for example, when I was sewing my halloween costume I stayed up until 4am a few nights in a row to finish it - and consequent late mornings.  Homework tends to be a more worthy reason to forget to go to bed, but that has left me waking up in the afternoon on Saturdays and Sundays (and, unfortunately, on weekdays too).

Over the past several months, I have started to shift to waking up early to get things done, something that even a year ago I would never have expected.  It's pretty awesome to get up on a Saturday have all my errands run before noon, so that I can bake and, well, do more stuff in the afternoon.

Last Saturday, I slept in, which meant I had to bake on Sunday.  Oh well.

112. Apricot Windows
These cookie bars have SO MUCH butter in them.  I was shocked when I first read the recipe and saw it call for 4-1/2 sticks of butter. Yes, that is 1.12 pounds of butter.  This mass of butter is mixed with sugar, flour, a few eggs, and yellow cornmeal (plus some other ingredients I'm probably forgetting), then spread all over a cookie sheet to make a base for these cookies.  After the base is baked, apricot jam is spread on it and more of the buttery batter is piped on the top to make a lovely lattice pattern.

It's immediately apparent, upon tasting these, that they are full of butter.  The cornmeal flavor comes out very nicely, and pairs well with the apricot, which isn't overwhelming.  My results had a kind of thick crust, because the recipe calls for a larger cookie sheet than will fit in my tiny oven, so I did the best I could with what was available.  However, in the future I will consider scaling down the recipe a little, so that these bars can be a little thinner and can have more apricot on them.  Otherwise, these were very easy to make, which was good because I had about a million things to do last weekend.

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