Martha's Cookies

Over the past few weeks I've made a few cookies from Martha Stewart's Holiday Cookies special issue magazine. I wasn't all that impressed with the few I tried for Christmas but the photos in the magazine are so impressive I always get conned into trying yet another recipe.

My first recipe was for Surprise Cookies. I was craving chocolate and I love marshmellows so this seemed like a good idea. For some reason I didn't realize that this was going to be cakey and similar to a ho-ho.

I made the dough and decided to only bake half of the dough. This first half I made according to directions and placed the marshmellows on top after baking for 8 minutes. When I made the chocolate icing to go over it I meant to make half of the recipe but somehow started making the full recipe half-way through the process. When I realized this I tried to resurrect the icing by making the full recipe. I'm not sure if the icing was thin because of my mistake or due to the recipe. The chocolate icing didn't really harden around the marshmellow and cookie. It was more of a see-through coating.




This first version of the Surprise cookies were a surprise. They were way too cakey and wayyyyyyyy too sweet. I did discover that they were fairly yummy with vanilla ice cream (which actually cut some of the sweetness)but decided not to bake the second half of the dough the same way.

I decided to just bake the rest of the dough as regular cookies and lightly drizzle the icing on top of them. They're still in my fridge because I'm out of ice cream and they aren't good without it.

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My second attempt at Martha's cookie magazine was her Black and White cookies . I used to get them back in NY and D.C. but it's been a while since I've had a good black and white cookie.



The black and white cookie pre-"black and white" was good enough to eat by itself. Adding the white and black icing only made it that much better. I actually made just the white icing and used the leftover chocolate icing from the surprise cookies.

The result was quite delicious. I had to keep the cookies in the fridge to keep the icing from melting but they didn't last more than two days.

It's funny because my cookies were rounded on top and the photo in the magazine showed a flat cookie. I feel much better now that I saw the website's photo which looks a lot more like my cookies.

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Tonight I used some leftover cookie dough from my holiday Stained Glass Christmas Tree Cookies to make some Valentine's Day cookies. I also used my leftover chocolate and white icings along with some sprinkles for the occasion. The icing was a bit runny but they actually tasted pretty good. I already ate the K (for me) and the M (my husband). (L is for love, by the way).