Latin Lace Florentines For Mother's Day

Latin Lace Florentines

This year for Mother's Day Mom and I got together with Grammy. After consulting on how to spend the day we came up with a casual day at home, grilling, and chilling. It was only the night before that I decided to come up with something fabulous for these two special women in my life. Mom and Grammy are both trying to lay off the sugar and sweets (NOT while I'm around!), but this is a special day, and once I saw the recipe for these Latin Lace Florentines, I knew they would be the perfect treat for the day (and mom agreed).
 
The  night before I was leafing through my Great Big Butter Cookbook when I happened on the same page a couple of times. I have to admit that I am a picture person -- if the picture is engaging you have me hooked. The opposite is true if the picture is dull -- but this picture was anything but dull. Gorgeous, tiny, lacey cookies topped with a drizzling of chocolate in a dish of chili powder. Yes, you read that right, there is chili powder in these cookies! Mmm they are decadent. Anyway, I was smitten with the picture, had most of the ingredients, and decided to make them as soon as we brought Grammy home.

These are going fast....

  The assembly was sort of strange. First, you whisk all of the dry ingredients together, and then you pour all of the wet ingredients into the dry mixture and stir until completely combined. These are not the usual steps I take when making cookies, but I did as I was told. It worked out just fine...the machine was a little irritated, but the batter was completely mixed and delicious looking.

Now, here's one thing I encountered. For this specific recipe when it says to only use a teaspoon size ball on the baking sheet that is precisely the size you should use. And I don't generally advocate for tiny cookies. Like mom said: "I want my cookies to be the size of a plate, the size of my head!" I guess that's where I get it from. The first go around that is what I did. I have a cookie scoop that makes a decent size cookie. I noticed that this becomes a bit of a problem though when they were baking. There is a lot of butter and light corn syrup in these cookies, which means that as soon as there is any bit of heat the batter instantly begins to spread out (putting the dough balls three inches apart is also a good idea! These cookies spread out!). Because the edges were spreading out and the middle was still mounded, the edges began to get really brown and the center was still under baked. For the next batch I decided on the tiny teaspoon, and I had much better results. When the cookies spread out there was no longer a huge mound in the center, so they baked pretty evenly. When the cookies come out of the oven you can tell where they get their name from. The big chunks of almonds and oats leaves gaps in the dough and makes the cookie look like lace! They are so pretty! And did I mention delicious? Oh, my. They are good.

Once all the cookies were out of the oven I melted bittersweet chocolate to drizzle on top of the cookies. Bittersweet chocolate was the best to use because it perfectly complimented the sweetness of the cookie. Semi-sweet chocolate would have been too sweet and masked the flavors in the cookie -- cinnamon, chili powder, mm! Decadent.





Once the chocolate was drizzled over the tops of all the cookies we dove in (well, we dove in way before then, but this was the first time we would taste the final product). Everyone thought they were delicious! And gorgeous (even Shawn can't keep his paws of of these elegant treats). They were the perfect cookie to make for a day honoring mothers; the cookies are dainty, lacey, elegant, and delicate. Perfect!

A variation of these are definitely going in the bakery.

What did you do with the special women in your life on Mother's Day?