Day 37 - Terry's Favorite Almond Cookie

Terry's Favorite Almond Cookie

I've never been particularly partial to the almond cookie, but since I was going to be having my friends Judith and Ryan over for dinner, this seemed like an obvious choice. See, our typical (i.e. ritual for the past 20! years) date involves dinner at House of Vegetarian in Chinatown, followed by a stop at La Bella Ferrara for cookies in Little Italy. So I thought I'd cook something Chinese-y, and then serve cookies for dessert. (Plus, I have that Green Tea Ice Cream in the freezer, waiting to be made into ice cream sandwiches with these cookies!)

This cookie batter is very dense - again I used my electric mixer, but once all the dry ingredients were added, the batter was too thick to do much. I made about 50/50 medium-sized and full-sized cookies. I figured most people wouldn't want to eat a mammoth ice cream sandwich made from gigantic cookies....

As has been the case with all of the cookies I've made from this book so far, these seem scarily underdone when removed from the oven. I've been using a combination of I&T's timing suggestions, the smell test (i.e. they're done when you can start smelling them), and visual cues to determine when to take them out. In this case, I went by the browning around the edges, plus they were smelly by then, and it was right in line with I&T's times.

And just as I&T warn, the cookies are crazily soft (seemingly way underdone) before they've cooled. But lo and behold, upon cooling, they transform into normal chewy cookies.

I like them. They have a nice crackly appearance, with the nuts baked into the tops. The weird ingredient here is the sesame oil, which really expresses itself, even though only a small amount is used. I simultaneously love it and am bothered by it. 

SFO: 10