Nuts

The husband took over the kitchen Sunday morning. Here's his report on the morning's activities.

--The Faudie
As you may have noticed, daylight saving time ended last weekend. Circadian rhythms were disrupted, clocks were adjusted, nightfall now begins depressingly early in the evening and people on the Internet got something new to complain about. (My favorite take on the whole thing comes courtesy NPR: "How Bush Ruined Daylight Savings." Surprise, surprise: He changed it in such a way that it helped no one except big business interests.)

Personally, I think we should ditch DST altogether and let nature be nature, but no one really cares what I think of DST. I must admit, however, that this year's "fall back" and the resultant extra hour weren't entirely unappreciated. We'd received the Autumn 2010 issue of The Baking Sheet quite a few weeks ago. I'd been wanting to make the recipe pictured on the cover but never really had the time--at least, I never had the time until DST ended. A 25-hour Sunday may defy all laws of nature and time and space, but it's convenient if you want to bake something.

The recipe was appropriately seasonal and perfect for marking the end of DST:

Butterscotch Acorns

Dough
1 C unsalted butter, melted
3/4 C brown sugar
1 t vanilla extract
1/2 C pecan meal or finely chopped pecans
2 3/4 C King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
1/2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt

Topping
2 C butterscotch chips
1 1/4 C finely chopped pistachio nuts
1/2 C extra butterscotch chips, unmelted

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Combine melted butter, sugar, vanilla and pecans.
3. Whisk together flour, baking powder and salt; add to the butter mixture, mixing until combined.
4. Scoop batter by the teaspoon and place flat-side-down on greased baking sheets. Pinch tops to a point to resemble an acorn.
5. Bake for 15 minutes.
6. Melt two cups of butterscotch chips.
7. Use a dab of the melted chips to "glue" a whole chip on the flat end of the cooled cookies.
8. When chip has set, dip the flat end (tops) of the cookies into the melted chips, let the excess run off, then coat with the chopped nuts.

Yield: 60 cookies (serving size: 1 cookie)

Nutritional Info
Calories: 104
Fat: 6 g
Carbs: 11 g
Cholesterol: 8 mg
Sodium: 40 mg
Protein: 1 g

The Husband's Futzings
I don't have any significant changes to the ingredients to report, but the method of preparation...well, I found The Baking Sheet's instructions to be a little nuts, if you'll pardon the expression.

The cookie part of the acorns (steps 1 - 5) came together without major incident. I do think the guidance to use only a teaspoon's worth of dough for each cookie is an underestimate; the boy and I found that by using more than this amount, we were better able to shape appropriately acorn-ish acorns. And even with the larger acorns, we were able to make some 72 cookies by the kiddo's somewhat shaky count. The real fun, though, came when it was time to make the acorn "caps."

In my world, butterscotch is a flavoring, not an adhesive. I don't think melted chips can do what the recipe says they can do. I had zero luck using the melted chips to "glue" a whole chip to the flat end of the cookie. (Which just begged the question: exacly what purpose was that glued-on chip supposed to serve? Neither The Faudie nor I could figure that one out. I suppose it was supposed to help form the cap of the acorn, but I would have appreciated it if the recipe had been more clear on this point.) Also, I had zero luck dipping the cookies in the melted chips and then getting the chopped pistachio nuts to stick. So instead, I futzed.

Recalling our near-fiasco with the midnight mice, in which we were forced to hand-coat each cookie to obtain the desired effect, I combined the melted butterscotch chips with the pistachio pieces, resulting in a compound I could use like modeling clay. Each acorn cookie received a carefully sculpted cap...or maybe a not-so-carefully sculpted cap as my patience started to wear thin after the first 50 or so cookies. Suffice to say, some of the cookies came out looking a lot more like acorns than the others.

We made 72 cookies, and these were the only ones that actually looked like acorns.

To be fair, the cookies on the cover of The Baking Sheet didn't bear that strong of a resemblance to real acorns either, so I don't feel too bad about the way mine turned out. Appearance, after all, is second to taste, and these acorns taste pretty good. They're similar to pecan sandies (or, as The Faudie pointed out, besan ladoos), albeit with a funky butterscotch-pistachio topping.

Switching back and forth from DST still sucks, but at least I was able to do something productive with the extra time!