For October 14 (also a little late)

I am a little behind on my blogging! The worst part is that my memory for what I am making starts to slip pretty quickly, so I do need to get my laptop by my bed and start doing these entries when I am just finished baking.

Last week was a double Martha week; happily, most of her recipes are available online:

Pumpkin Cookies with Maple Brown Butter Icing, from Martha Stewart Cookies
Hazelnut Cookies, from Martha Stewart Living (October 2010).

The pumpkin cookie is one of my favorite cookies. I have made it a few times before and every time I make it I am happy. The combination of the soft, cakey cookie with the brown butter icing is really good. The cookie is relatively straightforward to make. Although the recipe calls for piping the cookie dough (a very soft, batter-like consistency) out using a pastry bag, I just use a tablespoon-sized ice cream scoop, which makes them much less uniform and round, but keeps me from making a fool of myself with a pastry bag. The most challenging element of this recipe is the icing, since it calls for browning the butter, which can be an anxious process for those doing it for the first time. Having done it before a few times, it seemed like a breeze this time - it went much more quickly, was much less anxiety-inducing, and was all around straightforward. Anyway, I ended up replacing about 1/4 of the confectioner's sugar called for in the icing recipe with maple sugar to give some maple flavor to the icing. These are a great cookie, and they are fall icons in my book. I highly recommend them!

The second recipe was out of the current Martha Stewart Living magazine. I have to admit, not my favorite, although many people seemed to like it. Very few ingredients, so it really focuses on the hazelnut. In making the dough, I found it didn't hold together as I had thought it would - it was a very loose, falling-apart dough, so it requires quite a lot of work to form individual 1" balls and then to press them down to flatten them and not have them just fall apart. I am happy to have made it, and ready to move on.