Coconut-Cream Cheese Pinwheels (Pg 61)

Wow. What a process to make these cookies. Sarah was joining me again and we had already done 2 other batches during the day and this was our 3rd recipe.

Needless to say, we were a little tired and weren't quite feeling up to the 20 different steps in the process of baking these. Seriously. We made a couple batches and then refrigerated the rest of the dough for the next day. So this was a 2 day process.

The process is this: Make the dough and the filling. Refrigerate the dough. Roll out dough and cut into squares. This was my favorite part. I love rolling dough and I got this neat little ruffly edge cookie slicer which is like a pizza slicer. It was fun to make the little squares.

Then the squares of dough have to be refrigerated for 15 minutes. Then you put a dollop of the coconut-cream cheese filling in the middle of each square. Then you slice diagonal lines from the corners to the dollop of filling. Then you fold every other tip down to make a pinwheel and press the center pieces of dough together and make a well in the top.

Are you still with me?

Now you use a pastry brush to glaze the tops of the pinwheels with beaten egg and then sprinkle them with sanding sugar. Then you bake for 6 minutes. Then you take them out and put the strawberry jam in the well in the center. Then bake for another 6 minutes.

Seriously. I was getting a little bit annoyed, so it was good that I was baking with someone else. I don't think I'd have the patience to make these on my own. And I can't even eat these because I'm allergic to the cream cheese, so I don't even know if all the trouble was worth it. I have heard (from my Mom and from Sarah) that the cookies are really good. Maybe they're worth it.

When I was rolling out the squares I had one little bit of dough at the end that wasn't really enough to make the right size square, so I just left it in an un-shaped lump and baked it. Sarah decided to put a dollop of filling and strawberry jam in it as she was doing with the rest of the squares, but it came out just like a little cup instead of a pinwheel. We agreed that it's pretty cute - like a little flower. Our verdict is that if we make these again, we'll just make them look like this and not bother with the pinwheel thing because it was just too much. They will still taste just as good if they look like this.

Yield:
Recipe predicted: 2.5 dozen.
Actual: 2 dozen.

18 recipes down, 157 to go.