TWD: Coconut Butter Thins

Working your way through an entire cookbook, recipe by recipe can be a tricky business. Especially, when someone else is choosing the recipes for you! Sometimes, you're delighted by what you end up with - and sometimes, not. While Dorie's Coconut Butter Thins do contain several ingredients that I love - butter, coconut, lime, macadamia nuts and ground coriander - I didn't really love them in this cookie. Don't get me wrong, I LIKED the cookies. I just didn't LOVE them.

Coconut Butter Thins are supposed to be thin, crispy and lacy shortbread-like cookies. And mine were. But to me, the flavors were so subtle that they were virtually undetectable. I got no sunny pop of lime or scent of coriander. Nor did I find much crunch of macadamia nuts. I did get some chewiness from the coconut, but mostly in the annoying shreds that peeked out from my neatly cut cookie shapes. They were a nice little unassuming cookie that would probably be great paired with something else, but without much personality of their own.

I also think that there's a reason that there is no accompanying photo of these cookies in the book. My cookies were just not very photogenic. When baked, they flattened out and spread a bit so that their edges blurred. I made one sheet of cookies cut into squares as Dorie directs in the recipe. Once out of the oven, they took on a kind of stretchy, Dali-esque quality. I cut the next batch into rounds which held their shape better, but not much. To be fair, I do think that I rolled my cookies a little too thin. I don't know how much that affected the shape, if at all.

I'm sorry, Dorie! You know I love you. But, these just didn't do it for me the way so many of your other fantastic recipes have.

Thanks to Jayne from The Barefoot Kitchen Witch for choosing our recipe for this week. If you'd like to see how the rest of the TWD gang fared with these Coconut Butter Thins, check out the Tuesdays with Dorie blogroll.