Chocoholic Anonymous

This week’s TWD is Espresso Chocolate Shortbread cookies chosen by Donna of Life’s Too Short Not to Eat Dessert First. I know it has been a couple weeks since I have posted; “Prince Charming” and I are moving into a new house and needless to say I’ve been a tad bit busy. We have painted (or are still in the process of painting) all but a couple rooms in the house, closed off a redundant doorway and moved the entire contents of our old house plus a storage unit into the new house over the past few weeks.

I did, however, manage to clear enough space in my new kitchen to give these cookies a try. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to snap any pictures yet, hopefully I can do that tomorrow.

I couldn’t make up my mind between the original recipe or Dorie’s playing around version so I ended up making both versions…with a couple of small tweaks.

For the espresso chocolate version, I increased the espresso by a smidge, replaced about 1/4 of flour with cocoa powder and upped the chocolate bits a little as well. I was very careful with my butter temperature and my mixing; the resulting texture was perfect (for shortbread, not necessarily my ideal) and they had a rich mocha flavor.

For the oatmeal spice version the only change I made was to add chocolate bits to them. Somehow I expected a bit more from this version, it fell a little flat for me. The flavor wasn’t bad, but the texture didn’t seem to match the flavor profile – the message my taste buds sent to my brain was that these should be chewy!

Head over to Donna’s site to grab the recipe for yourself (or check out Dorie’s book, of course).

This week Barbara of Bungalow Barbara selected sablés from pages 131-133.  As I was rather pressed for time this week, all I can say is I’m glad these are so quick to whip up!

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*UPDATE* I’m obvioulsy a complete scatter brain.  I wrote this post on Tuesday at 9:52 PM and I THOUGHT I published it.  Obviously not since I have just discovered it has a Draft status.

It’s Tuesday again and time for TWD.  I know I’ve missed a few and I apologize to those who stopped by over the last few weeks to find nothing new at all, never mind the expected TWD posts.

I’m afraid I just haven’t been feeling up to baking recently, or up to much of anything else for that matter.  But this weekend was a nice long weekend and “Prince Charming” was out of town so I needed something to take my mind off being lonely.  This week’s Chipster Topped Brownie recipe certainly qualified.

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I know I was supposed to make Floating Islands this week, and they did look lovely in the picture in Dorie’s book, but I’m afraid the extent of my cooking this weekend was throwing something in the slow cooker so “Prince Charming” would have leftovers for lunch this week.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t head over to Shari’s site (Whisk: a food blog) for the recipe or hit the TWD blog roll to see what everyone else did.  I hope to be back with more TWD goodness next week.

But, since I didn’t make what I was supposed to and I don’t want to leave you hanging yet again, I thought I would take some time to share a new toy that I got for Christmas that is definitely great culinary fun…

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Welcome to the latest installment of TWD!  I’m doing my very best to keep on track with my TWD commitment despite the continuing holiday insanity.  This week Ulrike of Küchenlatein‘s selection is Grandma’s All Occassion Sugar Cookies.  At first glance I wasn’t too terribly excited about this recipe; just your basic sugar cookie.  But, the more I thought about it, the more excited I got.  The very simplicity of this recipe lends itself to so many variations.  Grandma’s All Occasion Sugar Cookie is the ultimate blank canvas of the cookie world!

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