I found this recipe on Epicurious a few weeks back and knew that I wanted to make it as we got close to the holiday season. The pictures on the site showed a very festive cookie, lots of bright red from the cranberries and green from the pistachios, and I happen to like both flavors. The cookie dough was not difficult to make, in fact, it came together rather quickly, but I wasn't happy with the texture of the dough. This is a short-bread type base which means you don't want to over work the dough once you add the dry ingredients, but it also means that the dough tends to be dry. There are techniques to mastering short bread doughs, and I'm not quite there yet. One of the advantages of a short bread though, is that you make the dough one day, shape it into a log and then throw it into the fridge for a few hours. They can be sliced and baked later in the same day, or in the next few days.
I had some problems slicing the dough because the pistachios would catch the knife (one of Chris' very sharp knives) and the fragile dough would break apart. In fact, there were only 3 or 4 whole cookies in the entire batch. I know it wasn't the knife, so either I under (or over) mixed the dough, or pretty much every one who makes these cookies will run into the same problem.
The recipe is here.
2 comments:
i was kind of skeptical. i like pistachios by themselves well enough, but i'm not crazy about them, and rarely am i a fan of pistachio-things. i quite liked this, though. i love shortbread cookies (Pecan Sandies being my favorite commercial cookie), so that's a big reason why. but i like the salty/sweet/buttery taste of these. worth doing--and eating--again :) -jb
brown sugar-pecan shortbreads? they're on my short list too... :)
Post a Comment