The weekend is almost here, and I figure we could all use a liberal dose of HAPPINESS right about now. Maybe you’re cranky from work, the lack of beach weather (it goes that way sometimes in October), or just because you’ve stubbed your toe 5 times in the last 3 days…. well, these cookies are easily the best cure.
I dubbed them “Happiness Cookies” the first time I made them – they are instantly cheering, sunny, warm, and unbelievably delicious. The only sad thing about them is when you get down to the last 1 or 2 of a batch. Luckily, more can be whipped up in about 45 minutes, including baking time.
A few months back, I was faced with the dilemma of making David Leibovitz’s Salty Peanut Butter Cookies with Caramel or Alice Medrich’s Salted Peanut Butter Toffee Cookies. Similar not just in name, but in ingredient list and likely outcome, I took the road more-oft traveled and chose the recipe with an accompanying picture, David’s Salty Peanut Butter Cookies with Caramel. For those of you that read the post, you will recall that I was less than thrilled with the outcome. It wasn’t bad – it is a sweet and salty cookie covered in caramel – but, it was a bit too dry and not sweet enough for my taste, and it left me wondering what Alice’s cookie would have been like.
As an aside, why is it that we can only conceive of a recipe being good if it has a scrumptious picture by its side. Surely, there have been some spectacular dishes made with no SLR camera sitting conveniently nearby. It requires a leap of faith, but I dare everyone that reads this post to go into their cookbooks and pick one recipe that does NOT have a recipe accompanying it. Some of my favorite dishes have been those tucked away obscurely into the recesses of my cookbooks, and I never would have discovered them had I been photo-only prejudiced.
I was a little troubled the other day…. while I desperately did not want to turn my oven to 375° on a day so humid you could practically bottle the humidity, I really, REALLY wanted a ginger scone and did not want the store or cafe-bought variety, which tend to be nothing like a real scone.
Well, as fate would have it, my scones (yes, I did cave and turn the oven on) were also nothing like a real scone, but, in fact, turned out to be more like the perfect ginger cookie. Now, before you think that all of this balmy Boston weather has gone to my head and turned me into some sort of ego-maniac, dropping superlatives like “best” and “perfect” with nary a thought for accuracy, let me tell you that this cookie is worthy of any and all laudations that you care to throw at it.
The Northeast suffered one of its erratic weather spells last week, casting the lot of us into dreary, dull raininess for nearly five solid days. Five days of nothing but Wellies, wet hair, and wistful remembrances of sunny Spain. Clearly, a little pick-me-up was in order….
Nutella smeared between two discs of sunny shortbread seemed like just the cure for five days of oppressive rain…. and, wouldn’t you know it, these shortbread sandwiches snapped me right out of my rainy-day-blues mood.
