I am never doing that again.
The last time I was around these parts, I was making all kinds of sadfaces about culinary amnesia, myopia, whatever you want to call it. Then I visited family and ate comfort food and shoveled a millionty inches of snow, which left me feeling up to tackling smitten kitchen‘s rainbow cookies.
Never again.
Don’t get me wrong: they were delicious (don’t click away! just because you know the ending doesn’t mean the rest of the story can’t be enjoyable! this blog is not a murder mystery, or if it is, think Dorothy L. Sayers!). They were just an unbelievable amount of work. And I cheated. Not only did I have a faithful minion, J., but we decided that 3 and 8 look enough alike that it would be okay to take the cookies out of the refrigerator where they were resting after three hours. Instead of eight. Yeah.
photograph from afagen
And yet: utterly delicious. Other than that (and running out of almond extract and probably not whipping the egg whites all the way to “stiff, glossy peaks”), though, I used deb’s recipe exactly. So I’m not going to bother reposting it; I will say only that this is easily the single most time-consuming recipe I have ever made (J. is going to show up and refute this, I bet you anything), one of the prettiest, and one of the most impressive. People have been shocked that rainbow cookies can be made at home, and then they’re shocked by how much work they are, and then, finally, they’re shocked at how good they taste.
On second thought, I may make these again, on three conditions: one, that the reason is a very good one (a wedding or a birth would be an example); two, that I am in someone else’s kitchen, with sufficient room and counters and a dishwasher; three, that I get to play with the colors and not use the traditional pink, white, green pattern. I think a purple stripe would be nice, don’t you?
