mm: coconut-pecan caramel sandwich cookies

martha mondays: coconut-pecan caramel sandwich cookies

welcome to the first showing of martha mondays! i hope you had as much fun as i did making these sandwich cookies. the photo in her baking handbook was one of the first things to catch my eye, and i'm glad i finally tried baking them. and i'm glad to have the company too! especially because this was my first time ever making caramel. wow. homemade caramel = sugar heaven. also, sticky hell :)



how did your cookies go? unfortunately i could not find a flower cut-out in the right shape, so i just made rounds. first lesson for me ... roll out dough in pieces. i seem to have the innate inability to roll out dough evenly 1/8 inch high across 10+ round inches. so next time, i will halve the dough before chilling so i can have smaller pieces to work with.



i had a lot of fun making the caramel. i wanted to use a squeeze bottle, but the plastic melted a bit, whoops! the canvas piping bag i have is too large. so i used a spoon and it came out fine, but the dollop and drizzle on top came out a little too heavy. of course i only show the ones that came out nicely, haha! but to me, my cookies came out a little too caramely and next time i will have to try harder at manipulating the sweet stuff. but to mr. mimi they were perfect.
and the taste? this is definitely a sweet cookie. but really yummy. it's a keeper! and it's great for the diet too. unlike, let's say, chocolate chip cookies which you can totally munch like five, six, ten in a row in one sitting ... you can really only handle one of these sweet babies at a time :)

online recipe can be found here with slight differences from the book (in the book: 1/4 cup coconut and for the filling 1 1/3 cup sugar, 1/2 cup cream, and 4 tb butter). depending on what happens with this event, i'll post again with a round-up of anyone else who made these!

update: go check out alexandra at addicted sweet tooth to see her great cookies, including some with ganache filling!

frosted bake shop also joined us and made awesome looking flower shaped cookies! and i was just waiting until someone got around to saying ... it's a "good thing" :)