Blogger Fail: Vietnamese Iced Coffee Cookies

Do you get inspired when you read other bloggers and their awesome recipes? They take great photos and show you step by step how to make something. I’ve made Lindsay’s paleo bars with satisfactory success. I’ve made Halfbaked Harvest‘s oatmeal chocolate chip breakfast cups with my own twist with great success. I’ve even made some chocolate chip cookies that were delicious.

This month, Thien-Kim posted a recipe for Vietnamese “Iced” Coffee Cookies. She got me with the word “coffee” in them. I mean look at her photos.

courtesy: I’m Not The Nanny

Here’s a story about how I butchered it.

Blogger Fail: Vietnamese “Iced” Coffee Cookies

The recipe is basically a shortbread cookie recipe, which I have never made before. I added very concentrated coffee from my Bialetti because I didn’t have instant espresso powder on-hand. Click here for the recipe.

Brewing up coffee

Mix it up!

Once the batter was mixed, I rolled it into a log and chilled it in the fridge. My log was lopsided but I was in a bit of a rush. (Company was over and we were headed out to grab dinner.)

I threw my “discs” into the oven and they came out looking like ovals. They also took a lot longer to bake. I had to keep throwing them back into the oven every 5 minutes because they wouldn’t brown around the edges. In the end, they still smelled good. I could still decorate them….

Cut up and out of the oven to cool.

Thien-Kim’s recipe for icing was easy to make. I felt I was doing pretty well with following instructions. Powdered sugar, condensed milk and a bit of milk. Done and done.

Icing!

But once I started to ice the cookies, everything fell apart. As you can see, I was dropping the icing and it would slide and fall off the cookies. The icing was too thin. And my cookies baked and formed its own shapes, so I wasn’t getting good coverage. They didn’t bake flat! GAH!

WTF.

By the end of my icing fiasco, I was out of icing.

I was PM-ing (private messaging) Thien-Kim throughout my baking ordeal that night. She was very encouraging. Just to be clear – in no way was this her fault. Her recipe is flawless. It was my execution that sucked balls.

URGHHHHHHH

While there are Photoshop and PicMonkey programs to help fix photos, there is no program that can fix these cookies.

Lort.

I’m going to go ahead and call them a Blogger Fail.

They did taste good – all that butter made them quite yummy. But I won’t be making any more shortbread anytime soon.

Thanks to Thien-Kim for sharing a wonderful recipe that I butchered.

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