Brownies and Zucchini

Have I mentioned that desserts are my favorite foods to eat make? They are.  You can hardly ever go wrong with a new dessert.  Fruit, chocolate, pie, bars, etc.  Ok, unless it involves peanut butter.  Oh, I didn’t tell you I don’t like peanut butter? Well, its true, I can barely even stand the smell…..now you know.

Today’s dessert is 4th of July inspired, since it will be one of two that I  will be bringing to the party at the in-laws for the fireworks. I found it on Delish.com.  They had a ton of cute red, white, and blue inspired desserts – as well as lots of other good recipes. This one seemed cute, but still easily transportable.

It is very rare that I read through more than the ingredients list of a recipe.  Especially a dessert.  That is a habit I am trying to break.  Often times, that leaves me halfway through a recipe realizing that I don’t have an item that I need.  Like saran wrap or aluminum foil.  Or, I don’t realize that the cookie dough needs to be refrigerated before baking.

This time, I read the directions all the way through.  And it was a good thing I did.  Not only was there refrigeration involved, but it was needed after each of the four steps.  Hello, lots of waiting!

After you mix together the dough, it needs to be balled up and refrigerated for “at least 3 hours. (up to 3 days)”  Since it was already after 9pm when I was making the dough, I opted to refrigerate the dough overnight.  When I got to the dough the next afternoon it was really hard.  Definitely too hard to roll out. So I let it sit out for about an hour before attempting to roll it.  Much better.

The instructions tell you to roll it into 1/8″ thick rectangles.  The idea is that if you make them all the same size rectangle, it will be easier to then stack on top of each other without any extra dough.  This is not as easy as it may seem.  Here is my “rectangle”

Yeah, it doesn’t look like a rectangle to me either, but it was the best I could do.

After rolling out the dough, refrigerating, putting jam on dough, stacking, and refrigerating again, it was time to cut out some cookies! This is when I realize I am used to cutting out sugar cookies that you can easily ball up the leftover dough and roll it out again. I got a total of 8 cookies out of this dough. (2x the amount of dough in the picture) Either I didn’t I roll it out thin enough, or my cookie cutter was larger than suggested.  I think it was probably the first option.  I ended up just cutting up some of the scraps and cooking those as well, not as pretty, but the same yummy cookie flavor.

Next, I cut up the rest of the pieces, sprinkle with sugar, and refrigerate – yes, again.  Then it was time to put them in the oven!  For some reason, the raspberry spread got really runny and leaked out of the cookies a lot.  The blueberry did not.  They were the same brand, so I’m not sure what the deal was, I guess maybe just the difference between the texture of raspberries and blueberries? Here is what they looked like fresh out of the oven:

(the ones on the left are the blueberry, on the right are raspberry)

I think they turned out pretty well overall.  Not as pretty as the ones that Martha made, but I can deal with that.  Here is a prettier picture of my finished product:

Not only do they look like a fancy 4th of July dessert, but they also taste good!  Fruity, sugary, deliciousness.

Ease: C+, lots of waiting and slightly complicated instructions, but, thats Martha Stewart for ya!
Taste: A, very good.
Will I make them again? Most likely yes.  As time consuming as they were to make, they did taste really good.  Even the dough by itself was good!

Do you associate certain desserts with certain holidays?
I have an aunt that always makes danishes for Christmas brunch.

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Filed under: Cookies, Dessert Tagged: | cookie, dessert, fourth of july, star