My title sounds like a really lame National Enquirer headline.

So I woke up to a rainy, cold day, and for whatever reason, this brings out a strong urge to bake. I determined I would prefer to make cookies (wasn’t a cake sort of day), and then it occurred to me I should pick out cookies that ship well and send some to my brother, who has gone way beyond the call of sibling duty of late and spent 45 minutes of his Saturday evening on the phone helping me with this blog you see here. I chose Almond Cookie Slices from the FamilyCircle Best-Ever Cakes & Cookies, a gift from my Grandma when she discovered I liked to cook. Reasons for picking these cookies are: they were different than my usual fare, they called for icing (and I really felt like icing), I have a bit of an almond thing lately, and they sounded ship-able. I can’t quite remember my brother’s stance toward almonds, but I’m trusting his non-picky nature.

Baking these cookies turned into the never-ending cookie extravaganza. You have to blanch the almonds, pop them out of their skins, toast them, grind them, etc. Once you have your dough, you have to freeze it for twenty minutes. The whole process took me 2 hours. Granted, I was carrying on a conversation and drinking wine while making the cookies—not particularly conducive to efficient cookie-making—but I think the estimated 58 minutes was way off. (But check out my picture–I’m pretty proud of it. You can see the steam coming off of the tea!)

Adjustments: The recipe called for 1 1/4 cup ground almonds and 1 1/4 cup whole almonds. This sounded like a lot of big ole almonds, so I opted to include a 3/4 cup of sliced almonds instead of folding the second 1 1/4 cup in whole form. This suits me too since I’m more a fan of the almond flavor than the nut itself. I also had to adjust the Almond Glaze since I didn’t have a full cup of powdered sugar (so basically, I included less water.) Also, when you slice up the cookies, the instructions forget to tell you to give a slice down the middle, so you have reasonably sized cookies and the 3 dozen the recipe claims.

Assessments: Though good, I will probably never make these cookies again because they were far too much trouble. Also, they were more or less biscotti! And I’m no big fan of biscotti. I looked up a recipe to see the difference, and it turns out biscotti has egg (my cookies did not) and are baked twice (who knew?) The biscotti recipe claimed baking them twice gave them that “delightfully crunchy” texture. And all this time I thought they were just hard and overrated. Still, if you like biscotti but would prefer a slightly softer texture, these Almond Cookie Slices would be the ticket. And I have to say I really looked forward to my cookies and tea the next afternoon. It’s going to be hard to ship them too. They were so much work, I feel I deserve to eat every last one.