Cream Cheese-Lemon Bows (Pg 156)

Don't be freaked out by my psychic abilities, but I can totally read your mind right now. You're thinking "Hey! Those don't look like bows!" Yeah. This is what they should look like:

Awwww, how pretty. It really would have been lovely if I could have made them look like that. But y'know, I'm still on my learning journey here.

As with my previous recipe (Cream Cheese Swirl Brownies) I was using the thin cream cheese, so I'm pretty sure the consinstency of the dough was not what it should've been. It was supposed to be piped out of a pastry bag into the shape of bows. Well, I tried.

Again, this was a first for me, and as with all baking projects, if the dough is not exactly as it should be, it won't work. Baking is a very particular science, after all. So I had a feeling the dough wasn't going to work with a pastry bag, and the tip I had probably wasn't big enough, but I tried anyway. And my results were.....interesting.

Not very pretty. Each bow I made looked a little better, and I know if I just practiced I could probably get the hang of it. But I didn't really feel like wasting all the dough by trying to make pretty bows.

After making the Snickerdoodles, I recognized the consistency of this Cream Cheese-Lemon dough as being a good consistency for drop cookies. So I rolled the dough into balls and rolled them in bright, festive, holiday colored decorating sugar. I have to say, I think they look really adorable, like little holiday jewels.

Even though I'm allergic to the cream cheese, I tried a tiny bit of the dough. It's really good! It has a nice little tart bite from the lemon, which compliments the cream cheese nicely.

The moral to these two cream cheese recipes is: follow the directions, for goodness sake. This is something I know, especially with baking, but I keep getting ahead of myself and thinking I can improvise. No. If the ingredients aren't exactly as listed, if the tools are different, if your oven temperature is uneven, it just doesn't work. But the other moral is: it probably still tastes good!

The Cream Cheese-Lemon Drops came out really nicely, even with the improvisation. Even when things go a little wrong, you can still make something good. Sometimes.