After my cinnamon roll tests, I
should have been prepared for failure. However, since the pinwheel cookie
recipes on my spreadsheet were so overwhelmingly similar, I was 90% sure that
my first attempt would be a success.
I was wrong.
I whipped together the recipe
last night since my curiosity was killing me. I decided to do sloppy pinwheels
since I just basically wanted to see what it was like to mix and roll out this
dough. The dough was very easy to work with and I was pretty happy with the
appearance, since I didn’t even try to make it look good.
This was my result:
HOWEVER. Taste: bland. No
chocolate to speak of. Texture: too cakey and chewy. Bubbly on the surface.
Spread too much.
Major disappointment.
This morning I remembered that
I had a Cooks Illustrated cookie recipe for refrigerator cookies. When I found
it (”Icebox Cookies” from Holiday Baking, 2007) I realized 1: Pinwheels or Killer
Zebras are just refrigerator/icebox/slice-and-bake cookies (duh) and 2. the
baker from Cooks Illustrated had encountered my problems EXACTLY and the
solution was: eliminate baking powder, use only egg yolk, use a
granulated/powdered sugar combo, don’t cream the sugar/butter for too long, and
add extra melted chocolate (sounds good to me!).
I will go through my cookbooks
again, adding refrigerator cookies to my spreadsheet for comparison. The Cooks
Illustrated recipe shows how to do marbled cookies, but I think that I would
rather do the Zebra cookie pattern on a baking sheet, as shown by the blogger
Vivian Pang. I think Sunshine would take the easiest route, and mushing the
dough on a sheet is easy, plus you can just cut out the cookies in rectangles
instead of trying to get perfect cylinders of dough in the fridge. I can’t wait
to try this!
No comments:
Post a Comment