It's about time

...For me to do a cookie update!  While there are plenty of excuses I could make about why I haven't updated, it all boils down to one thing: this has been a busy summer.  This comes as a combination of teaching, research, meeting with friends once a week for dinner, leading a bible study, and going to the gym 5-6 days each week.  Oh, right, and spending time with Phil.  Let me tell you, finding shared free time for two graduate students can be pretty nearly impossible some days.

But now I have a "free" night, and it's about time I post my cookies before I forget what they were..

 152. Cream Cheese-Lemon Bows
A few months ago,  I broke my frosting bag, and I haven't yet bothered with replacing it.  Sometimes there are workarounds for this - I have a cookie gun too - but sometimes they don't work.  I tried to use my cookie gun, and the dough wouldn't come off properly, so these "bows" ended up being rounds instead.

These cookies are full of butter with a bit of cream cheese, along with lemon zest and juice.  After baking, they were pretty delicious, but a bit dry for my taste.  Maybe it had something to do with changing the shape, but I wasn't too impressed.

 153. Lemon-Apricot Sandwiches
Oh, these were good.  The cookies are crisp and lemony, given some extra nice texture with the addition of almond flour and corn starch, and apricot is a fantastic pairing.  The cookies themselves weren't very sweet, which meant that the jam completed the taste rather than making the cookies too rich.

 154. Bourbon Currant Cookies
Here's another winner.  These flaky cookies made with bourbon and currants (as indicated by the title) can be cut out into any shape, but I thought elephants were appropriately whimsical, and everyone I shared this with seemed to agree.  Before being baked, the cookies were brushed with heavy cream, and somehow that flavor came through spectacularly.  I will absolutely be making these again!

 155. Biscuit Sandwich Cookies
There's something about chocolate filling that makes everything better, and these cookies are no exception.  These cookies were pretty flaky, probably due to the combination of butter and heavy cream in them.  Although usually cookie fillings are some kind of ganache (that is, heavy cream mixed with melted chocolate), these are filled with melted milk chocolate.  A note on cooking with milk chocolate: you should always opt for the more expensive stuff.  Cheap milk chocolate is not the same at all.

 156. Homemade Graham Crackers (definitely a best cookie)
I'm always skeptical of the glowing comments that go along with the recipes in this book, but the ones for this recipe were entirely deserved.  Indeed, these cookies were not difficult to make, and they're full of whole wheat flour and wheat germ, which makes them pretty healthy!  Oh, right, and they taste really really good.  I'll be making these again and trying them with s'mores.

157. Meringue Porcupines
I have a confession to make.  I went home over the 4th of July weekend and completely ran out of time to make cookies.  Yes, that's right, I skipped a weekend.  This was not okay with me, so last weekend I doubled up and made two batches of cookies.  This was the first batch, prepared for a pizza-making and Munchkin-playing party at my friend's condo.  And so, in the midst of a busy Saturday, I had yet another meringue fail.  I don't know why, but I just can't seem to get meringues to work when I use the whisk attachment on my electric mixer.  It's very frustrating, and every time it happens it make me feel like a total kitchen failure.

So I beat and beat these egg whites, waiting for them to form stiff, glossy peaks, and I guess I added the vanilla too early, because they went from soft peaks to no peaks at all.  Nevertheless, I cooked what I had made, and the meringues turned out decently.  In the middle of the baking (drying?) process, I took them out of the oven and pushed their bottoms in a little bit.  When it was time to serve them, I put apricot jam in the divot of one and whipped cream with almond extra in the divot of the other, and sandwiched them together.  Everyone enjoyed these very much, but I think the meringues were a little too sweet.  If I ever try making these again, I will add less sugar to them.

Aw, nuts!

I don't really have too much to say as an introduction or a life update today, except to say that it's Lent now, and in the spirit of following the Liturgical calendar, I've decided to quit watching TV as a means of filling quiet and/or bored times.  I'm hoping to cultivate a better appreciation of quiet and solitude, as well as to spend more time reading, journaling, praying, and so on.

This also means that whatever bad movie is being shown on TBS is not distracting me from taking care of the things at hand, including cookie posts!  The title of this post pretty much gives you the theme of these cookies, but I'm sure you didn't need me to tell you that to figure it out.

140. Hazelnut Jam Thumbprints
I'm sure by now I sound pretty lazy, but there are some Saturdays when I just don't want to spend 5 hours in the kitchen, and I guess that's fair considering the hundreds of hours I've already put into this project.  I try to alternate between simple and complicated recipes, and for some reason I imagined that this one would be kind of labor-intensive.

Well, I was wrong.  These cookies were fantastically simple to make.  The dough consists of very typical ingredients: egg, flour, sugar, etc, which were mixed together, chilled, and then separated into balls which were rolled in toasted hazelnuts.  After putting thumb-sized holes in these balls they were baked and filled with apricot jam.  Tada!  A cute and colorful cookie!  The hazelnuts really make the flavor here since, well, there's not much else to do that job.  I chose apricot jam because that's what I had open, but I think it was a good decision as it wasn't overly sweet.

Now, I know I've talked about hazelnuts before, since I bought them chopped from Meijer and the skins on them ended up making that recipe kind of bitter tasting.  This time, I went to Strawberry Fields and bought whole hazelnuts (minus the shells), which worked so much better.  After toasting the nuts, I steamed them in a towel for five minutes and the skins came right off.

141. Pine Nut Cookies
Warning: Do not make these cookies unless you are willing to spend $20 or more on ingredients.
Oh my goodness, pine nuts are so expensive.  This recipe calls for 2C of them - about half are ground up in the dough and the rest end up on the outside, and so following this recipe cost me probably $18 in pine nuts alone.

Aside from the pine nuts, these cookies are much like almond macaroons, with typical ingredients, including almond paste, which is another (slightly less) expensive ingredient.  Fortunately, I had half a can left over from a previous recipe, so that was one thing I didn't have to buy.  Because of the recipe's simplicity, everything came together quickly, and I was able to bake them over the span of about an hour on Saturday morning and share them with a few friends last night as we gathered to watch Beverly Hills Cop and drink home brewed beer.

These were actually really good cookies.  They're not very sweet, and the flavors are subtle - I mean, of course the pine nuts are dominant, but the almond paste adds an unexpected but pleasant twist.  If it weren't for the expense, I would definitely make these again for some kind of summer party thing, as pine nuts seem like a warm weather food.