In the 'Last Bite' section of Feb 2008 Food & Wine is what I thought was a lovely little recipe for 'Chocolate-Caramel Sandwich Cookies'. I've made a lot of recipes from my 3 year subscription of Food&Wine, and they have consistently needed tweaking. Not enough salt, leavening, flavor, they all seem to be not tested well, or just some misc. recipe that some chichi restaurant handed them and they went with it w/out even inspecting it for errors.
This has got to be the worst offender yet. I will not print the recipe as it needs too many fixes to warrant a rewrite. But I will list what went wrong.
They were suppose to be a 'reimagined oreo cookie' by Rachel Thebault, with a caramel filling instead of whipped lard. What it Was, was a mess.
The cookie dough-
- was so soft and gooey that it had to be frozen on the plastic wrap (that you had to roll it on to keep it from sticking to everything) every few minutes in order to peel off the cut out cookies.
- recipe called for 20 minute bake at 350. Any more than 12 and they burned.
- even baked properly, they were greasy and pretty flavorless. The entire batch of cookie dough had only 1/2 c. of cocoa powder, and you could barely taste it. They were visually deceptive, because they looked richly dark brown, but had little flavor.
The caramel
- a 9" square pan is too small to cut out enough caramel to fill the cookies. It had to be a much larger pan. The caramel came out very thick.
- evil evil recipe writers. You said to oil the pan, put wax paper in it, then pour the caramel in to cool. Didn't say to oil the proper side of the wax paper, and I trusted you. From previous shoddy recipes I should have known not to. I now have a big chunk of pretty flavorless oily caramel (there was absolutely no salt in the recipe) with wax paper glued to one side. I tried freezing it, reheating it, cutting out shapes and peeling it off, all to no avail. If only I had a horrible evil neighbor I could pawn these off on, and pretend I was an incompetent cook as I smiled while they ate the cookies with a delicate slice of wax paper sandwiched between flavorless caramel and bland cookie.
I'm canceling my subscription. I'm tired of tempting looking recipes that are flops over and over again. I paid a lot of money for those stupid magazines, and I've never once cut out a recipe and added it to my book of favorites.
Sure there are ideas in there that I use as a base, but I am not going to continue buying the magazine knowing that all the recipes are in need of tweaking and research. I have plenty of great books I can use for that purpose.
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3 comments:
I used to get Martha Stewart's living and was always pleased with the results of any recipe I tried. I'm sure that they have a pretty stringent recipe testing process.
Oh yes, most of the recipes I get from Living turn out as expected. Though they sometimes make the recipes more complex than they need to. It's really hard to part w/ those darn magazines, how I love them so.
It's another magazine I can't get a subscription to because I Must keep them.
That's true! :-)
I have piles of 'zines that I just can't get rid of 'cause someday I'll use that recipe again or try that one out.
I only have a subscription to Vtimes now - I finally stopped the Bon Apetite and the MSLiving. Stopping hurt.
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