The Dorie's Cookies group recipes for January are Bruno’s New Year’s Waffles (page 253) and Portofignos (page 215). This week I chose to make the Portofignos as the other recipe required the use of a pizzelle iron and I don’t have one of those and couldn’t think of a way to adapt it to make it work as intended.
Ingredients: walnuts, salt, dried figs, ruby port, flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, butter, brown sugar, white sugar, and vanilla extract.
Disclaimer right up front: I used dried cherries instead of dried figs as Mark does not care for figs and since he is the one eating the cookies, dried cherries it had to be today. Sometimes one can substitute things and it really isn’t obvious, but since FIG is in the name, I felt I had to confess that my cookies are Pseudo Portofignos. There aren’t any figs in mine, sometimes these things happen.
Mark liked them, and it’s a good thing as I made half a batch and that netted 24 cookies, he figured four a day for six days…you know, like they are some kind of vitamin dose or something. The man loves his cookies, he always has an emergency stash on hand in case I haven’t gotten around to baking any for him. When I asked him why he didn’t like figs he said that his mother loved Fig Newtons and would buy them when they were children. He said it was the most disappointing day ever if she only bought that kind of cookie as he didn't like the taste and wouldn’t eat them, which left him with no cookies when the others were eating theirs. Childhood nightmares indeed. These cookies are easy to make and judging by his comments, should be on the Repeat Often List.
The Tuesdays with Dorie group is baking from Dorie Greenspan's book, Dorie's Cookies. The posts are the first and third Tuesdays of the month and can be linked at the main Tuesdays with Dorie website here. You can also find the information on joining in and/or see the posts from those in the group baking along at this location. I don’t publish copyrighted recipes, so if you’d like to bake along, buy the book, it’s well worth it.