You’ve no doubt heard of “The Perils of Pauline”. This journal entry is more aptly titled, “The Baking Blunders of Beverly”. Ok, so it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
I’ve had this recipe hanging around for some time now and I finally bought the cranberries and cardamom (have you seen the price of cardamom?) with the intention of making them soon. Soon came this afternoon. I had never made cookies where I had to refrigerate the dough, roll it out, roll it up and refrigerate again.
The recipe is properly called Cranberry Cardamom & Citrus Pinwheel Cookies. I read through the recipe (apparently very quickly) and started.
Combining the cranberries, nuts, brown sugar, nutmeg and cardamom in the food processor was no problem. This was set aside.
The next step was to beat the butter then add the granulated sugar, baking powder, and salt. Then add the eggs and orange peel and keep beating. Then it said to add the rest of the flour. What did it mean “the rest of the flour?” There had been no mention of flour at all up until now except in the list of ingredients. What? Ok. So I dumped in the flour and did the best I could. The dough was extremely stiff…so much so, I turned it out of the bowl and kneaded it in by hand.
Then I took this blob of dough, wrapped it in plastic wrap and put it into the refrigerator.
I turned to the counter and saw the cranberry mixture sitting there. Oh, crap. I forgot to add that. Out of the refrigerator came the blob of dough and into the mixing bowl where I proceeded to begin kneading the mixture into the dough. That’s when I remembered that this mixture was the FILLING! Too late.
I reread the recipe and noticed it said to divide the dough into two halves before wrapping each half in plastic wrap and refrigerating for an hour or so. Oh, alright! I cut the blob in half, wrapped each one in plastic and put them in the fridge (and hoped they would disappear before I needed to do anything else).
A couple hours went by and they were still there, so I took them out and proceeded to roll them (one by one) into as flat a 10” x 10” square as I could. Since I didn’t have any fill to spread (remember I made it part of the dough) I just rolled the dough out then rolled it up and wrapped it again in plastic and back into the fridge they went (maybe this time they would disappear).
They didn’t!
As directed (finally did something as directed) I cut the rolled-up dough in ¼” wide pieces and baked as directed (ah ha…the second thing I did as directed). The recipe said the yield would be 60, but I got about 70…the difference being, I suppose, the fact that the filling was part of the dough!
There were several casualties as some of the cookies crumbled as I removed them from the cookie sheet. These went into a dish to be eaten as I baked the rest. Not bad!
They taste ok. Good enough for me to enjoy with my afternoon coffee. Since I used gluten free flour (as suggested in the recipe) I can eat them without feeling guilty about them affecting my thyroid function.
Would I feed them to someone else? That depends. If it was someone who knew me well and loved me anyway…probably. Otherwise…no.
Will I ever make them again? That’s a big PROBABLY NOT! After I finished baking, I Googled the recipe and lo and behold, I found the corrected recipe where it mentioned adding flour.
