X Cookies

My friend Jacqueline corrected me last night - I keep calling this a "baking challenge", but when I explained the premise she said I'm in fact in a "baking club". The thing is it's pretty challenging for me, so I prefer my way of saying it. Sounds like I'm suffering for my baking. However it also sounds like one of us will be crowned Grand Baking Queen at the end of the year, and let's face it, that would be Tina, so in order to not give up all hope I shall refer to it as my "baking club" from now on.

I have this horrible tendency to read the ingredients of the recipe and not the directions. So challenge number 1 I discover is that a food processor is rather heavily needed for the X Cookies. Me, I have this :

For a recipe that ends up making 5 dozen cookies, this is going to take a while. I ended up halving it like Tina suggested.

Culinarium's contribution to this recipe is once again butter and eggs.

I didn't quite follow this recipe to a T. Which likely explains why I didn't really care for the final cookies, either that or I don't like figs, I can't be sure.


The Bulk Barn didn't have "candied orange peel" just something generically called "citrus peel" which I used instead. Also since I was buying all my ingredients there I skipped over the dark rum, as that's not really something you can get at Bulk Barn. Then I promptly forgot I needed it at all until after I'd made the dough. So I took to the internets and replaced the rum with molasses. If you told me 5 years ago that I would be the type of girl more likely to have molasses in her kitchen than rum I would have laughed. In your face. And called you a liar. But old lady me has in fact turned out this way.

The thing about using molasses is that it's quite sticky. Like glue-sticky. So trying to roll something like that into a rope, it's just... gross. Combine that with the fact that I missed a portion of dough hiding behind my hand blender and I may have overfilled the cookies. Also, I didn't have parchment paper, so the bottoms may be a little darker than normal.

On the plus side that extra dough allowed me to produce other cookies. I used the dough and a little dollop of jam. I made five with Lime Marmalade and five with Ginger Jam. Those. I loved. Perhaps due to their lack of figs. Though they weren't nearly as pretty: