I came across this recipe some time last year and was waiting for an opportunity to try it out. When someone asked me if I would bring cupcakes to Friendmas 2011, I knew I had the perfect group to experiment on!

Irish Cupcake Bombs (from the Brown Eyed Baker, renamed due to controversy)

Yield: 24 cupcakes
Prep Time: 40 minutes | Bake Time: 17 minutes

For the Cupcakes:
1 cup Guinness stout
1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
¾ cup Dutch-process cocoa powder
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups granulated sugar
1½ teaspoons baking soda
¾ teaspoons salt
2 eggs
2/3 cup sour cream

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line 24 cupcake cups with liners.
2. Bring the Guinness and butter to a simmer in a heavy, medium saucepan over medium heat. Take off heat and whisk in cocoa powder until smooth. Cool slightly.
3. Whisk the flour, sugar, baking soda and salt in a large bowl to combine.
4. Using an electric mixer, beat the eggs and sour cream on medium speed until combined. Add the Guinness-chocolate mixture to the egg mixture and beat just to combine.
5. Reduce the speed to low, add the flour mixture and beat briefly. Using a rubber spatula, fold the batter until completely combined. Divide the batter among the cupcake liners. Bake until a thin knife inserted into the center comes out clean, about 17 minutes. Cool the cupcakes on a rack.

For the Whiskey Ganache Filling:
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate
2/3 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
2 teaspoons Irish whiskey

1. Finely chop the chocolate and transfer it to a heatproof bowl.
2. Heat the cream until simmering and pour it over the chocolate.
3. Let it sit for one minute and then, using a rubber spatula, stir it from the center outward until smooth.
4. Add the butter and whiskey and stir until combined. Let the ganache cool until thick but still soft enough to be piped.

For the Baileys Frosting:
2 cups unsalted butter, at room temperature
5 cups powdered sugar
6 tablespoons Baileys Irish Cream

1. Using the whisk attachment of a stand mixer, whip the butter on medium-high speed for 5 minutes, scraping the sides of the bowl occasionally.
2. Reduce the speed to medium-low and gradually add the powdered sugar until all of it is incorporated.
3. Add the Baileys, increase the speed to medium-high and whip for another 2 to 3 minutes, until it is light and fluffy.

To Decorate the Cupcakes:
1. Using a 1-inch round cookie cutter (or the bottom of a large decorating tip), cut the centers out of the cooled cupcakes, going about two-thirds of the way down. Transfer the ganache to a piping bag with a wide tip and fill the holes in each cupcake to the top.
2. Using your favorite decorating tip, or an offset spatula, frost the cupcakes and decorate with sprinkles, if desired. Store the cupcakes in an airtight container.

Notes:
- Used Youngs double chocolate stout because I like it better.
- Used semi-sweet chocolate for the ganache because that’s what I had, but altered the cream slightly based on Carolyn’s research.
- Cut the frosting with a little whiskey because the cream made the frosting extra buttery.
- Made ganache while cupcakes were cooling; made frosting while ganache was cooling.
- Recommend not making a triple batch of these. It’s just too much. Note to self: Never make triple batches of stuff. Just don’t do it.

Congrats to Brandee & Kain who got married this weekend!

And for everyone else, here are the recipes I used for the bridal shower cupcakes:

Oreo Cupcakes (modified from Bakerella)

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup natural unsweetened cocoa
1 1/4 cup sugar
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup hot water
24 Oreos, plus more for crumbs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Line tray with baking cups.
Place one whole cookie in each cup or break apart at least 24 cookies and place the broken pieces into each cup.

Mix the flour, cocoa, sugar, baking soda, baking powder and salt in a large mixing bowl using a wire whisk.

Add the eggs, oil, vanilla and milk and mix well until thoroughly combined. Add the hot water and mix until combined.

Transfer the batter (it will be very liquid) to a large measuring cup and then pour batter into each baking cup so it’s about three quarters full. You should have a little left over.

Bake for 16-18 minutes.

Notes: For the raspberry cupcakes, I substituted 2Tbl raspberry syrup for the vanilla (could’ve used more). Next time I would use butter instead of oil. This was a little dense to me.

If using whole cookies, err on the low side when filling the cups. Mine came out all lop-sided because there wasn’t enough air flow for the batter to bake completely underneath the cookie and they all had these tumors… which I was forced to break off and eat.

Cream Cheese Oreo Frosting (modified from Cupcake Project)

12 oz cream cheese, chilled
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
2 cups icing sugar
1/4 cup crushed Oreos
2 Tbl flavoring

Whip cream cheese and butter until light and fluffy.
Add sugar gradually.
Stir in cookie crumbs.
Add flavoring to taste.

Notes: I definitely would add more flavor to the frosting next time. I thought the flavor was a little weak. I used creme de menthe for the regular cupcakes and raspberry syrup for the raspberry cupcakes.

These are definitely the prettiest cupcakes I have ever attempted. And people liked them well enough, so I’ll be keeping this around to try again!

I ended up buying this awesome whale bottle opener for Ian, which I thought there would be a possibility he’d hate. You know, because it’s a little hideous. But I went ahead and bought it because *I* thought it was awesome. In retrospect, I think the Bloggess is having a big influence on my life of late (reference: Zombie speech that came out the same week I got the announcement for Survive Alexandria and her anniversary present for her husband). Anyway, Ian’s coming around. I’m sure he’ll cherish it when I’m dead.

