Ivy Arts

I bought a can of almond paste at Christmas time but I never got a chance to make the cookies I had planned. I made these tasty treats the other day. I followed a few of the reviewers suggestions to decrease the butter and use the entire can of almond paste (what’s a few more tablespoons?). They have an almost shortbread quality, especially at the bottom and the outside pieces and a rich, buttery almond chewy cookie texture on top.

I’m a big fan of the online recipe sites that have user reviews. My cookbooks are pretty dusty at this point. It’s nice to know in advance if your sauce might need thickening or the cook time should be shorter. I use Allrecipes for my everyday dishes. Since I like to cook from scratch when possible, my criticism of this site is that I wish I could sort out dishes that use processed ingredients. I’m pretty sure that if I wanted to dump a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup on some chicken breasts, I don’t need a recipe. When I need something fancier for a dinner party or holiday dish, I use Epicurious. These recipes come mostly from Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines.

As much as I utilize the reviews (I rarely make a dish without at least 4 stars), I never review them myself. Mostly everything has been said before. My favorite are the reviewers who are critical of a dish when they have substituted nearly every important ingredient. My feeling is that you should pretty much keep your two cents to yourself in this case. I read a particularly entertaining one where someone did not have prosciutto so they substituted prostitutes. Bad spelling or just a really bad cook?