But really, a Happy Easter to everyone!
In other news, the day before (yesterday, or otherwise known as "Saturday") was my guy's and I's first anniversary. Woohoo! Of course we're poor right now so it was pizza in a cute little joint east of here, and afterwards we rented a rom-com that didn't make either of us vomit. AAAND I got to show off said boyfriend to my huge flippin' extended family earlier that afternoon at a big get-together way outside the city. We both survived, pretty much unscathed.
Today for Easter my guy and I puttered around downtown Milwaukee for some hi-jinks down by the lakefront. Then I made him drive until we found a little hole-in-the-wall Mediterranean bakery. There I got us a little combo package of baklava and other sweets. There were these little honey filled donuts that we tried. Kyle was so excited when he saw them, less excited when he tasted them. Apparently his taste buds are less adventurous than mine, and after two bites I had the whole container all to myself. Unfortunately, I don't recall the name of those little donuts. But I noticed a hint of rosewater in with the honey, which inspired my newest cookie creation.
And so, today I bring you all a light and delicious little bite-sized cookie. If a warm spring day should have a flavor, I would think these guys would be it.
Rosy Honey-Lemon Cookies
- 1 1/2 C flour
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 1/8 tsp salt
- 1/2 C (1 stick) butter, softened
- 1/2 C sugar
- 2 tbsp honey
- 1 egg
- 1/4 tsp rosewater
- 1/2 tsp lemon extract
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
- Sift together flour, baking soda and salt in a small bowl and set aside.
- Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
- Scrape the bowl and add honey, egg, rosewater and extract and mix until well blended.
- Slowly incorporate flour mixture, do not over-mix.
- Form small balls of dough using your palms and stick on a ungreased baking sheet. Pick any size you like. If you're thinking bite-sized like I did, go with maybe 2 tsp each ball.
- Bake 5-7 minutes or until they just start to get a little golden brown around the edges.
- Let sit for a couple minutes on the pan before moving to cooling rack to cool down completely before decorating.
Ok, so I thought I'd cover these babies in powdered sugar. Pretty, yes. Then I thought about using some leftover fondant to make pretty little flowers for each cookie. And had I wanted to spend several hours on the task, I might have decorated more than four cookies. As it stands, getting fondant to stick to a cookie covered in powdered sugar sucks, and takes too much time. All you really need to do is dab water on the spot you want to put the fondant, but as I lack a set of paint brushes for the task, it just got to be a pain.
Then I tried melting white chocolate and coloring it pretty spring colors. I thought I'd do the ol' zip-loc piping bag technique and get my flower petals that way. It worked well for the centers, because it was only one dot, but when I'm making five more dots around it, I guess my technique was a little off and it got more amoeba-ish than anything. To make matters worse, my "purple" turned out really oddly grey, and I cut the hole for the blue piping bag too small, so when I tried to force more frosting out of it... the bag burst, and blue white chocolate exploded all over my cookie. I decided to call it quits and just took a picture of the three decent looking fondant flowers I had.
So what's the lesson? If you want to use fondant on a cookie, or pipe frosting on a cookie, don't cover said cookie in powdered sugar first. If you want to pipe white chocolate, wait till it's a little cooler so the thickness isn't so runny and hard to work with. Also, don't try to force frosting out of a baggie/piping bag, it could (will most definitely) burst on you. Also, liquid food coloring just plain sucks, and as soon as I can I'm investing in the gel stuff.
On that note, I hope everyone has safe and happy holiday!
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