{sms} Cookie Substitution

Fellow {sms} bakers, you'll have to forgive my substitutions for this week. On Saturday,  I had a Robert Schumann 200th Birthday Celebration for my piano students (all were performing one of his compositions) and I felt the need to bake goodies that would appeal to the widest range of 12-&-under palates.  In the past, I've baked large assortments of fancy tea cookies- linzer bars, checkerboard cookies, lemon squares, etc- and The Students inevitably ignore those and gravitate to the sprinkle cookies and chocolate chip cookies.  So, instead of the PB Truffles and still wanting to bake something from The Sweet Melissa Baking Book, I tried Melissa's Sugar Cookies and  Chocolate Chip Cookies with Toasted Almond.

The sugar recipe recipe is plain and simple, but for a rolled cookie dough, unless you're working at hyper-speed and have the air-conditioning on at full blast, this dough is difficult to keep firm for a long period of time.  Many of my cutouts got messed up.  That said, I believe that this would make a lovely tart dough, which is what Melissa suggests in her book.  You can find the recipe on Nina's blog, Nina's Cupcakes.

The chocolate chip cookie is worth mention because of the toasted almonds. I've never thought to add them to cookies, and I definitely like this variation.  I had a scant 1/2 cup sitting in the pantry (the exact amount called for) and left it out on a plate to be toasted.  The Husband came home, saw them, and proceeded to snack away, leaving me nine. Oh well. Kids usually don't like nuts in their cookies. I made exactly four cookies with nuts and ate them myself.

Of course, in the craziness of everything, I managed to get no shots of the cookies plated, but Herr Schumann loved his music, I'm sure, and The Students, well, they finished off the cookies.