The July Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.

I am fairly ambivalent about marshmallows – they’re a critical element in making s’mores and hot chocolate, of course, but beyond that, I really have no use for them. Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano cookies, however, are one of my very favorite store-bought cookies, so it was a no-brainer which type of cookies I’d be making this round.

The original recipe calls for a whole lot of orange extract, and the addition of lemon zest. I realize there are many people out there who like the combination of citrus and chocolate, but I am not one of them. And while I adore the mint milanos, I knew that Richard wasn’t as big a fan. So my compromise (which mainly consisted of opening the cupboard where I keep my small collection of flavor extracts and seeing what was left): almond it was!

This was a bit of a challenge for me to make, mainly because, well, let’s face it. My piping skills leave a lot to be desired. The cookie dough is not at all like regular cookie dough – thick enough to just spoon up and plop on a pan. This required piping. I don’t own a pastry bag (add that to the steadily growing list of Things I Need) and the only icing tip I could scrounge up in the dusty recesses of the cupboards was one of those little plastic wedge-shaped ones that comes in the set when you buy little tubes of cake icing. But I am nothing if not resourceful, so I snipped a hole in a ziploc bag, spooned the dough inside, and except for one brief mishap that involved the bag bursting, dough spilling everywhere, and no small amount of swearing under my breath until I’d assembled a new bag and cleaned up the mess, it worked out just fine.

Pepperidge Farm milanos are beautiful oval cookies. They have a slight, soft crunch to the outside and aren’t very cakey. My cookies had a tendency to look more like Attack Of the Blob and even though they were quite thin and browned perfectly on the edges, they had less of a soft crunch and more of a cake-like texture. When they were all baked, I called Richard in to help and he assembled ‘matching’ pairs as best he could, sort of like some grand cookie puzzle.

The good thing is that if you carefully select out the most attractive cookies and then stack them neatly on a plate and angle your camera just right, it looks as if your result was far more impressive than it actually turned out (heh).

Verdict – eh. Richard really likes them. I think I might try it again some time, and leave out all the vanilla extract completely – there was barely any almond flavor and the vanilla was really a bit overwhelming. I could also see adding a touch of cocoa powder to the cookie dough to make chocolate cookies, and then adding a little bit of mint to the ganache in the middle. Or maybe instead, if I’m in the mood for Milano cookies, I’ll just leave it to the experts and buy them from the store.