I seriously just read, befuddled and followed the most complicated recipe ever! When it could have been summed up as: Roll dough in to 1 in. balls and dip in sugar mixture.
It was all like, roll dough out between two pieces of parchment paper into a flat disk. First, what's wrong with using flour and a rolling pin like most normal people do? And second, you have to search back to fourth grade math when you learned about disks.
Cut this into quarters, fourth grade math again, and divide each quarter into 11 or 12 equal portions. Shape potions into balls. Ummm, have you ever tried to cut a piece of pizza into 11 or 12 equal portions? Who came up with these directions?! You cannot cut a piece of pizza, a triangle, into equal parts without driving yourself crazy! At this point I scooped up all my dough and threw it back in the bowl.
Roll in reserved lime-sugar mixture and gently reshape. This seriously almost had me dumping what was left of the sugar and lime peel into the bowl with the dough. What SHOULD have happened was had the subject (balls) re-introduced and read, "Roll dough balls in reserved lime-sugar mixture and gently reshape. Ugh! Where was the editor? Or maybe the editor doesn't bake and had no idea this would be so complicated. After all, the two sentences were connected with a semi-colon, therefore the subject would just carry over to the other part of the sentence without having to be re-stated. What they didn't take into account is a person following directions does one step at a time, period. Roll dough in balls. Period. Done. Cross it off the list! Don't look at the last part of the sentence and try to connect it to the first part.
What they really could have left off was the whole cutting and dicing. Roll dough into balls 1 in. in diameter and be done with it. No need to waste some perfectly good parchment paper. Or cause any heart attacks because said baker doesn't have any since it wasn't on the ingredient list. Oi.
After I got through the muddle of the recipe I decided these are as simple to make as snickerdoodles and taste way better. If you like ginger and lime - together. Which I guess, why not?
I am really bad at remembering to smoosh cookies before putting them in the oven. Rolling into balls and dipping in sugar is really enough steps for me. Add smooshing before shoving them in the oven to bake is a little too much on my mind. Needless to say, I looked at the directions one item at a time before I shut that oven door the first time. I even went back down the ingredient list, making sure I didn't forget the vanilla or salt or something else that would be impossible to mix in at this point.
I thought I knew what I was doing the second time, neglecting to check each step, and forgot to smoosh them down before I took them out after 6 minutes and had a mini freak-out that they didn't look like the rest. Until I remembered that I had forgotten the smooshing. So I went ahead and smooshed them down (huge no, no) and put them back in the oven for another 4 minutes to puff themselves back up. And, you know what, those cookies taste WAY better than the firsts that went through the oven. So I purposefully forgot to smoosh the rest of them until the 6 minute mark and then cooked for another few minutes.
Someone should have followed that recipe themselves before publishing it and my copy now has notes all over it about "just like a snickerdoodle" and about not smooshing until cooked for 6 minutes.
This recipe also is one of those 'choose your own adventure' recipes. '2 or 3 tsp ground ginger, to taste', was on the ingredient list. I've never cooked anything with ginger before and was at a total loss as to whether 2 or 3 would be better. So I put two, knowing that when it was cooked the taste would change again. I now know to do three. And that is circled, because I know it will be a year before I do this recipe again and by that time I will have forgotten this learning experience and would have to think really hard about what I did the year before and whether or not it worked and whether or not I want to do what I know or try for something different. This way, with a circle, I have no need to think, just do and pour it on.
I cannot believe something so seemingly complicated ended up being so easy. I will no longer be afraid about cutting recipes from magazines when their instructions look too long to handle. It really could be as simple as dipping dough balls into remaining sugar.
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