Progress, and My Sweet Tooth

I'm in a bit of a groove with piecing tiny four-patches for Danuta's Garden, and happily so. It's taken a while to feel like there's any traction with this one, but I think I might be over the hump. All credit is going to having everything collected and in one place rather than helter skelter around the house.

It doesn't look like much but this little bundle of joy is my latest bit of progress. They need some quality time with the iron right now to press those seams open, and after that it's full steam ahead on the sashing.

Out of the blue today I decided that I needed some chocolate chip cookies - chewy, nutty, chocolate chip cookies. My go-to recipe has rolled oats, dried cherries and nuts with cinnamon and nutmeg thrown in for good measure, but this time around all I wanted was nuts & chocolate. And I found the perfect recipe in Butter Baked Goods by Rosie Daykin that Stephanie gave me for Christmas a year ago.

They are loaded with nuts, both pecans and walnuts, and are fabulous. Baking the nuts for about 8 minutes before adding them to the dough really helps their flavour shine through (I always roast my nuts when baking). I have to confess that there was a bit of dough sampling happening and it was as good as the final product.

I used a scoop to drop them onto the pan but I think it's smaller than the one used by Rosie because I ended up with probably double the 30 cookies that the recipe said it would yield. Tough problem to have :).

The recipe suggested freezing some of the dough balls instead of baking them all at once so that they are ready to bake and be enjoyed fresh from the oven, so I did. I've not done this before but I think I'll do it more often. Right now though, I have a date with the iron....M