Not sure if I have ever mentioned my love of honey. I absolutely adore it! Some of my relatives in the Black Forest have been bee keepers (as a hobby) for a few generations so it’s always a treat to visit — and sneak home a jar of good raw honey. These cookies accentuate the honey flavor, and combine that with pistachios, actually give it a bit of a Middle Eastern flavor. Yum!
Browsing Tag
nuts
Here’s a little bit of a riff on your standard peanut butter kiss cookies — Almond Butter Blossoms! While peanut butter is ok, I like almonds better, so I thought I would try these out. The Hershey’s Kisses are also the ones with almonds in them, so a little surprise inside. Easy to make and this recipe makes a bunch (it can be halved).
This is a new type of Christmas Cookie. You see, every year, I experiment with one sort. Sometimes they are a success, sometimes not. And sometimes, while I love the cookies themselves, they are too much of a pain in the neck to make +/- 300 of them, so they don’t get included the next year. This year, I decided to go with a distinctly non-German type recipe — if anything, these Rosemary Apricot Pinecone, with Toasted Pinenuts, almost have a Mediterranean feel to them. They are not too sweet and definitely have a rosemary finish. Most of the sweetness does come from the apricot jam. While the verdict is out on whether they will become part of my regular rotation, they are quite lovely.
Nougatkipferl have never been my favorite of my Christmas Cookies to make. There are a number of things wrong with the recipe that I have been using for years, not the least of which is that nougat is really hard to find in the US. Substituting Nutella has usually worked, however this year, Nutella’s ingredient / composition changed somewhat (to much controversy, actually), and that made it more difficult to bake with. So, after a fail or two with the dough, I started from scratch and came up with this recipe. It has a little bit of corn syrup in it, which is not my favorite thing, but seemed to help with the dough’s consistency when I was rolling it out.
I was in the mood to continue the “Harvest” trend here on this here website, but somehow, I am not overly pleased with these cookies. They taste really nice — chocolate-dipped chocolate sugar cookies, with just the right amount of toasted pecans, but somehow, these little squirrels don’t look right to me. Next time, maybe I’ll have the little critters holding a nut, and maybe even paint eyes on them. At any rate, still wanted to post them here. Enjoy.