COCO COOKS

On the 8th Day of Christmas Cookies Glamah baked for me Maida Heatter’s Chocolate Cookies with Gin-Soaked Raisins.If you have been keeping up with my posts until now you see I name every cookie at the point like I’m singing the 12 days of Christmas. But with this long title and the hour I’m typing this ,I will pass. Now we don’t keep Gin in the house. But we did buy some when in the Bahamas to take advantage of the great duty free price and make our new favorite cocktail. I was intrigued by this recipe because it called for Gin soaked raisins. I can see soaking raisins in Rum , or even Whisky, but Gin! I even googled Gin soaked golden raisins and found out they are a legendary home cure for arthritis! Maida , who is one of the leading cookie experts in the world, knew what she was doing. This recipe was published in December 2000 and is described as crunchy on the outside with a rich gooey center. It’s is a most unusual recipe asking for you to butter and flour your baking sheets, soak your raisins for at least 8 hours, uses only egg whites, and doesn’t have any fat in the dough.I didn’t have the pecans Maida called for, so I used walnuts in the same way, toasted and chopped and they worked wonderfully. I also used the only Cocoa I had which was Hershey’s Special Dark. I was scared with this dough as it was a sticky, drying mass that you had to work quickly with. Imagine mixing dry ingredients with just a few egg whites ands nuts and raisins. The cookies baked up wonderfully and imparted a heavenly chocolate smell. They are easy to remove from the pan. Once cooled the result was a pleasant surprise. I haven’t had a cookie like this before. You don’t taste the gin at all, but they warn the effect may kick in. Might I say this cookie went over very well as well on my holiday cookie trays. So keep this cookie away from the kiddies. What we have here is a legal cookie with gin soaked substance.

On the 7th day of Christmas Cookies Glamah baked for me Chocolate Wafers,Viennese Vanilla Crescents, Bizcochitos(Anise Cookies), Brown Butter Cookies,Chocolate Meringue Biscuits, Benne Wafers, and Navettes Sucrees. Yes we are halfway into this cookie thing. By now we may seem calm and collected on our posts, but we are hitting some roadblocks ,and extreme cookie anxiety. Did I mention Certain Someone thinks I’m completely cookie crazed and is getting annoyed .I had to remind him I wont be blogging fro the rest of December after this because I will be in Germany without access to Internet.Thankfully the pleasure on the recipients faces makes this worth while for me. It is a learning experience in what works and doesn’t in baking, and most important accurate recipe writing. As I said yesterday I took two types of cookies to work and they were gone in 60 minutes. I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be. Even people who don’t like sweets complimented the Viennese Vanilla Crescents and Chocolate Wafers. Gourmet first published this recipe in the 1950’s. They say they were ‘quite smitten with wafer cookies”. If you looking for a dough that chills overnight that you can slice or cut out, this is for you! I did not have the breakfast cocoa the recipe called for, but used Hershey’s Special Dark Cocoa. That’s why these look more like dark chocolate wafers. The wafers bake up buttery and crisp. The flavor with the dark cocoa was reminiscent of a Oreo without the filling. I don’t know about you, but that was always my favorite part.