REFLECTION: My First Gingered Duck Cookies

I got impatient. Before I split the unsweetened dough in half, I decided that it would be too dry, even though I had yet to add the molasses or maple syrup. I hastily incorporated an extra quarter cup of fat and not until the two halves were whole did I realize the error of my ways. The dough was a little slimy.

I am not yet sold on the duck. I will try it again with 3/4 of the fat and maybe substitute butter for some of that. The free radicals were too numerous in this debacle to be sure that the altered fats were the cause, but the spices in these cookies were so muted when compared to my last batch of bacon cookies, despite comparable amounts of all other ingredients.

The texture of the flat duck cookies was very similar to that of the bacon cookies, regardless of sugars, but they seemed to puff up more cake-like in the muffin tins than their porcine counterparts.

The maple syrup flavor was a superb touch, which also seemed to slow the cooking, while the molasses got more of a burned sugar flavor that went from sweet to bitter.

TSB liked the molasses better than the maple and said she could taste the duck, which worries me, since she is the one with the incisive palate. I made her test the cookies before we uncorked the smuggled absinthe, in which she noted a citrusy finish, but I could barely get my tongue past the anise.