If you’ve been keeping up with the cookie-palooza, today brings an end to all the recipes that were slated for trial and error with the tasters.
The three today makes around a dozen cookie recipes shared this season. That’s a lot of butter and flour foisted upon you.
It was my sole mission to keep you in the loop on cookies to try during these pre-celebration days of heavy-duty baking. Mission accomplished.
These three were the last to be taste-tested and mother-approved. The Raspberry Brownies basically made the grade with the McElwee test kitchen.
One reviewer believed the raspberry influenced her negative assessment. Others liked it but thought it would be just as good minus any jam.
It’s a fudge-y brownie, marbled with raspberry jam, topped with a layer of whipped chocolate raspberry ganache, garnished with a fresh raspberry. Notice a theme here? Did I mention raspberry?
OK, so technically it isn’t a cookie. I confess that I hoped to slide it through, masquerading as a cookie, by plunking the raspberry on top to distract attention.
And double OK because the Butter Pecan Cheesecake Bars don’t qualify as a cookie either.
Although it doesn’t have “cookie” in the title, it does have butter, cream, cream cheese, toasted pecans, and bits of brickle throughout on an easy base accomplished with a cake mix. Crunchy and creamy at the same time.
I hoped their richness would make you forget the bars aren’t one of those legit, dunk-into-milk crisp discs we can call “cookie.”
But maybe I redeemed myself with the third offering. This one is the real McCoy, a base very similar to the chocolate chip cookie dough, minus the chocolate. They get stuffed with butterscotch chips, chopped cashews and more brickle.
The palooza cookies also haven’t been among the shaped then sugared, iced, piped, flooded and decorated cutesy reindeer, Santa, Christmas tree, snowman, gingerbread persons (is that PC?), or Hanukkah symbols. (I have the cutters for them.)
Those finished works of art are all attractive and I marvel at the craftiness of the bakers, but I think taking that avenue looks like a lot of work. . .
We’ll just call the trio of recipes today as hard to resist. Try them and see.
