Candied Lemon Florentines

Let's be honest.  I'm not Julia Child.  I'm a baker, maybe on the borderline of pastry chef.  I could be more of a Martha.  But she's no Julia Child.  Which is perhaps why her recipe for chicken liver pate was an absolute disaster.  I'm not talking about a kitchen explosion, a hot mess, or some catastrophic mishap -- the pate was just bland.  Not good.  Meh.

Perhaps I remember pate tasting much better than it actually did.  But then again, this was more than two years ago, when a Frenchman brought pate to my Westwood apartment for a graduation celebration.  I do trust the French when it comes to food.  After all, that same Frenchman lit crepes doused in rum on fire in my kitchen.  Perhaps that pate was duck and not chicken, or perhaps it had a different array of spices.  But lesson learned: I will never use this recipe again.  It was... gross.  And the worst part of all had nothing to do with the taste of it, or the fact that I'll never get that hour of my life back.  It was that, after all the effort, it didn't even look pretty.  It's actually very ugly, and I am still very bitter that I man-handled bloody chicken livers for ten minutes in complete vain.  I guess that's one of the reasons why I love baking so much; even if it tastes like dirt, you can find some way to make it look pretty.  And it usually tastes pretty good.  I'm a huge fan of icing, which can make almost anything taste like heaven.  Or chocolate.  It's pretty much heaven by itself.

This past weekend, my house threw our annual cookie "rager."  It's our twenty-something yuppie version of a traditional cookie exchange, which involves massive amounts of cookies, sangria, and dancing.  More than forty people were crammed into our little townhouse like dancing sardines.  There was even couch dancing for the sake of space.  It actually reminded me of one of my favorite movie scenes -- the party scene in Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Anyway, it was satisfying to see many of the people that I can hardly keep in touch with between classes and running -- and, I recruited a few new running buddies.  It was only appropriate to talk up fitness at a cookie rager as everyone plowed through pounds of cookies and booze.

These were my cookies -- candied lemon florentines.  My office benefitted from the leftovers this morning.  It took all of twenty minutes for them to disappear from the coffee room.