My first recipe post in a long while 🙂 A bit of a baking project, and one that used pantry items I already had on hand. Which means these were date cookies, and not fig cookies. Because who just has figs in their pantry?

The recipe comes from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything: Vegetarian. I love a Mark Bittman recipe- I’ve been a fan since I used to watch him in the early and fleeting days of vodcasts (remember those?) on my very first iPod. He would record short cooking videos for the NY Times, and he always seemed so approachable. His food was simple, straightforward, and delicious.

This recipe is also simple, straightforward, and delicious. And yet, it didn’t turn out as I had hoped. The date filling was beautiful- thick and glossy, and an intense date flavor with a bit of brightness from the orange juice. For me, on this first time go-around on this recipe, the problem was in the cookie dough. The flavor was buttery and lemony, but it felt too wet and sticky as I worked to shape it into a disk for chilling. As I rolled it out, it kept breaking apart, it was soft and very fragile, and seemed to melt the instant my fingers tried to work it. The dough stuck to the table, and to the dough scraper, and yet, not to itself, which prevented me from really sealing the date filling inside. And so through the rips and tears and faulty patch jobs came bits of jammy date goodness.

I struggle with dough. I don’t have any kind of dough recipe as part of my regular food rotation, and it shows. This recipe, however, is one I would delight in practicing. I already have a list of improvements for my next attempt:

1. use unsalted butter
2. time the creaming of the butter and sugar- more care here in general to not overcream
3. add/adjust flour as necessary
4. chill for longer, 90 minutes-120 minutes
5. roll the dough thinner

So, I did not excel in the execution of these cookies, but lessons were learned, and I’m already looking forward to trying this again. I feel a bit shy posting the pictures- the poor, clumsy things. They really do look a mess. Try not to judge them by their shocking uneveness and slightly overbakedness. This is a classic ugly delicious sort of situation here. Which will only be improved by dedicated practice. I’m up for it.