What you see there is the finished product of my toiling in the kitchen this past Saturday. Those are, what I am told, Italian Brownie Cookies. As a German-Irish guy, I just call them those Italian-chocolate-spice-cookies-with-the-white-icing-that-I-love-to-dunk.
The given recipe makes 30-dozen cookies and, during last night’s Pirates game, I am pretty sure that I ate 12-dozen. Then, when they went down 3-0 in the 9th, I dunked another 8-dozen in 2 gallons of constant-flow milk! Skim of course.. because I’m watching my calorie intake.
Here’s the deal behind me making the cookies. A friend of mine’s Italian mother said she liked these cookies. I loooooove these cookies. The problem is, they are a @#$@#! mess to make. My friend’s mother doesn’t have the stamina to make them anymore. I labored of these things for the first time last Christmas for a blogger cookie event. I had this past Saturday available. Sooooo….there ya go. Thank GAWD I had them on hand for last night!
Here’s are some pictures of the cookie-baking-process.
Ya have to start off the the right tools. When I’m baking, ya never know what will break so I keep tools handy. Not that I know how to use them any better than a spatula but…they are good to have close at hand. The linoleum knife came in handy for opening the bag of walnuts.
When I was mixing the dry goods, at one point there was more of it flipping out of the bowl than staying in the bowl. So I stopped using my blistering wrist-shot hand to mix! That’s just a sample of what ended up on the counter. Just like the sand that blows off of a dump trunk on the highway. I have to account for that. I figure I lost and additional dozen cookies due to counter-top-loss.
When I’m cooking OR baking… the best kitchen appliance is the dog. Cleans up every spill that hits the floor! Much easier then any ShopVac, Dyson OR Shark.
You can’t actually see the smoke on this picture. But, if this was scratch and sniff, you’d smell it! The smoke was more apparent before I took the time to wash my hands to grab my phone to take the picture. Basically, what this is, is the SECOND hand-mixer with a blown motor due to these @#$@@%^ cookies! I burned up a mixer last December too. Something tells me I need to invest in a cement mixer if I’m gonna make these cookies again.
And there ya have it. I only had to make 2 trips to the hardware store while making the cookies. The palm-sander came in handy for the ones that were lightly burned on the bottom. The tree saw was only for standby in case the oven broke and I had to cut firewood to finish the baking process. Not seen in his picture is the caulking gun that I had attached to my work belt….just in case a neighbor guy knocked on the door while I was putting the icing on the cookies. I could have easily said I was caulking the shower when he saw all the white stuff stuck to my hands!
Bottom line… if the Bucs lose again… I made have to opt out for Oreos!
By the way, if ya want this recipe, email me at YaJagoff (at) verizon (dot) net, subject line COOKIE.
And, for those of you manly-men that want to taunt me for baking cookies on a Saturday afternoon, shut-up and go drink you Pumpkin-spiced coffees….Ya Jagoffs!
