I contend that Martha Stewart booby traps her recipes – it’s usually not in the ingredients. It’s usually in the method – she gives an instruction that causes the recipe to fail, like the recipe for baby artichoke quiches, where she said to mix the wine & cream for the sauce together and heat them – which makes them curdle. Or did for me anyways. This year, the December Martha Stewart Living has a recipe for pistachio spritz cookies. Ground pistachios in a vanilla butter spritz cookie with a dash of almond extract – what’s not to like? The hinky instruction is to add water to the dough, after the flour has been mixed in, which in my experience, makes dough sticky and tough. So I decided to use less flour, and leave out the water. OK. But then it came time to press the cookies through my spritz cookie gun. I had ground the pistachios fine in the food processor, with the powdered sugar, until I had what was apparently pistachio flour. I bought a new blade for the food processor this cookie season, too. But when I tried to press the cookies, pieces of pistachio kept clogging the gun. I ended up using the plainest, round disk, and ended up with simple rounds with a ragged edge. If I make these next year – and I think I will, and amp up the almond extract, and salt – I am going to scoop them and press flat with the bottom of a glass. That will give the same shape, more consistently, and more easily. I like the mini-Hershey’s kisses on the top, but they are evil – mini-kisses, already unwrapped, in a bag, from which large handfuls can go directly into mouth …
I made the pecan bars on Thursday night, along with the pistachio spritz. Last year I got fooled by a pecan bar recipe in Food & Wine – they had a spread with really nice photography of flat pies, but they came out too squishy, and a little burnt around the edges. This year, I went back to my standard pecan bar recipe, from Silver Palette. And I made a lot – two half sheet pans. No problems except I never can cut the bar cookies as evenly as I wish I could – but oh, well, people want big ones and small ones, right?
Friday I had a funny back and forth day – I went to work, and managed to get through a sizable percentage of email by noon. Mark came to meet me, and we walked home, and I baked the spoon cookies – or most of them anyhow. I had to go back to campus to meet with a candidate for a position, as part of their excruciating academic interview, which include a presentation, and meeting with all kinds of people, and meals. But when I got there, there’d been a room change, of which I was not told, and I missed the meeting. It meant a nice 45 minute or so walk for me, so by the time I got home I wasn’t even mad. The oven had barely cooled off, so I baked the last three trays of spoons, while checking in with my classes, and when they were all out of the oven, I recorded a lecture. Mark and I went off to the Madison Symphony Christmas concert, which was pretty fun this year. They positioned Irving Berlin’s White Christmas next to an original by Madison’s Leotha Stanley, The Spirit of Christmas is Love, near the end of the second half, right where I would’ve been ready to say, “OK, enough”.
Home and jammed the spoon cookies – ended up with 172, (341 little spoonfuls, paired up for the sandwiches) a good number. I didn’t get to bed till about quarter to 1:00 so I’m taking it easy Saturday morning – in bed till 7:20, and drinking coffee in pajamas at the computer. Gonna go for a walk, and then go into baking mode – I am planning 6 kinds today: Chocolate spritz, peanut butter sandwiches (made small this year), coconut cookies, fig bars, a chocolate peppermint I have been eying for years, chocolate toffee bars and then maybe raspberry almond bars, and make the dough for the boomerangs. I’ll let you know how it works out.
And, oh, yea – season appropriate current iPhone wallpaper –
