For yesterday's cookie baking frenzy, Kev and I searched allrecipes.com for easy recipes with short ingredient lists. This house only gets used part time, and the kitchen is just not as stocked as mine... especially for a baking freak like me. I was dying to bake something, but didn't want to have to buy a ton of ingredients. We were lucky enough to find two recipes that perfectly fit the bill. First up were coconut macaroons. My mom used to make these every Christmas when I was a kid, but I somehow had never made them myself... until yesterday. The recipe we found was simple, and seemed familiar: One 14-oz package flaked coconut, one 14-oz can sweetened condensed milk, and one teaspoon vanilla extract. We went to the store and found 7-oz bags of sweetened coconut. We grabbed two of those and a can of sweetened condensed milk, and headed home. We mixed everything together, dropped spoonfuls of the batter onto greased cookie sheets, and meticulously applied red, green, and white sprinkles. We put them into a 350 oven and baked them for 20 minutes. I ran across the street to Kev's grandmother's house while they baked, so Kev was in charge of timing. When I got back, I pulled from the oven a cookie sheet covered with puddles of sticky coconut goo. Eeewww!!! What happened? We followed the directions. How could such a simple recipe be so easy to screw up? I won't even share a picture, It's too ugly.
We tasted some of the goo, and I thought it was pretty good, though ungiftable (we had planned to deliver plates of cookie to Kev's grandmother and aunt when they were done). Kev said "it's OK, but just too sweet for me." A light bulb went off in my head. "Too sweet?" Ding ding ding! We must need unsweetened coconut for these! I decided that the sweetened coconut must have added enough sugar for extra melting, extra caramelization, and extra gooeyness. Off to the health food store for some unsweetened coconut... which, I gotta tell you, in bulk, is a heck of a lot cheaper than the prepackaged sweetened stuff! The rest of the assembly process was repeated, right down to my anal retentive sprinkles application. Each macaroon, of course, had to have a good balance of red, green, and white. We did a test batch of just three cookies, thinking we could add flour to the batter if they puddled again. 20 minutes later... let's just say that no flour was necessary! We achieved macaroon perfection...
That picture shows off our lovely sprinkles skills, but I really like this one, which happened completely unintentionally:
And just in case you really want to know, here's the official recipe for these macaroons.
AJ December 5, 2004 10:00 PM PST How darling! I've never made a macaroon that worked. :P I will have to try these out and maybe add some maraschino cherries on top. ;)
