culinary experiments and explorations

Not much going on the past week -- between work and hobbies I haven't made the time to cook all that much that's new and interesting. Weekends, however, are when I have time to actually experiment a bit more. I'd snagged a bunch of cookie recipes and printed them out Friday at work, and decided to start experimenting with at least a few yesterday morning.

The first one I made was ( Skibo Castle Ginger Crunch. )

I adapted this recipe from the Good Morning America Food & Recipes page. Sad to say, overall I wasn't particularly impressed by it. The shortbread base seemed rather bland, and far too dry and crumbly for my tastes -- but maybe that's just the nature of shortbread. It wasn't in any way crunchy, really, and I expected it to be given the name of the recipe.

The ginger-maple taste of the topping is pleasantly sweet and elevates the recipe from mediocre to OK.

Overall rating, 3/5 -- I probably won't make it all too often, given that I can make tastier cookies for about the same amount of effort with similar ingredients, but at least this is a simple and straightforward snack recipe.

A while back, I took a recipe that was on the back of a Nestle white chocolate chip morsels package and tweaked it a bit with some varied spices (my holy trinity is cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves). The end result, which I'm actually quite proud of, is my ( White Chip Spice Island Cookies. )

They always turn out delightfully tasty, with some intriguing hints of spice and flavor that somehow always leave me pleasantly surprised.