Recipe #31: Italian Cookies

Behold: The LAST cookie recipe! Oh, I am so happy...!

I really struggled through this chapter - like I said in an earlier post, we are not cookie people. I don't come home from work dying for a gingernut and a cup of tea. I'm a cheese-and-crackers person (my secret food weakness!), and I can never say no to tomato chutney, camembert, crackers and pickled onions. Especially pickled onions... So it's easy to understand why I didn't have the motivation or the desire to be continually filling the cookie tin. Even Chris - who has the worlds biggest sweet tooth and can eat an ENTIRE fruit cake to himself - will forget all about the cookies sitting in the back of the pantry. But the end is here! Italian Cookies - delicate, cherry-topped, piped cookies. (Yes, piped... how exciting is this?!)

Now if there is one thing I have learned from this chapter, it is this: do NOT blindly trust Nigella's ingredient measurements when making cookies. Her butter to flour ratios seem waaaaay off and I really struggled in my last post to get those recipes right. So I was a little more prepared for it this time round...

 A 'cup' of butter. Seriously?!

I chopped that butter into oblivion and crammed in into a cup. CRAMMED it. Your silly measurements aren't getting the better of me this time Ms. Lawson! Muahahaha!

...Oh wait... Turns out maybe they are. This is what happened to my icing bag when I tried to pipe my cookies onto the tray:

 Who pipes cookies anyway? Pfft.

I really thought I had this one sussed. Just reading the recipe I knew it wasn't going to be right - I mean, 1 egg to two and a half cups of flour?! Unless you are using EMU eggs Nigella, that is not going to go through a piping bag without some issues. I really cut back on the flour, adding only half a cup at a time and I stopped at about 1 and 3/4 cups. It should have been runny as heck according to the recipe, but even being conservative with my measuring it was still just a little bit too far. DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN!

This is what happened to my second piping(oven) bag. 

And my third. 

The fourth and final attempt before I was going to wash it all down the sink.

I finally got there in the end. All I needed was the help of a little duct tape, and the addition of a little milk - well probably quite a lot in the end - to smooth the batter out and make it runny enough to squeeze through a tiny plastic nozzle. I think the first cookie took nearly a whole minute to squeeze out, and by the end of the batter my wrists were killing me and I had vowed never to pipe cookies again in my life. EVER.

But still - after all the effort, and the swearing, and the destruction of one bought and three home-made piping bags - I have to admit they do look amazing. Which is almost satisfying enough to make me want to go through it all again, with a couple of adaptions to the recipe. Almost.

And they even left pretty little swirls on the baking paper, how cute is this? (Confession: tempted to let it dry and use it for wrapping paper. Inspired? Or just plain cheap and kind of weird?)

They looked so great in fact, that I taste-tested the very first batch out of the oven, before the second half of them had even been squeezed out onto the next tray. They are AMAZING. The complete finishing touch - the flavour and consistency of the glacé cherries perfectly complements the dryness and light sweetness of the cookie itself. Perfect partners - just like the jam in a Shrewsberry.

Case-in-point: I have devoured about five of these since I started typing out this post. Scratch that, I'm up to six.

Chris' verdict is on the way folks! Watch this space!

Update: Chris came home from work with a 4/5 rating for these ones! He kindly informed me though, that he would have given me a 5/5 if only they had at least 3 cherries per cookies. So generous.