As I think about what spurred my latest baking attempt – Florentine Lace Cookies – I have to admit that my memory is a bit fuzzy. I think that my husband may have seen these cookies at a bakery (or maybe on the Internet? or TV?) and wanted me to make them at home. Or maybe it was me who came across this cookie recipe and decided to make it?
In any case, for a spring weekend dinner party, we decided to try these delicate, brightly flavored orange, nutty cookies. I used a Cook's Illustrated / America's Test Kitchen recipe I found online and prepared the cookies in the afternoon before starting the dinner courses.
The recipe was relatively easy to follow, and thankfully didn't take up too much time, allowing me to complete my dinner main dishes well before guests arrived! First, I pulsed the slivered almonds into a meal while heating up the liquid ingredients. I then removed the cooked liquid ingredients from the heat to stir in the dry ingredients, thus forming a warm, sticky dough.
This warm dough was exceedingly easy to shape and flatten into rounds for baking.
This is when the trickiest part of the process occurred – for how long to bake these treats, and at what temperature? The first batch at 350 degrees were definitely way over-baked (if not burnt) and so for the second batch, I reduced the oven temperature to about 310 – 315.
I baked the second batch of dough for 14 minutes on the top rack, and it resulted in a much better browned (not burnt) cookie. So definitely heed online warnings to use a lower oven temperature for these cookies, and watch them closely to avoid over-baking.
The texture of the cookies was perfect – lightly crispy throughout, but still showcasing the almond and orange flavors of the component parts. The chocolate added a great bitterness to this sweet cookie, and I can definitely see this becoming a standard winter treat in our home.
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