Since I started blogging, I have acquired a digital weighing scale which I have to confess I don’t use very much. My measuring cups and spoons were not standard American size! She managed to convert my recipe to her requirements, and also promised to send me some standard American measuring cups and spoons which she did. So when Robin first asked for my recipe, there was a bit of a confusion regarding ingredient quantities. People have been cooking for generations and in the good old days they didn’t have standardised measuring cups and spoons or weighing scales, yet the turned out consistently excellent food! In my experience, with some exceptions, most ingredients in recipes are usually in proportion to one another. While this might seem unscientific to some, I believe that most recipes are not sacrosanct in their ingredient measurements. In case you are wondering, that’s Aparna’s Standard Measure! I am a person who has cooked and baked all the recipes on my blog using my own measuring cups (which are actually old coffee mugs you can find the volume measurements I use at the bottom of this page), which follows the ASM system. It was also the perfect chance to put to use a set of measuring cups and spoons that Robin was so sweet to send to me. What made them particularly attractive to me was the chocolate in them and that these are eggless cookies too. I thought I would experiment with the Viennese Chocolate Fingers (page 147 of the book) contributed by Iris Grundler of Gaithersburg. While some of the recipes are Robin’s and those inherited from her mother-in-law, many of them are recipes from cookie bakers around the world. Each recipe is also marked for degree of difficulty and whether it is an everyday cookie or a holiday cookie. If you’re not interested in any of these activities but are a cookie lover, her book has a great collection of 176 cookie recipes including classics like Chocolate Chip Cookies and Snickerdoodles, Christmas cookies like Peppermint Pinwheels and Chocolate Reindeer Cookies, bars, tartlets, turtles and a variety of cookies from around the world. If you would like to host your own cookie exchange parties then Robin provides a wealth of information about how to plan and organise one and even provides ideas for party themes, invites, 25 sample tea-time menus, fun activities, prizes and favours. Her book, The Cookie Party Cookbook: The Ultimate Guide to Hosting a Cookie Exchange was published last month and you can find my recipe on pages 188-189 of her book. I just got my copy of the book and am looking forward to trying out some of the cookies in it. To cut a long story short, I agreed and Robin added my cookies to her book. That’s when I checked out “cookie exchanges” and found that Robin was a pioneer in the field. She told me she was writing a book on hosting cookie exchanges and wanted to know if I was willing to have my Ghorayebah (Arabic Cardamom Shortbread Cookies) recipe included in her book. Well, I had no idea what a cookie exchange was till about a year ago when Robin Olson wrote to me.
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