Over the weekend, we went from arctic to temperate – it was in the mid-30s on Saturday, and up to 46°s on Sunday. A huge amount of the snowpack has melted, but fortunately, we’ve been having warm wind that evaporates everything – no rain – so even though there are some [deep] puddles in the streets, and lake on the sidewalk, the water’s staying out of our basements, mostly.
I decided to bake an assortment of Valentine’s cookies – one Martha, and the other two Dorie Greenspan – sort of. The Martha recipe is raison heart pockets – I had made & liked for Valentines 2009 – and nice to see that I did the same things this year – didn’t bother to pureé the filling, didn’t bother to roll out the dough between sheets of wax paper.
One of Dorie Greenspan’s famous cookies is the World Peace cookie, a chocolate on chocolate slice & bake, that looks like I have been making since 2007. Some time ago, I found a couple of variants that another baking blogger had posted, caffeinated world peace, and the one I tried, peanut butter. I didn’t have mini-peanut butter cups to throw in; I used chopped up Mr. Goodbars – Hershey milk chocolate with salted peanuts. I thought they were just OK, but I really made them for peanut butter & chocolate loving Al – and he liked them. He forgot his cookie box when he left to drive back to the twins Sunday afternoon, but he’ll be passing through on the way to camp next Friday, so I stuck the box in the fridge – it’ll be perfect car food.
The other Dorie cookie I made is her jammers – the cookie she says came to her in a dream – sables topped wth jam and streusel. She sold them at her pop-up cookie stand, last week in NYC. This is truly a great cookie – in the movie, Sarabeth (who made the jam) says she wishes it were hers. I used the butter sables from Baking from my home to yours, two kinds of jam, American Spoon ginger pear, and Smuckers seedless raspberry – and streusel from my favorite King Arthur Flour blueberry crisp. I am jealous though – you’ll see in the movie that when Dorie et al were doing the production baking for the pop-up, they had rings to place around each cookie to keep it perfectly round and contain the jam and streusel.
