Part XX: Fresh Orange Cookies

I am beginning this post with a picture of a round piece of green rubber, a wonderful and cheap gadget used to loosen tight jar lids. Why? Because it reminds me of my mom. A little strange, I know, but growing up we had one and it got a lot of use. It reminds me of being in the kitchen with Mom and helping her cook or doing my homework at the table while she made dinner. The one pictured above is courtesy of Winchester Savings Bank.

The most noteworthy item about these cookies is that the recipe called for one finely chopped, unpeeled orange. I used the food processor to get the orange chopped finely and evenly enough. It felt really strange to drop sections of the orange in with the peel attached. Its one thing to use a teaspoon or so of the zest, but this seemed a little extreme. I was hoping the cookies would be tasty and not too bitter or overpowered by the peel.

The orange glaze called for zest, so I pulled out this little guy from the recesses of one of my kitchen drawers.

Turns out this is an orange peeler, not a zester. It worked pretty well but obviously wasn't the tool I needed for this job. Had to use the birdie zester.

I accidentally dropped the zester on the rug and Phyllis was right there, trying to bat it around.


Zesty!

The icing instructions were to simply to take softened butter, powdered sugar, orange juice and zest and mix it all together. No heating of the butter first or anything of that nature. I thought that was a little strange, but figured that as long as the butter was sufficiently soft the orange juice would contain the required liquid to create the icing. This is what I ended up with.

This didn't look right at all, so I added more powdered sugar.

You can't really tell from this photo, but the extra powdered sugar didn't help. The icing was lumpy and way too thin. I probably should have melted the butter, as that was creating the lumps, and used less, maybe half, of the orange juice that was called for.

The cookies came out looking good, though

I ended up icing, or trying to ice, some of the cookies. Fail

Verdict: I might make these again. Even though the peel was chopped well enough, I kept anticipating taking a bite of cookie and finding myself with a mouthful of bitter orange peel. They were tasty, but that feeling ruined it for me. Alas.

Next up: Soft Molasses Spice Cookies