After a few weeks of travel and stressful catch-up from vacation, I finally had the opportunity to bake something this morning. How refreshing! It really is stress relief, even if I did get up at 4:30 on a Saturday morning. These florentines are simply lovely: sweet and crisp and almost like a nut brittle. Not to be missed!
Whenever I am excited or happy about an upcoming event or activity, I have this habit of being super efficient and I get everything that I possibly need to do before said event done as soon as and as quickly as possible. I’ve always called this “pushing time” with the irrational logic of “If everything is done, the happy thing will happen sooner.” I’ve done this since I was a little girl, and then usually got so excited that I would make myself sick (I guess that sometimes still happens, with my propensity of getting migraines). But I digress.
So, I’m going on vacation this evening, and by Wednesday, I was done with everything (at least on a personal level; work I have less control over the deadlines). So last night I was twiddling my thumbs and making myself crazy, thus I decided to do something calming and well, yummy.
Somehow in this mess of a week, I never did get around to making anything that I wanted to show you. That is not to say that I didn’t make anything, but they are all in-progress recipe experiments, that still need some work. But thees cookies, these are the bomb. As you all know, I have a thing for cardamom, so I thought that I would try a new twist on the traditional chocolate chip cookie and ended up with these, with a slight Middle Eastern turn of all things: Cardamom Cherry White Chocolate Chip Cookies with Toasted Pine Nuts and Sea Salt. Turned out heavenly. Pillowy and sweet, with just the right ratio of sweet and savory.
Another weekend, another cookie experiment. I had actually intended to make a completely different type of cookie today — blueberry lemon pinwheel cookies — but my heart wasn’t in it apparently and I has a spectacular cookie fail. So I started from scratch, let my mind wander and ended up with these. If you can’t find the fine shread unsweeted desicated coconut, the shreaded sweetended will do as well. Simple to make and is fairly small batch (ended up with about 36 cookies).
Took a couple of days off from making things this week after the marathon baking week last week. And of course work was busy at the end of the quarter so I wouldn’t have had time anyway. But I did decide to make these little gems, which seem to me to be rather spring-like, even though nothing about oatmeal or apricots says spring really. They are super easy to make, pretty hard to mess up and taste great even for breakfast (there is that oatmeal in the equation).