"You followed a recipe, didn't you?" Part 1

Lemon-Ginger Pinwheel Cookies from Cooking Light. They looked pretty, don't they?

Don't be fooled. They're like dog biscuits. I think I broke a filling on one of them - no, seriously, I'm calling the dentist on Monday.

When the recipe didn't call for any baking powder, I was suspicious. But I'd never made pinwheel cookies before, so I thought maybe they wouldn't look good without the baking powder and maybe the surprisingly low oven temperature and surprisingly short baking time would make it work anyway.

Boy was I wrong.

The low oven temperature did not cook the cookies within the allotted time. Cooking them longer at least meant they weren't raw in the middle, but now they were tough. The recipe called for cooking until "lightly browned" so the second batch, I cooked even longer, until they were browned, with the result that even Ariel won't eat that batch.

To add insult to injury, the different colors of dough didn't "join" together, and so there are cracks between the colors, which look bad and also cause the cookie to fall apart when eating it. With baking powder, these cracks would have filled in and the cookie would have been a cohesive baked good, not a crumbly, tough waste of ingredients.

Trust your own judgment, ladies and gentlemen! When a cookie doesn't call for baking powder and you KNOW it should, ADD IT ANYWAY!