TWD—Dulce De Leche Duos and A Great New Blog

I want to start off my post today letting you know about a great new blog by a wonderful local chef I’ve been taking classes from, Paige Vandegrift.  This lady can cook! ;)  She’s a Le Cordon Bleu in London, professionally trained chef and I’ve had the pleasure of attending many of her cooking classes over the last year or so.  She has started a blog and I love it!  I’m lucky enough to be able to take her classes, now she’s sharing her knowledge in a blog.  Check it out and follow along!  Her blog is called A Cooking Life.  She’s just getting started, but has already shared a wealth of knowledge pertinent to anyone interested in cooking/baking and doing it well.

Our recipe for TWD this week was chosen by Jodie from Beansy Loves Cake.  Check out all her awesome cakes, you can also get this recipe on her blog!  For our TWD baking group, she chose Dulce De Leche Duos. These cookies are found on page 161 in Dorie’s book, Baking From My Home to Yours.

Is this what they’re supposed to look like?  I thought that Dorie’s description of these cookies was interesting—“round and flatish, crisp on the outside and soft, almost cakey and just a little chewy in their skinny centers.”  ???

This WAS good, but I’d have preferred a more crisp cookie.  I actually only filled this one cookie.  Sam is loving the plain cookies.  He ate four in one sitting.  I think they do have an interesting taste with the dulce de leche in the dough.

My cookies were mostly soft and a little chewy.  I think I was afraid to overbake them, so they weren’t crispy at all.  I did bake them for 10 minutes though.  I baked off 18 cookies or so, then decided to do my “playing around”.  I wanted a thicker cookie and I for sure wanted chocolate involved.  So I added 1/2 cup flour, some pecans and chocolate chips to the rest of the dough and baked off more cookies.  Then I drizzled them with some of the dulce de leche and some melted chocolate AND I sprinkled some with more chopped pecans.

The cookies were good.  That said, I don’t think I’ll make this recipe again.  For some reason, I don’t love dulce de leche, there’s something about it.  I love caramel.  Is there no salt or not enough in the dulce?  It just doesn’t taste quite right to me.   But I love trying new cookies and recipes, so thanks to Jodie for picking this one.  And I ALWAYS have fun playing around.  So of course, I' wasn’t done there!

This recipe made a lot of dough.  I got to where I didn’t feel like baking any more cookies, so I stuck the rest of the dough in my three little cake pans.  I sprinkled one of them with more chopped pecans.  I had turtles on my mind.

I purposely baked these slightly underbaked.  These came out with more of a texture I wanted.  Thick, with a crispy outside and chewy-gooey inside.  And you had to know, perfect for building a sundae on top!

A little chocolate ice cream on top, how about some more of that melted chocolate, more pecans and that dulce de leche.  '

Sorry, no inside picture, Kevin ate the thing before I could get one of those shots.  (I forced him in to it.)

Now, go check out Paige’s blog, A Cooking Life!