When strolling through the super market or waiting to check out, I am often tempted by the racks of beautiful cooking magazines positioned near the gum and candy. Look at the beautiful pictures! It says I only need seven ingredients for dinner! This one has a holiday baking theme! Inevitably, I give in, buy them, and then spend a half hour thumbing through them while watching the West Wing. I then deposit them on top of an already-impressive pile of similar magazines, and go back to my life. However, in the spirit of my new commitment to adhering to recipes, I decided today to choose a recipe from the stack and make some sort of Christmas cookie.
Never again. Apparently this particular magazine did not have an editor that believed in recipe testing or proofreading. Mary Berry, Julia Child, Ina Garten, I’m sorry. I will never stray from your beautifully bound recipe books again.
I decided to make Chocolate Espresso Fingers from a Holiday-themed magazine from a few years ago. They looked pretty in the picture, I already had all of the listed ingredients, and I have a rather dependent relationship with caffeine that is both unhealthy and mandatory to ensure my happiness. I should have known that this project was going to be a problem from the beginning, however, because the first thing I did in the kitchen was open the lazy susan to look for chocolate, knock into the bottle of espresso powder, and smash it all over the floor, terrifying my cat and causing the entire house to smell like the inside of a bag of coffee. But I persevered.
Step one: make the cookie dough. The first direction was to chop the toasted hazelnuts in the food processor. I should have aborted this entire venture right then and there, because of course there were no directions on how to toast the nuts. Under the broiler? In a non-stick pan? Should I turn the toaster on its side and dump the nuts in with the bread crumbs? I used my common sense and went with a non-stick pan. I then gave them a whirl in Helga, my food processor, and set them aside to make the batter, which was mostly sugar and butter.

It was at this point that I noticed that the directions had ANOTHER major hole: they did not spell out what to do with the nuts. Was I supposed to add them to the creamed butter and sugar? Did they go in after the floor? Who knows, really. After briefly considering just eating them with a spoon, I went with my gut and stirred them into the batter last, but it was hard to know if that was really right… nuts have a lot of oil and they can mess up baked goods if not handled correctly. I got out my new giant cookie sheet that I couldn’t pass up at my favorite place, the fancy Kroger, shaped the batter into little logs, and baked them for nine minutes.

I was actually very pleased with the way the cookies themselves turned out. One or two might have accidentally been broken during their removal from the cookie sheet and then were eaten as a means of quality control. And they might have been delicious and buttery. But I couldn’t say for sure.
At this point, I started working on melting the chocolate to dip them in, and this is when things went sour quickly.
The directions in the recipe said to melt chocolate chips and some butter in the microwave, stirring occasionally, and then dip the cookies in half way. Yeah, no. The microwave was not working, not even a little. I fell back on what I knew was the right way to work with chocolate and set up a little double boiler:

Right after this picture was taken, I discovered that the reason that we don’t use a ceramic bowl that is smaller than the pan of water is that you will slosh water into the chocolate, causing it to seize. I then tried again, but this time with a bar of semi-sweet bakers chocolate:

I have always dismissed these bars of chocolate as poor quality and unreliable, but I admit that that was very very wrong. I tried to do this stupid chocolate four times, and this is the only time it worked. After it melted down, I dipped half the cookies into it and left them to set on some wax paper. (The recipe said that this would be enough chocolate for all of cookies. More vicious lies.) . I then tried to melt chocolate again, using nestle chocolate chips. That one seized up again and became grainy.
At this point, I decided to pull out the big guns and reached to the back of the pantry for the girardelli chocolate chips. These were the expensive chocolate chips. They were in the pretty bag. The name sounds European, and therefore automatically better. This chocolate would melt into a delicious smooth sauce.
Nope.
I then gave up and decided to live with half of them uncovered. Don’t worry, they still taste amazing. I mean, anything with that much butter is going to taste good. Also, notice the way that I cleverly arranged the cookies with the messed-up ones on the bottom, so that this picture looks nice. Have to keep up appearances, after all.

Fun activity: try to figure out which cookie I angrily smeared grainy chocolate on with a knife before giving up.
Next week: back to the comforting arms of Paul Hollywood.


I miss Mary Berry! Loved your cookie story 🙂