Let me set the record straight on these cookies before I go any further. I did not bake them. My boyfriend did. Yes, he bakes. Very well. He just doesn’t do it as often as he did before we started dating.

While I’m admitting that I didn’t bake these beautiful cookies, I’ll also admit that his standard double pastry crust fruit pies are probably better than mine. I do a great job with fancy pies and tarts or pies with crumb tops…but his normal apple or blueberry pies are superior to mine.

I did, however, take the photographs of his almond and raspberry thumbprint cookies. They’re a very slight alteration of the “Thumbprints for Us Big Guys” cookies found in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours.

The very slight alteration is the substitution of almonds for hazelnuts. We had hazelnuts in the house but the process of toasting them and rubbing the skin off of them and then grinding them was far too arduous for that particular evening. Almonds were the easy way out. Sorry, the easy – yet still delicious- way out.

Sometimes you have to do that. If I never took a shortcut in cooking and baking, I’d probably turn out way more delicious food…but I’d have a lot less free time on my hands. Running to the grocery store for something I don’t have wastes a lot of time…especially when I have a reasonable alternative for the item needed in the house. Sometimes the easy way out is okay (as it was with these cookies). Just don’t do it all the time. Sometimes you need to deal with the hazelnuts…time consuming or not.

These almond and raspberry thumbprint cookies were great. Delicate and crumbly yet somehow sturdy enough to make the drive with us to Myrtle Beach for our vacation.

The boyfriend made these cookies after a string of three or four bad batches of cookies baked in my old apartment. Yes, I know there are no bad (or ugly) cookies…but these were all terrible. After the first bad batch or two, the boyfriend joked that I’d lost my baking mojo. The jokes ceased after he baked a bad batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

We thought the problem was baking powder or baking soda…but they weren’t guilty. We eventually chalked it up to the terrible half-sized oven in my apartment that wouldn’t hold an even temperature. That oven liked to burn the bottoms of cookies well before the tops began to set yet it was incapable of getting much above 400 degrees and the broiler didn’t work at all. Is it any wonder we blamed it for bad cookies?

The problem wasn’t solved until a week or so ago when I baked another bad batch of cookies…the first batch in the new house. It was a cookie recipe I’d used the week before with great success so I was pretty sure the recipe wasn’t to blame. I was also pretty sure it was not the oven in the new house’s fault. Albeit it is a very cheap oven, it is still a brand new oven that works very well.

Because of the bad batch of cookies in the new house, we finally figured out the culprit: Food Lion butter. Cheap Food Lion butter that probably has too high an oil or water content for successful baking. If you’re not familiar with Food Lion, it’s a grocery store. A kind of chintzy grocery store. I tend to like high-end grocery stores and really only go to Food Lion for staple items. I usually don’t like to buy meat or produce there. Nor will I even buy butter there again. I’m back to Land O’Lakes for a while.

The recipe for these cookies can be found on the internet currently so I’m not going to type it out today.

Here’s a link to it at : Recipezaar. The only change that was made to the recipe was the substitution of almonds for hazelnuts.

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