maple madness.

my company has decided to have a bake off. not just any bake off mind you but a bake off where each employee who participates is randomly assigned a state and has to use that state (or its motto, affiliations, political infractions, etc ad naseum) as basis for said bake off entry. my assignment was vermont. now i know, i know, i should be excited for all the extra sharp chedda cheese love, but this is a bake off so i needed a sweet treat. the next obvious option was of course maple. believe it or not there are not many maple-based recipes out there. at least not many that sounded uber appealing to me. i considered maple cheesecake bars, but i'm pretty against flavored cheesecakes. grandma's two tone is always the number one cheesecake of choice, followed distantly by new york style, but this isn't about cheesecake today. another day perhaps...

anyway, i decided on maple. right. so a few months ago i made these totally awesome buttery molasses cookies for my father as a kiss ass father's day gift. he loves molasses. i brought some to my father-in-law as well, and even he and the in-laws who said they didn't like molasses polished these off. side note, butter will win anyone over. but the really weird thing about that recipe is that it called for melting butter not creaming it, which makes for flat cookies. so i knew this going in and figured i could still use that recipe as a template for the maple cookies and just sub maply syrup for molasses, added a few more spices, etc no problem right?

yeah. well this went in the oven:
and this came out:
riiiiigghhhhhtttt. interesting. this is why i am not martha stewart. and why martha stewart is martha stewart. so the rest of the concoction got put into a large pan to be baked bar cookie style and came out like this:
while the crimped edges were very endearing, the taste and consistency left something to be desired. this went in the trash and i started again.
this time i pretty much followed the recipe to a T and made sure it called for creaming butter, which i learned adds air to the batter and makes them puff. so martha stewart recipe is:

cream 1 stick butter with 1 cup brown sugar
add 1 egg
add 1/2 cup maple syrup (ok i lied, i did modify, it was molasses again and only 1/4 cup)

then add dry ingredients:
1.5 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinammon

spoon dough onto cookie sheets:

bake at 350 for 12-15 minutes rotating pans and moving up to down on racks. how effing high maintenance is martha stewart? good lord. but they came out as seperate cookies so how much can i really complain?
so i kept making these for awhile. they're sandwich cookies so i had to make a whole other batch and frosting. this went on for hours.

to make frosting, cream:
1 stick butter
1/4 cup maple syrup
1.5-2 cups confectionary sugar
and assembled they did turn out to be pretty cute....

and tasty as well. trust me i ate three kinds of maple cookies last night and these are definitely the best ones of the bunch. it was quite a dinner! at one point i attempted to make a fried egg but somehow it didn't turn out (i have no idea how i couldn't make a fried egg, there must have been bad karma in the kitchen) so i just opted for cookies and wine. contest today, stay tuned for results!

***addendum: some chocolateness won the contest, oh well i persevered through the tragedy of losing and didn't have to go home and make three kinds of maple cookies. success!***