The long and short of things...

I love to cook and bake. Clearly... I do not, however, love cookbooks. I find that they take up a lot of room, and I only use a few of the recipes in them. I consider it a good cookbook if I can find five (or so) good, keeper recipes. I do, however love Cooking Light magazine. I get four or five great recipes every month. And that is without even looking at the ones for meat and fish. It is great! And the recipes are almost always easy to follow, made with realistic ingredients and healthy. What is there not to love?

I felt like I hadn't baked in a while, and I had some amazingly good vanilla beans sitting in my cupboard, so I decided to make a recipe from Cooking Light that I had tried once before - Vanilla Bean Shortbread. This is a yummy, eggless recipe that makes a nice, fairly plain cookie that serves as a great base for chocolate pudding, ice cream and other flavorful things. It also gave me a chance to get my hands nice and sticky pushing the dough into the pan!! I did substitute margarine for the butter, making this a nondairy treat, and I also used half brown sugar and half white instead of all white - I just love brown sugar!!

The bars came out of the oven at a beautiful golden brown color and cooled for five minutes until it was time to cut them. As I mentioned yesterday, I seem to be totally incapable of cutting in a straight line or making uniform, even pieces. Which is why I wanted to use cookie cutters. Which I don't have. So I had to use my pizza cutter, and have shortbread bars in a variety of shapes and sizes. They still taste good though, and luckily no one is judging my uniformity. (Please, don't judge my uniformity!!)

As much as I enjoy plain cookies, I wanted to have some variety in my dessert. So I melted some chocolate in my makeshift double boiler and dipped away... Quite a nice combination, that vanilla and chocolate... No wonder it is so popular!