Sunday I needed to bring an appetizer or dessert to our local AWS Riesling tasting. I had some scheduling and logistical problems to overcome. The tasting was scheduled for 3PM and my son planned a combo Birthday-Fathers Day cookout for 5PM. I only have a 2-seat Toyota pickup, which my son would drive and pick up my mother-in-law for the cookout. That meant I had to have something I could fit in my backpack, along with 3 bottles of wine, so I could drive my motorcycle. I browsed through my file of downloaded recipes and found
Jenise's Espresso Shortbread. About halfway through the mixing, it occurred to me that I don't recall ever making cookies. My wife used to make wonderful cookies, especially for Christmas. She'd put them in coffee cans and hide them in the trunk of her car some the boys and I wouldn't eat them all before Christmas. Jenise's method of squashing chunks of the dough into the coarsely ground coffee sounds great, but wasn't conducive to my backpack, so I decided to roll out the dough (thinking Lorna Doones) and press in onto the coffee on 2 small cookie sheets. This probably would have worked fine if I had realized that since what I was baking was thinner than Jenise's I should have reduced the baking time. Then, just as the 40 minute time was up, the phone rang - it was my sister, calling to wish me a happy fathers day and birthday, so I forgot to get them out of the oven on time. Needless to say, they were partially burned. One tray was smoking, but not the other, which confirms my suspicion that I need to get a new range (I'm using my mother's Kenmore electric from the early 70's). I did manage to salvage enough from the non-smoking tray to take with me and tasted a few. They were good - not too sweet, a bit darker than I thought they should be, but I need to revisit these in the near future.
