I Baked!

My oven does not get any of the love it deserves, but today I filled it with great cookie smells. Today, I finally made some time to bake cookies for Freddy, our doorman. I wanted to make him something for the holidays, but it wasn't until I read about Bezzie's Chocolate Orange Cookies that I knew what to make him.

I know it is a little late for holiday gifts, but I over estimated the time I would have in between all of our traveling in November and December. When we returned from our Christmas visit to Chicago, our oven was broken (there's no telling how long that had been a problem.) Guess who took care of getting it fixed? That's right Freddy. He also kept our sidewalk shoveled and ice free during and after the blizzard. He rounded up space heaters for us when our heat was out for a full week and he helped us keep out the mice that infiltrated back in July. I decided it is never too late to say thank you to Freddy. I baked up a full batch and gave the prettiest ones to Freddy.

These cookies are really good, but not quite as orangy as I was hoping. I think I may have skimped on the orange zest a little. I hate orange peels and as I was zesting, I couldn't help but think about how absolutely disgusting it would be to bite into a piece of peel that didn't get chopped quite small enough. (There are cookies from my childhood that haunt me that had huge chunks of orange peels in them.) By the time I got to the very end of the dough, I was getting bored with the cookie shuffle (emptying and refilling the cookie sheets every 10 minutes) so I just dumped the last of it in the middle of my baking stone.