Coffee caramel crisps

Before today, it had been about three months since I last baked. There was just no drive or interest until out of the blue, I felt the desire to make something easy and delicious. My only condition was that whatever I made had to use coffee (no idea why) so I found a recipe and modified it to fit my requirement.

Here's a picture of the finished cookie:


And here's the recipe...

• Coffee caramel crisps
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• 1 3/4 call-purpose flour
• 1/4 calmonds, finely chopped
• 1/4 cground coffee beans
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• 3/4 cunsalted butter
• 1 cgranulated sugar
• 1 tspvanilla extract
• 2 Tbspsoy milk
• 1 Tbsphoney
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• Sift flour. Mix in ground coffee beans and almonds. Set flour mixture aside.
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• Cream butter and sugar. Add vanilla, milk, and honey and mix well. Fold flour mixture into batter and mix. Chill dough for at least 30 minutes.
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• Dust working surface with flour and roll out a portion of chilled dough to 1/8" thickness. Cut shapes with cookie cutter and place 1" apart on lined cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees F for 12 minutes.
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The 1 c sugar and 1 Tbsp honey were a substitute for 1 c brown sugar, which I had forgotten to pick up after baking honey cupcakes. I found a really neat app on my iPod Touch called Food Sub and it has helped me make numerous substitutions, but I can't seem to locate it in iTunes at the moment for some reason.

Anyway, the most time consuming parts of this baking project were when I chopped up the almonds and when I was cutting the cookies. I poured out two handfuls of whole almonds onto a chopping board, which appeared to be about 1/2 c. However, it ended up being 1/4 c once chopped. This amount seemed to be just perfect - not too much crunch and not too little either. As for rolling out the dough and cutting the cookies, I found chilling the dough helped immensely because it needed to be relatively stiff to cut and transfer onto the cookie sheet without ruining the shape. If I didn't have the patience to use a cookie cutter, I could have rolled the dough into a log, frozen it, and then sliced it for a haphazard look. My scalloped round cutter gave the cookie a nice, elegant finish and I wouldn't change a thing next time.

Here is a picture of the cookie dough, which smelled like coffee ice cream and tasted just as heavenly:


And here are a few of the cookies resting on a cooling rack: