Many thanks to all for the advice on Cattern Cakes. I started out with a sheaf of recipes and a transcript of the Arachne comments, incorporating all of them into one attempt. You can see the results on the International Organization of Laceâs I facebook page, as I took photos all along the process. I used cake flour (to mitigate the protein problem- Leonard) and baking powder, using a formula on the internet, 3 1/3 teaspoons, and then add the flour to the gram requirement (to compensate for the self rising flour). I set my food scale for grams in order to avoid any confusion about whether we were talking about ounces as a weight, or fluid ounces as a measurement. I ground the almonds in the food processor, then added the currents which I had frozen on a plate in the freezer, so they could be ground, and not interfere with the cutting of the cookies. The currents didnât want to be ground, so I had to run the processor for quite a while resulting in very finely ground almonds and coarsely ground currents. I used the biggest egg I could get, a Jumbo. One thing that I have not seen discussed is the temperature of the butter. One recipe said that you should melt it, and let it cool. So, I tried this. My dough was overly sticky and moist when I finished adding the dry ingredients and I was afraid that it would be taking in a lot of flour during the rolling process. This is at odds with what most people in North America were experiencing, as the âtoo dryâ comment was a constant theme. In fact, if I were doing it again, I would have stuck the dough in the refrigerator at that point. The moistness of the dough proved to be a problem during the rolling out and the rolling up. Acting on the advice of Lin, in an effort to get a spiral. I put black current jam on one third, red current jelly on a third and a mixture of cinnamon and water on a third. After baking the black current jam was dark red, the red current jelly was pale orange, and the cinnamon one had no visible color variation. None of this produced a spiral in the end because the cookie just melted together in the oven. (Again, it would be interesting to see if this would happen if the dough had been cooled.) In retrospect, perhaps something dryer with a red color would have been better, but the cinnamon and water mixture didnât do it either. Perhaps a dry food coloring? But, that wouldnât be traditional. I was planning to take the advice to spread the almonds and the currents on the surface of the roll instead of making them part of the dough to enhance the spiral effect, but I decided against this because I was afraid that the ground almonds might be imperative to the texture of the cookie. I think that was probably a correct decision. I rolled the cookies up like a jelly roll, but I could see that the dough was too mushy. Many recipes called for making the slices ¾ of an inch wide, but one called for ½ inch and I went with the ½ inch recalling that several people said it took 30 minutes for them to bake. At ½ inch they took the requisite 10-12 minutes that several recipes say they will. The slicing was difficult because the rolls were so mushy. Finally I opened the window and let them have a good blast of New Jersey frigid air in an attempt to firm them up. It made a difference, although the cookies produced from this process were smaller and in some ways not as sumptuous as the ones that spread uncontrollably in the oven. The resultant cookie was not what we had been hoping for, spiralwise, but it was tasty, somewhat reminiscent of a Snickerdoodle, except for the caraway seeds. The caraway seeds are actually very good on it, something I had had some doubts about. I took a video of my husband tasting it and pronouncing it good and posted it on the International Organization of Laceâs facebook page.
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