Lemon Espresso Bites Mishap

Once again I find myself scrambling for a treat idea last Thurday for OCT's Friday lab meeting. I turned to my cookbook collections for ideas, but those that met my eyes were either too time consuming (certainly not for last minute baking) or required special ingredients that I didn't have on hand. So, I resorted to the ever resourceful cooking websites, and settled for a Lemon Espresso Bites recipe. Partly also because I am partial to anything with caffeine or lemon in it. After congratulating myself for finding the recipe with this great flavors combo, I started to work on it.

I must have been mesmerised by the name and the picture of the cookies that I forgot to look at the instructions. After everything was assembled, I faced the first impossible task of grinding the almond to fine powder, without the help of a food processor. It was really a mission impossible. I tried to ground them the best i could with a meat mallet. The end result wasn't very impressive, but I decided to proceed nonetheless.

And everything seems fine until I realised that the cookies were supposed to be piped out through a 1.5 inch round tip into 2 inch rounds. Obviously there's no such decoration tools lying around in my very primitive kitchen, so I scooped out the delicate dough into a large ziplock bag and tried my best to cut a 1.5 inch slit at one of the corners. I remembered seeing someone did that before, so that trick should work. After carefully piped out the 2 inches cookies dough on my baking sheet, I happily returned to the laptop to admire the desired end products. It was at that point that I realised something was not right with my cookies' appearance. The one featured on the website was much flatter than my meringue looking cookies. Actually, these are meringue cookies, but the one on the recipe was a thin meringue cookies. Not the bulky ones like those already baking away in the oven.....



I was worry that so many mishap would eventually destroy my cookies. Hence, I decided to swap the espresso filling with one of the ready made, hard to beat secret ingredient that everybody likes- Nutella! Yes, it's true. Nutella can fix anything! From horrible tasting ice-cream to tasteless bread. Nutella always works. And Nutella is going to save my day! I spread a thin layer of Nutella in between my fat meringue cookies, and secretly hope that OCT's labmates would at least have one, for the sack of Nutella....


Because these cookies are associated with too many unhappy memories, I decided to skip the recipe. Eventhough I know none of you out there would be interested in baking them too. Right?

But if you really must know, or simply curious of how the cookies should turn out, click here