Saturday, September 17, 2005
Cookie's Fortune
I promised to make cookies to take to the kids (next weekend is their wedding bash). Russian tea cakes for the bridegroom, Mexican wedding cakes for the bride.
So imagine my surprise when googling for a Mexican wedding cake recipe without cinnamon and/or chocolate (no problem, I found the one I was looking for) when I discovered a recipe for both. The same recipe! Showing the name as "Mexican Wedding Cookies or Russian Tea Cakes." (emphasis mine) Wow!
Well, I'm here to tell you that they are not the same! The tea cakes are flour based, the wedding cookies use ground pecans in place of part of the flour. So there.
But that started me looking at cookie recipes in a lot of my cookbooks. (My cookbook collection once rivaled my knitting book collection, but I gave a bunch to the Older Kid.)
Cookies are all essentially the same. Oh, the additions are different. Some have spices or nuts or fruit, but the basic recipe: fat, sugar, flour, and the technique: cream the fat with the sugar, add the flour, is the same in nearly every cookie recipe I have.
Today, I toasted the pecans. Tomorrow I bake! (Film at 11?)
We were going to buy a bunch of fancy cookies to go along with the ones I am making, but after stops at several bakeries today (including the incredible Kiffle* Kitchen), I decided that the taste did not warrant the cost. My time may be valuable, but homemade tastes better.
*kiffle--an Eastern European pastry made of a sour cream pastry rolled around a fruit, nut, or poppyseed filling. Very time consuming, very tasty. Maybe at Christmas when I don't mind having the oven on for hours at a time!
.
So imagine my surprise when googling for a Mexican wedding cake recipe without cinnamon and/or chocolate (no problem, I found the one I was looking for) when I discovered a recipe for both. The same recipe! Showing the name as "Mexican Wedding Cookies or Russian Tea Cakes." (emphasis mine) Wow!
Well, I'm here to tell you that they are not the same! The tea cakes are flour based, the wedding cookies use ground pecans in place of part of the flour. So there.
But that started me looking at cookie recipes in a lot of my cookbooks. (My cookbook collection once rivaled my knitting book collection, but I gave a bunch to the Older Kid.)
Cookies are all essentially the same. Oh, the additions are different. Some have spices or nuts or fruit, but the basic recipe: fat, sugar, flour, and the technique: cream the fat with the sugar, add the flour, is the same in nearly every cookie recipe I have.
Today, I toasted the pecans. Tomorrow I bake! (Film at 11?)
We were going to buy a bunch of fancy cookies to go along with the ones I am making, but after stops at several bakeries today (including the incredible Kiffle* Kitchen), I decided that the taste did not warrant the cost. My time may be valuable, but homemade tastes better.
*kiffle--an Eastern European pastry made of a sour cream pastry rolled around a fruit, nut, or poppyseed filling. Very time consuming, very tasty. Maybe at Christmas when I don't mind having the oven on for hours at a time!
.
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Russian Tea Balls and Mexican Wedding Cookies are the same recipe...Russian tea cakes, I don't know... Whichever, though, they will get scarfed up quicker than you can make them! (They do freeze well!)
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