New Recipe #13: Buttermilk lemon cookies

I was on a roll. I was on fire, even! A slow cooker of beef burrito filling was simmering, accompanying cornbread was cooling on a rack, and the lettuce had been prepped for the week. It was the most efficient Sunday afternoon I could remember in a long time.

In high spirits, I retrieved the recipe for buttermilk cookies with lemon zest, courtesy of Molly, originally from Gourmet. The minute I laid eyes on Molly’s slightly-faded Polaroid of her batch of cookies, I knew I had to make them. Buttermilk! Lemon! Cookies! The three words sang out to me in happy harmony. I do not often indulge my love of lemon because JG is not a huge fan, but luckily for me, we were invited to a cook-out this week, and I knew just what I was bringing.

The cookies came together quite quickly and easily, and the dough was among the softest, fluffiest ones I have ever had the pleasure of dropping onto baking sheets. The scent of lemon was in the air, and I happily whisked up the simple glaze to have it ready for the warm cookies.

End serene scene.

Whether it was the fault of smaller cookie sheets, a hyperactive oven, my inexperience with glazing, or a combination thereof, I had a rough time with baking and finishing the cookies. My first sheet came out terribly overdone, and I panicked with the glaze, only to end up with drippy, amoebic specimens. I reduced the baking time and set up a more efficient glazing assembly line, but by then, my hands were shaking, I was dripping sweat from the hot oven and humid weather, and my dreams of the perfect, light, lemon cookie were escaping before my very eyes. Eventually, I figured out how to use the back of the spoon to create a smoother circle of glaze for some passable samples, but I had to let go of the puffy, shiny delights that had caught my eye in Molly’s photo. I reluctantly tasted one of the “ugly ones,” as we call the rejects for public exposure, and shrugged. The cookie itself was decent, but the glaze hit me over the head with its sugary shock. I mournfully sequestered the overly browned cookies for me and rescued the nicer-looking ones for the party.

In order to atone for my lacking dessert contribution, I reached for my emergency box of brownie mix. When all else fails, I make a batch of brownies, toss in some chips of whatever sort I have lying around, and call it a day. All was going swimmingly until I measured out a handful of peanut butter chips, dropped them in, and then smelled a slightly sweet aroma from the mixing bowl. Uh-oh.

“Hey,” I called to JG, “what do you think about butterscotch chips in brownies?”

“Uh, I don’t know about that one.”

“What if it’s too late?”

He paused. “I guess it can’t hurt to see how they turn out.”

I stirred up the brownie batter (with no small amount of annoyance) and dumped it into a pan, but when the brownies cooled, I found that I had horribly underbaked them. They were not that pleasant, chewy degree of underbaked; the batter was barely holding itself up in a solid form. Failure, again!

On the way to the cook-out, we stopped at the grocery store and I picked up a chocolate chip bundt cake to accompany my paltry cookie offering, but what do you know? Everyone finished off the cookies and didn’t even touch the cake. People even complimented the glaze, much to my surprise.  Maybe the ugly cookie I had sampled wasn’t a good representative of the whole. Maybe if I omit the glaze and watch the baking time carefully, I will like them more. The recipe is back in the “to try” pocket of the binder, so I haven’t written it off completely. I’m simply disappointed because I so wanted to love these cookies, but they were just not that into me.