Treats for appetites of every size
I don’t think anything wears you out like hiking up a mountain in the snow. Getting up early, layering up, climbing, and slide-walking back down really take it out of you. Though I do think I’m officially a winter hiking convert.
You know you’ve found some great friends when they show up at your apartment, start rooting around in your cabinets, and ask if there’s enough time for them to bake a batch of cookies before taking off on a 6 day vacation sure to be full of kitchen time. That’s what happened on Wednesday when a couple friends from college showed up (Happy Birthday, Marj!).
Law school exam period is this weird time where days stop having meaning and everything you do is with the goal of simply surviving. I get up, go to the library, come home, sleep, and repeat. It could be Saturday or Tuesday for all I know.
Everyone needs a recipe that they can make on a moment’s notice with ingredients they always have on hand. That’s not necessarily what I was looking for this week with this recipe, but I was definitely pleasantly surprised when it worked out.
I’ve been on an uncharacteristically non-chocolate kick with desserts for the past couple of weeks. Something about the beginning of summer makes me think of light and fruity desserts. Which I guess is good if you’d (like me) spent the previous 9 months making heavy and rich desserts.
I apologize that you won’t be able to make this. Because there is no way you also have the following box tucked away, unused, in a random drawer of your kitchen:
Remember last week when I was saying some weeks I have loads of free time and don’t want to bake? This week I was the opposite – I had a free morning and decided why not make some cookies! Of course, I had a recipe in mind, and usually that means I can’t not make it, so it wasn’t that difficult of a decision.
I really like cookbooks from famous bakeries. They always use some new technique or ratio that I never see in recipes online, and they unashamedly own their copious use butter. There’s also something nice about having a physical cookbook – crumbs get stuck in the pages, well-loved recipes open easily, you can flip through the pictures until something jumps out – you don’t get any of that online.
It has been a long time since I’ve seriously considered not baking on a Sunday. It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I spent all day working on a paper. I still hadn’t started reading for my other classes. And I was tired. But then I remembered what I had told myself at the beginning of law school: if I didn’t have time to bake, I was taking myself too seriously. There really isn’t an excuse not to take a couple hours out of my weekend to do something I enjoy, and I really had been dying to try the …
This week’s recipe was very much a learning experience. Some important lessons: Whole Foods doesn’t sell regular shortening. So I had to get some weird coconut and palm oil variety. Pro: it was yellow. You can melt shortening. As a former science teacher, this shouldn’t have been as surprising to me as it was. Orange zest has a tendency to stick to the attachment of your stand mixer like hair instead of incorporating into the batter. Even if you fully submerge and douse a cookie in powdered sugar, after it bakes it will still look like you did no such …