Apricot Ice and Cocoanut Cream Cookies

Sometimes, just sometimes, this hobby of mine rewards me with new and delicious treasures. Today, I have two recipes that are fantastic! Hurray!



Apricot Ice
Ice Creams, Water Ices, Frozen Puddings Together With Refreshments for All Social Affairs [1900's?]

1 quart can of apricots
1/2 cupful of sugar
1 pint of water
Juice of one lemon

Press the apricots through a sieve [or, you know, a blender.], add all the other ingredients, and
serve. This is nice served in lemonade glasses for afternoon tea. Pass sweet wafers. [Freeze like ice cream. All the other recipes for fruit ices in this book state this step, this one does not for some reason.]

This will serve eight persons.

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Important Note:: When I say here "freeze like ice cream", I mean "freeze in an ice cream maker", not "put it into the freezer as if it were a carton of Haagen Daaz." Not that anyone made that mistake. You know who you are.

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Cocoanut Cream Cookies
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book [1896]

2 eggs.
1 cup sugar.
1 cup thick cream.
1/2 cup shredded cocoanut.
3 1/2 cups flour.
3 teaspoons baking powder.
1 teaspoon salt.
[extra coconut for sprinkling on top of the dough]

Beat eggs until light, add sugar gradually, cocoanut, cream, and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder. Chill, toss on a floured board, pat and roll one-half inch thick. Sprinkle with cocoanut, roll one-fourth inch thick, and shape with a small round cutter, first dipped in flour. Bake on a buttered sheet. [app. 325 degrees for 10 minutes]


Verdict:

Apricot Ice: Yum. The apricot ice has a clean, crisp, refreshing flavor, perfect for a hot summer day. It also makes use of one of my least favorite fruit applications, canned apricots. I'm not a fan of apricots to begin with, but when they are canned they are like dollops of slimy fur. Here, however, they are transformed into something cloying and slithering to something pure and good.

Also a plus, this recipe just requires things from your pantry, and could be easily adapted to other fruits. Other, similar fruit ice recipes are even in the cookbook, but it isn't that hard. No ice cream? Have a need for ice cream but no dollars? Blend up that mysterious can of fruit in the back of your pantry with water, sugar, and possibly lemon juice. Nice.


Cocoanut cream cookies: Also delicious. They are not heavily sweet like a lot of modern cookies that make your teeth hurt biting into them, they are just exactly sweet enough. No more, no less. Perfect. You can eat them with lemonade or apricot ice without wincing as you go back and forth between teeth-aching frosting and sharp citrus. The texture is sort of like a soft sugar cookie, like a much better version of those pink-frosting sugar cookies you get in grocery stores. I imagine these would work really well at a wedding reception, baby/bridal shower, etc.

As a bonus, by convenient happenstance they are low fat! "But Jana!" you say. "They clearly have cream in them! And cream is fattening!" Well, yes, yes it is. But less fattening then butter. Butter is all the fat and a few of the milk solids from cream. Ninety-eight percent of the cookie recipes I can think of off the top of my head use some sort of solid fat, be it butter or shortening (Spry shortening, of course!). This one, however, uses only cream. Therefore, it is low fat. Go. Make. Eat. Feel not thou guilty.