Applesauce cookies

I love cookies. My family and friends can attest to my never ending sweet tooth, and cookies are a wonderful way to satisfy it.

That’s why I was happy to stumble upon a first edition of Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book, copyright 1963, complete with the original $1.95 price sticker on the front. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you where I bought mine or how much I paid for it. Nevertheless, it’s 159 pages long, hard cover and spiral bound.

I decided to try the first recipe in the book: Applesauce Cookies.

Coming from a Dutch background, I have a special relationship with applesauce. We used to serve it at every dinner, and I’ve even heard it referred to as “Dutch Gravy.” As a child I used to mix it with magma-hot scallop potatoes to cool them enough to eat, and my mother would sometimes serve cottage cheese with a dollop of applesauce in the middle as a sort of winter salad.

Imagine my horror, then, when my stepson made a face after hearing the name of the cookies and declared, “Applesauce is evil.”

Applesauce? Really?

Not beets, fried liver, brussels sprouts, or creamed spinach, but my beloved applesauce?

There is no explanation for such lack of judgment. Sigh.

Applesauce Cookies

1 cup shortening
2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup cold coffee
2 cups well-drained applesauce
3 1/2 cups Gold Medal Flour
1 tsp. [baking] soda
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. each cinnamon, nutmeg, and [ground] cloves
1 cup raisins
1/3 cup coarsely chopped nuts

Mix shortening, sugar, and eggs thoroughly. Stir in coffee and applesauce… Mix dry ingredients and stir into applesauce mixture. Chill at least 2 hours.

Heat oven to 400. Drop rounded tablespoonfuls of dough about 2″ apart on lightly greased baking sheet. Bake 9-12 min., or until almost no imprint remains when touched lightly. If desired, frost when cool with Lemon Butter Icing.

Makes 7-8 dozen cookies.

Lemon Butter Icing

2 1/2 tbsp. soft butter
1 1/2 cups sifted confectioner’s [powdered] sugar
1 1/2 tbsp. lemon juice
2 tsp. grated lemon rind

Blend butter and sugar together. Stir in cream and vanilla until smooth.

Makes icing for 4 doz. cookies.

Despite this being a rather straightforward cookie recipe, I had some problems with it. Apparently, I did not drain my applesauce well enough. I am not at all sure how to drain it better than I did with my strainer. Perhaps I should have left it for an hour or so. Perhaps I should have left it in the sun to dehydrate. Perhaps they sell freeze-dried applesauce somewhere online, maybe as part of the military’s MRE rations. (You can find anything on the Internet!)  The extra moisture in the applesauce made the cookie dough the consistency of cake batter. At this point, it would have made some pretty good muffins. That is what I should have done with it. Instead, I added more flour and stuck it in the refrigerator to set.

When I took it out, it was sticky. It was really sticky. The gluten in the flour had taken the opportunity to bond with the moisture in the applesauce to turn elastic. With no more than a cup of shortening in the batch, there was nothing to prevent this from happening. I used two teaspoons to drop the cookies onto my silicone-lined cookie sheets and popped them into the oven.

I like crunchy cookies. The crunch is satisfying, and it lets you know that you’re eating a cookie.

These however, are not crunchy. They’re like little apple spice cakes, except that they’re not terribly spicy either. Their flavor is not objectionable; it’s just not notable. These cakey little cookies bored the heck out of me.

So… I tried the Lemon Butter Icing

Mistake.

This icing is not lemony-tasting. It’s just sour. It’s so oddly sweet/sour that it made my mouth water, but not in a good way. I think my body was just trying to tell me that it wanted to dilute this stuff before it hit my stomach. Even the little bit of icing I put on my cookies completely overpowered their delicate (bland) flavor, rather than complementing it. Icing FAIL.

This made A LOT of cookies. In fact, it made way more than we cared to eat. DH and I were glad to see the end of the batch, which happened long after we thought it should have.

So, here’s the verdict:

This is a pretty good reduced-fat muffin recipe. Too bad it’s in a cookie cookbook.

This is not worthy of cookbook obsession.