I seem to be on a roll with the cookies.

First of all, last week I made madeleines (well, almost) for the first time in my life using Dorie’s recipe for Honey-Spiced Madeleines. Dorie describes her recipe as “not your typical madeleine” and at the time it felt a bit backwards to be making the “not typical” madeleines before I had ever attempted to make the typical ones. In essence I had no benchmark to compare them against, how the heck was I even supposed to know that I had done them correctly? It just didn’t feel right.

So this week I pulled out Dorie’s Baking: From My Home to Yours book and made her Classic Madeleine recipe. Actually, since I do not own a madeleine pan what I made was classic madeleine flavored tea cakes. But setting semantics aside for a moment, these were delicious! I may not have been entirely convinced by the honey-spiced madeleine recipe, but I will definitely make the classic recipe again.

And then, because apparently one can never have enough cookies, I decided to make Dorie’s Salted Butter Break-ups. Actually, I have had my eye on this previously completed French Fridays with Dorie recipe for a while, but baking for a household of two is a bit tricky. I have nothing against dessert (as is probably already abundantly clear by this point in the post) but I do not like to have mounds of leftover sweets and baked goods lying around, tempting me every time I enter the kitchen. Thus I always find myself trying to halve or even quarter the dessert recipes and then somehow get the leftovers out the door once I have had my portion. So when we were invited to bring something sweet to a friend’s house for a small get together, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to get this one checked off the list.

This is unlike any cookie I have ever made before. The flavor and texture is somewhere between a sugar cookie and a Scottish shortbread, but with a perceptible hint of saltiness. And instead of being served up in cute little cookie form, the dough is cooked into one big sheet which is then broken up into pieces.

All in all I liked this one. It had way more taste than the meagre list of ingredients would suggest and it was much less time-consuming than baking batch after batch of drop cookies. However, the cookie did not hold up well and had acquired a slight stale taste after only one day. This fact alone will likely keep me from turning to this recipe very often.