The honey florentines seemed a little bit off... too sticky and not crunchy enough. I wanted to try adding chocolate to them. It seemed like a good idea at the time... but then I realized that I didn't have enough time to let the chocolate harden enough so it wouldn't get smeared, or even (if I were overly ambitious) to attempt to temper the chocolate so it wouldn't melt at body temperature. So in the end, these were a failure. Lawrence and I ended up eating these.
The Gingersnap Palmiers were interesting. They weren't completely made from scratch as they called for frozen puff pastry dough. The sauce used to glaze the dough had raw grated ginger, molasses, and black pepper in it. After the dough was brushed with glaze and rolled up, it had to be wrapped and frozen for a few hours. Then, it was sliced. My first batch, I let it bake for slightly too long because I was pressed for time and had to shower. I was mad at myself for making such a stupid mistake. These failed too, but I still ended up eating them. I think the molasses glaze made them look darker and they weren't actually as burnt as they looked. I didn't take any pictures of these. I did bake more later, and those turned out beautiful. I brought some to Lawrence's family's Thanksgiving dinner. I also gave a bag to my parents when we went out for my brother's birthday. Sadly, I forgot to take pictures of the good ones!
Third was the cornmeal thyme cookies. I had to run out on Thanksgiving morning to buy the fresh thyme and dried currants used in these cookies. Other than those ingredients, these were a breeze to make. I used a medium grind cornmeal that I had in the fridge for a while. These cookies were surprisingly good, though the cornmeal was a little too coarse. I wrapped these up and gave some to my aunt and uncle as well as my parents. They don't look particularly great, but they were interesting to eat.
Lastly, today I tried making a classic chewy chocolate chip cookie. There are three kinds of chocolate chip cookies in the Martha Stewart book - soft and chewy, thin and crispy, and dense and cakey. I made the first because that's how Lawrence likes his chocolate chip cookies. At first I thought the butter might have melted too much before I started mixing in the sugar but the cookies didn't spread much so I guess not! They looked weird when taking them out of the oven - thick, brown along the bottom and edges, but undercooked-looking on top. What caused the thickness, I think, was the large sized chocolate chips I used. There was also an over-abundance of chips. I halved the recipe as I only had one cup of chocolate chips so I only made 16 cookies. Some of them also may have been a little large as the original recipe says it makes 3 dozen. Sorry the light in this picture is pretty bad. I would make color adjustments, but I don't think it would make these pasty-looking cookies any prettier.
