First of all, thank you for the outpouring of support last week on both the comment section of this blog, as well as on your own blogs. Having it be “your” week to host Tuesdays With Dorie is a lot like prom night, except this time I didn’t end up sobbing!

Looks pretty good, doesn’t it. DON’T BE FOOLED – THE CRUST IS POISON.

I messed this week’s recipe up big time. I must have made Dorie’s sweet tart dough five times before, and always without incident. This week I forgot to put the sugar into the dough. So it was more like a fruity chocolate tart in a biscuit-crust. Surprisingly, not as bad as I expected it to be; if I had more time, I would have given it another go before I posted this. I’ll be trying this again sometime soon, preferably with the correct dough.

For those of you who do not regularly read my site, I pretty much destroy everything I touch – baked goods included.

For this recipe, I destroyed my garlic press, which I used to crack the shells on my hazelnuts. GOTTA USE SOMETHING.

Otherwise, all went according to plan. They’re looking a little sloppy but dare I say…edible? Way to go, Me! And way to go, Tuesdays With Dorie, for baking along with me this week.

I’d imagine that I’ll be getting a little extra traffic due to this being “my” week picking the recipe. Here’s a little about me. I’m a big dumb doofus of a guy who somehow managed to end up with a beautiful fiance and an okay dog.

I used to be real fat. Then I went crazy and got too skinny. Now I’m a nice medium size and fairly healthy.

I’ve been baking since July 2008. It’s clear that I’m pretty bad at baking, but here’s something I am good at – self promotion!

This is my Facebook. You can befriend me.

This is my joke Twitter, which I write under the pen name “Leroy Pitts.” Basically it’s a bunch of dumb jokes whenever they pop into my head. Here is a compilation of the “best of” my first year or two of those jokes.

This is my baseball blog, Wade Bloggs. It is notable because I neither know nor care anything about baseball. I pretty much write silly things and punctuate them with references from Wikipedia. And it is a world renowned baseball blog! Easy enough.

So that’s me. What about you? ROLE CALL.

THUMBPRINTS FOR US BIG GUYS by Dorie Greenspan from “Baking: From My Home To Yours”

1 3/4 cups finely ground hazelnuts
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flower
2 sticks (8 oz) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon pure almond extract
Confectioner’s sugar, for dusting
About 1 cup raspberry jam (or the jam or marmalade of your choice)

GETTING READY: Position the racks to divide the oven into thirds and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment or silicone mats.

Whisk together ground nuts and flour.

Working with a stand mixer, preferably fitted with the paddle attachment, or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the butter and sugar together on medium speed until light and fluffy, 3 to 4 minutes. Add the extracts and beat to blend. Reduce the mixer speed to low and gradually add the nut-flower mixture, mixing only until it is incorporated into the dough.

Working with a teaspoonful of dough at a time, roll the dough between your palms to form small balls and place the balls 2 inches apart on the baking sheets. Steadying each cookie with the thumb and forefinger of one hand, use the pinkie of your other hand (or the end of a wooden spoon) to poke a hole in the center of each cookie. Be careful not to go all the way down to the baking sheet.

Bake for 15 to 18 minutes, rotating the sheets from top to bottom and front to back at the midway point. The cookies should be only slightly colored–they may even look underdone, which is fine: they should not be overbaked. When the cookies are baked, remove the baking sheets from the oven and let the cookies rest on the sheets for 2 minutes before transferring them to cooling racks with a wide metal spatula and sifting confectioner’s sugar over them.

Repeat with the remaining dough, remembering to cool the baking sheets before baking the next batch.

Bring jam to a boil in a small saucepan over low heat, or bring to a boil in a microwave oven; remove from the heat. Fill the indentations of all the cookies with enough of the hot jam to come level with the tops. Cool to room temperature.

You should have expected no less from a gentleman who has spent 100% of his $reading budget in the past year on graphic novels. I am a nerd. A geek. A square. A dwarf warrior.

Anyway, I made these into mini-tarts because I don’t own a bigger tart pan, and they’re easier to share, which is also nice. My friends were very complimentary towards the tarts and so they gave me +5 XP. That’s tart experience points, my friends.

I don’t know how to toast coconut properly, so I just dumped a bag of coconut into my toaster and pushed down the lever. There was much smoke.

That last paragraph didn’t really happen; just didn’t have anything else to say. Next week is MY TWD RECIPE. Expect some sort of glorious fanfare.

SUCCESS!

By the way, since Dorie took her time to comment on my last post, I should fess up: my first batch of last week’s recipe (Chocolate Chip Cookies) came out horribly burnt on the bottom; however, I switched to an insulated cookie sheet, which saved the bottom and made some decent cookies in the long run. In my wont of sad-sack posts, I just left out my later success. Hope I didn’t insult Dorie’s recipe, because even the burnt cookies were edible and good

My cookies all spread out like crazy and burnt on the bottom. Yum.

Here are some other things I made lately but haven’t found the time to post about:

Homemade veggie burgers, which, if I remember, are made up primarily of peanuts, sunflower seeds, almonds, green peppers, onions, garlic, and steak sauce. They were pretty good, although they were a little crumbly. They froze well for a future meal.

Nutella cookies, from a recipe we found somewhere online. I made these while we were snowed in on Saturday.

This was an enormous marshmallow rope brought to me from Italy by my friend. It was far superior to any store-bought marshmallow I’d eaten, and definitely superior to my sorry attempt at homemade marshmallows from a few weeks back.

I bought a mini-bundt pan for the occasion, except I didn’t realize that I bought a 12-mini-bundt-pan when I needed a 6-mini-bundt-pan. I adjusted the time and temperature by completely winging it, and these came out perfectly.

LOST starts up tonight. BE READY.

Mine…

Terribly disappointed. The gelatin and sugary-meringue mix became separate, leaving me with a super-sticky white layer and a firm, Jell-O-ish layer of sewage-brown nothingness. They taste fine, but definitely nothing I could share (which was the intention of this Thursday night experiment). Probably because I didn’t have a candy thermometer so I eyeballed it, but…damn.

Will try another recipe some day. Until then…tears.

LOOKIT.

Even my inability to slice an eggplant couldn’t stop this dinner from looking…well, I must say, downright edible.

It tasted amazing. I’ve decided to stop posting recipes since I get everything out of the same four cookbooks it seems, but if you’re interested, shoot me an e-mail.