Have a Cookie Bake Off Exchange
We’re in a new year and the pandemic is still here and plenty of us are still working from home, so did anyone actually make New Year’s Resolutions to lose weight? I don’t think so.
We’re in a new year and the pandemic is still here and plenty of us are still working from home, so did anyone actually make New Year’s Resolutions to lose weight? I don’t think so.
Christy Williams started her home-baking business, Little Chunk of Goodness, because, she said, “I couldn’t afford groceries.” Williams was working two jobs, one of which was cashiering and doing dishes at a bakery. “Customers kept coming in and asking if we had royal icing cookies. I had no idea what they were, but there was obviously a huge demand for it. So I Googled it.”
Being out on your own is fun. But what about when you’re invited to a party and you’re asked to bring a homemade dessert and you have no idea how to do that? Instead of calling dear old mom, why not learn how to bake by yourself?
I chose these cookies because I love anything with pecans, cream cheese and almond extract. For the crushed pecans, I used pecan pieces from Heggy’s Nut Shop. I rolled the balls of dough in them, pressing on the pieces to make sure they stayed in place.
I’ve made this recipe many times, and it comes out different almost every single time. The key is making sure the butter is properly cooled.
I swapped out the lemon extract in the recipe for fresh lemon juice, using the ratio recommended by the author (1 tablespoon of lemon juice = 1/2 teaspoon of lemon extract).
I used Swiss Miss dark chocolate variety for the cocoa powder. I needed almost 13 minutes of bake time for best results.
I handled my butter the normal way (aka just dropping the two softened sticks into the sugar), and my cookies still turned out like the pictures in terms of dimensions.
I baked mine for nine minutes instead of seven, which is what it took for the cookies to feel set on the sides and soft in the middle. I left them on the baking sheet for maybe another three minutes before moving them to a tray to finish cooling, and they turned out perfectly.
I’m a big fan of coffee, but I absolutely hate the jitters it gives me, so I was excited to make these espresso cookies. They did not disappoint.