walnut cookies

This, friends (and family), was an all-afternoon, multi-person project. And what am I left with? A belly full of cookie dough. Fun!

Karen had wanted to do some baking together on our next trip to the UP, and she found a recipe she thought would be fun: walnut cookies (a Martha Stewart recipe). I do rather like walnuts, so it sounded quite agreeable. In any case, she'd bought some lovely little molds, so we had to undertake the cookies at some point.

The cookies, ultimately, are fairly simple and delicious sandwich cookies. having said that, they weren't the easiest or quickest to make. Not the easiest because we were using Conrad's mother's kitchen. It's unfamiliar to me as a place to cook, and her equipment is not the same as what I have. Not the quickest because there was an hour needed to chill the dough, then another hour needed after that to freeze the molded dough before baking.
I think it was getting on for 3 when we started, and not far from 8 when we sat down to enjoy one or two with a cup of decaf after dinner.

Conrad, I should add, helped out. Yes, I bullied him into it, I admit. The family that bakes together...

It took some practice to get the hang of shaping the cookies and then releasing them from the molds properly. And then they needed trimming.


More time consumed. The filling, by comparison, was a doodle.

Ah, but the finished cookies? Imagine taking a plain cookie (or a lightly spiced one) and smearing it with Nutella. Kind of like that, but softer, nuttier, better. They're really very tasty cookies, and we should know given how much dough and filling we nipped at while working. I'm rather pleased with the effort. I rather wonder how easy it would be to make some simple round cookies with the dough and sandwich them with the filling. It should work, and it would be a real treat for colleagues or friends.