Last week, I did my Christmas (cookie) marathon, constructing and
baking 4 different batches of cookies through the week, and another 4
on Saturday. It’s not like there’s a lack of other things
going on this month — I just broke them up into stages and wove the
different stages (dough, shaping, resting, baking, decorating) in and
around other things.
Usually, the star performer in my Christmas cookie plate is Alton
Brown’s Chocolate
Peppermint Pinwheel. I’ve been known to (have to) make more
than one batch of them in a season.
This year, it was a good cookie gone very, very bad…
Note how the chocolate layer is broken/breaking off.
I’m still not really sure what happened, though I have a
suspicion. The cookies are made by making one batch of butter
cookie dough, splitting it in half, adding peppermint flavouring to
half of it and chocolate to the rest. I.e., the base cookie dough
is the same in the whole cookie.
When I went to roll the doughs out, the chocolate dough was hard. It actually clattered
when it hit the counter. This was straight out of the fridge, so
I waited to see if it would behave any better when warmed. My
suspicion is that I didn’t split the dough evenly enough, and that
threw off the ratio of melted chocolate to dough in the chocolate
segment. So, it was hard chocolate hitting the counter. I
wound up having to heat the dough in the microwave (for 30 seconds) to
be able to roll it out — but it never behaved like a cohesive whole,
as is witnessed by the broken bits above.
Oh, well. Still tasty. But I don’t think I can put them in
Christmas cookie gifts!
The beauty of doing 8 batches is that, for every failure such as the
above, there are successes… The raspberry
jam-filled, chocolate dipped ones seem to have come out okay.
And, the ginger bread condescended to let me roll it out and cut it
this year.
