a glimpse at my week; a full time job, classes three nights a week, a house to keep, a garden to tend to at home and another for the master gardeners and a list of things to do as long as my arm. can you tell i am a little stressed? needless to say, this probably was not the best recipe for me to work on today, my only real day off.
to sum it all up in one word; tedious. irritating is another word that comes to mind. while the end results were reasonably good (more on that in a moment), this is one recipe that i probably will not make again.
the dough is easy to make. it is definitely a recipe to keep in mind when you are making tarts and bars with a crust.
the filling was the tricky part. now, it wasn't all the recipe; some of it was my pantry or perhaps i should say my poorly stocked pantry. i only had half the figs needed so i substituted the only other fruit i had, a bag of prunes. now wait-prunes get a bad rap. i have always liked prunes and this sounded like a reasonable solution. to make sure all was soft, i plumped it all in hot water; figs, prunes and currants-i didn't have raisins. i also did not have candied orange peel-it isn't quite fruit cake season so it is hard to find. did i mention that i am not an orange fan? i added lemon zest instead. there wasn't any apricot jam in the pantry either, i used fig jam in the hope of punching up the fig flavor. my filling just ended up being a sticky mess that was a pain the *** to work with.
because the filling was so sticky, i could only shape one log at a time and it required that i wash my hands twice in the process. this irritated me quickly.
after shaping 4 logs, i quit! the rest of the dough was divided in two. one half was pressed into a pan, the filling was spread over it and i rolled out the rest of the dough to cover the filling. i made holes with a fork, egg washed it and gave it a sprinkle of sanding sugar. forty minutes later, voila!
now, this i might make again-but first, i will go to the grocery store for the figs and the apricot jam. and if i do make these, i think i will also add a little sugar to the filling. oh, remind me to hoard some candied lemon rind or citron, they would be nice in this too! to see what the rest of the bakers came up with, visit the
tuesdays with dorie page.
This recipe did take a good part of the day! Great idea to make a bar version!
ReplyDeleteThe bar version was a great idea! I did find the assembly portion of it fiddly. I was thinking that I should just make mini mince pie versions of them - possibly less fiddly.
ReplyDeleteLove your solution to the tediousness! I only got through 4 of the dough slices and the rest went into the freezer, along with the super sticky fig filling. Definitely not a recipe to attempt when you are pressed for time. Great job, nonetheless!
ReplyDeleteI wish I had gone with a bar instead of the X's - I have very little patience for shaping cookies, so I was cursing these the whole time I was snipping those ends. I really, really like the bar idea!
ReplyDeleteI thought the filling was very sticky - I ended up rolling my filling long in flour so that I could get it long enough to shape.
The fig slice version looks pretty good! But I agree, probably not the recipe when you're in a hurry. My husband thought it was delicious though, and has asked for it again...!
ReplyDeletethe bar is brilliant! I only made half a recipe (because I suspected they wouldn't be a favorite of mine), so that cut down on my X-forming prep time.
ReplyDeleteGood idea with the bars. I halved the recipe so it wasn't nearly as tedious.
ReplyDeleteLove your bar version!! Looks wonderful. What a good idea. It was so time consuming rolling 12 logs! But they are good cookies, so I cut them some slack! ;o)
ReplyDelete