Holy Applesauce, Batman!

Sometimes I love weekends in Connecticut. It's a chance for me to get a ton of baking done and to plan for baking during the week. Not only did I make cookies this weekend, but I also made the dough for cookies that will be baked today (they had to rest overnight), bought all the ingredients for my next five or so recipes, and planned what dessert to bring to my aunt's birthday dinner this weekend. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a rockin' good weekend to me! So, I started off this weekend's baking with another Martha recipe that intrigued me when I saw it. Several of Martha's recipes are very intriguing and somewhat weird. For example, Cornmeal Thyme cookies. That's not what I made this time but I will at some point because that's just too intriguing to let slide. No, this time, I made Oatmeal Applesauce cookies. I've never seen applesauce used in a recipe for a cookie but I figured that it couldn't possibly be bad. And in fact, it wasn't bad at all.

The first step was, of course, to buy the ingredients. The recipe didn't specify sweetened vs. unsweetened applesauce so I went for the unsweetened. Which means I now have a bunch of applesauce in my house that I won't eat. Oh well. I also had to buy some golden raisins. I was a bit surprised that I didn't already have raisins in my house for baking. Go figure. Oh, I should probably point out that this recipe is technically for Iced Oatmeal Applesauce cookies but I was too cheap to buy maple syrup and too lazy to ice the cookies. So I slacked off a little and eliminated the icing. Sorry people.

By the time I got to the actual baking, it was really easy. Honestly, just a very straightforward recipe that had me adding half the ingredients in one step and half the ingredients in the second step. However, one thing that I did notice was that the dough was, well, gloopy. It was very liquidy which was odd because the only liquid parts were one egg, melted butter, and half a cup of applesauce. I also quadruple checked that I had gotten all of the proportions correct. But I had and alas, gloop.

I had a feeling that the gloopiness of the dough was meant to be because the next direction was to use an ice cream scoop to scoop out cookies to put on the parchment paper. Martha specified a 1 1/2 inch ice cream scoop. I have no idea how big mine was but if I were to guess, I'd say it's about 3 inches across. So I only half filled the ice cream scoop. Logical, right? There will be no problems at all with that, right?

Ha.

I stuck them in the oven for 13 minutes and continued watching an old episode of Grey's Anatomy (lest some of you think that my watching of bad tv has lapsed lately). When the timer buzzed, I walked down the stairs to my kitchen and (I kid you not) exclaimed, "Holy crap, they smell good!" Yes, out loud. To myself, because I live alone. It was like an involuntary response to the most delicious smell ever. I mean, it smelled pretty good as dough, but once it was cooked it was other-worldly. You're reading this and you think I'm exaggerating. I'm not. However, delicious smell aside, I pulled the cookies out of the oven and they looked like this:

The fiends grew to enormous proportions! Each of these cookies is about the size of my hand span! I'm half surprised that they didn't expand to cover the entire pan and then come oozing out of my oven. They were also very soft cookies (because of the applesauce, of course) so they were challenging to lift off the pan and transfer to the drying rack. Disconcerting, because I never have had a problem transferring cookies before.

But here's the good news: they're delicious. I mean, they're soft and chewy and sweet (but not too sweet!) and just fantastic. Martha knows how to make a damn good cookie. My boyfriend suggested that I should have added cinnamon to the cookies to make them even better and I'm going to actually agree with that. If I ever make them again, I think that a dash of cinnamon will really put these cookies over the top in flavor. By the way, in case you were wondering, my subsequent batches of cookies still turned out about as large as the first batch. Clearly, I don't learn from my mistakes.

A Disney Moment: The Aristocats
Now, you would think that with my sudden love of cartoon animals, I would go crazy for Aristocats. I might have, if not for a few fatal flaws. But first, the good news: the opening credit sequence is darling. I really do love the style that Disney adopts for the opening credits in this time period. Plus, my sister and I still search for our favorite animators. Sadly, we've had to adopt some new favorites because our old favorites, well, died. But that's besides the point. The point is that the opening credits are fun. I also enjoy the scene with the aristocats acting like aristocrats. That is, the scene with the painting and the piano and voice lessons. I really do enjoy the paint on the piano. It makes me giggle.

Also, "Everybody Wants to be a Cat" is a fun song. If you look closely, you can spot some recycled animation from other movies when the cats are dancing. There's a fun video illustrating this fact here. My sister and I love pointing out recycled animation as well as recycled voice actors during this time period.

So that was the good stuff. My real beef with the film is that the animation is just plain lazy. Honestly, there's a real lack of detail. But more importantly, in a couple of the shots, you can see disappearing and reappearing pencil lines! Come on, Disney, that's just lazy. There's also some continuity problems with the paint colors when the cat is painting. Again, lazy. So that was my real problem. The more minor problem was that Edgar is an idiot. Why didn't he just kill the cats outright? Or wait until the woman died? Or just spend the inheritance money as he saw fit after the woman died since he was basically the executor of the cats' estate anyway? I know, I know, then we wouldn't have had a movie. It was still annoying. Therefore, I condemn Aristocats to a 4/5 to round out this group of five films.