We ended up leaving Mystic mid-morning, so it was too early to try Mystic Pizza before we left. It was ok though, since neither of us had even heard of the movie until we told people we were visiting Connecticut.

Next up: USS Nautilus! This was Yenny’s first time on a submarine. So fun! The Nautilus, for some reason, had been filled with Navy mannequins. They were kind of creepy and scared us a few times when we peeked around a corner only to find a mannequin hiding in a bunk or eating a mashed potato sandwich. (I’m not sure if those were standard rations; there was no placard addressing that question.) From there, we made our way through the sub museum and played around on the weapons they left lying around outside.

We swung by the Coast Guard Academy on our way out of town and stopped in at the New London Post Office to drop off some postcards. Apparently, we’re a dying breed. They ran out of postcard stamps at the desk and had to go rummage through the safe in the back to find enough stamps for me.

On the drive back up to Hartford, we passed a correctional facility, which we had passed a handful of times in the past 24 hours going back and forth from the casino and looking for lodging. Yenny was really intrigued by this, but there was a sign that clearly directed people not to stop near there, so we couldn’t take pictures. I got this blurry video instead:

During the rest of the hour to Hartford, I read through the tourist booklet we picked up at the airport. Included in the Hartford landmarks was a Trash Museum. We decided this was a definite destination for us. While doing some research on my phone to find out their hours, entry fees, etc. I discovered that there was also a Garbage Museum in Stratford, but they got shut down last week. I guess people weren’t as interested in garbage as they were in trash.

As it turned out, the Trash Museum was their main recycling facility. There was a viewing area where you could see the tipping pit, the conveyors that sorted the different materials, and some of the finished bales. They also had cameras throughout the facility so you could see from the viewing area what was going on in other areas. We had perfect timing and got there just in time to see 2 trucks unloading in the tipping pit.

We might have spent a lot of time there, so we didn’t have time to tour the Mark Twain House or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house. I had no idea they were neighbors! We did have enough time to go walk around the area and drive through downtown Hartford before heading to the airport.

And, in case we missed it, the airport was kind enough to have a Lego replica of the Mark Twain House.

From there, we decided to head toward the casinos and find a place to stay for the night. Then we saw a sign that said something about a beach, so we made a detour. We didn’t actually find any public beach area, but heading toward the water, we saw a house for sale and stopped to take a look.

Had a pretty nice front yard:

We got back on the road only to stop a few minutes later at the Hoxie Scenic Overlook:

Once we got closer to the Mohegan Sun casinos, we started calling hotels. Turned out a lot of places in the area were just getting power back. The Stop & Shop was all out of perishables and ice. The casinos (and their expensive hotels) had power, but none of the nearby hotels had power/rooms available. After calling around a bit, we decided to backtrack and head toward Mystic to stay the night. They had hotels with power, but the rest of the town was still in the dark.

We decided to eat in town before heading back to the casino. Yenny suggested finding a place with lobster rolls, since neither of us had ever had one before and we’ve been hearing a lot about them recently. The Sea View Snack Bar sounded promising, so we stopped to check it out. Not only did they have lobster rolls, but they also offered scallop rolls! I preferred the scallop roll, though that could just be because I have a thing for tartar sauce, but they were both very good. Not chase a DC food truck down good, but enjoyable. *cough*Katie*cough* ;)

We spent the rest of the evening at the Mohegan Sun. I wandered around a bit exploring the building while Yenny gambled. There were 3 casino areas, waterfalls, restaurants, and shops in the middle region. Set off from the central area were a convention center, an arena, and a hotel. After I circled the area, I tried my hand at video poker. Not much better odds than the slot machines, but made a whole lot more sense to me. I lost $17.46 over the course of about 2 hours. Not my best, but I got my entertainment value out of it, so I’m ok with that.

We left early Tuesday morning, only to receive a call at the airport letting us know that the B & B we had a reservation with had no power and the phone lines were out. We’d have to find somewhere else to stay. After calling around and getting [accidentally] hung up on a couple times, we decided to take a page out of Sonny’s book and just go on with our trip assuming everything would work out.

We headed straight for Bristol after picking up our rental car. First stop: ESPN Plaza. This turned out to be a bust. Despite our research, it turns out it’s not open to the public and you have to contact someone in advance to go on a guided tour.

Undeterred, we moved on to the next destination on the list only to be distracted by this… skyline:

After driving around for a bit, we circled our way toward the building and discovered it was the Otis Elevator Research Center. At which point, we further noticed that this building has no windows. There are some vents along the side of the building, but the front and back was practically all solid concrete.

We hung out there for probably an unreasonable amount of time before heading over to the Clock Museum. We got there just before noon, so the woman at the information desk recommended we visit the tower clocks first. Great suggestion! It was interesting to stand in a room full of antique clocks ringing for the better part of 10 minutes. (Since not all the clocks were set exactly right.) I tried to catch some of it on video, but I don’t think the recording captures the full effect of the various clocks and the on-going resonating that came from some of the chimes.

After the clocks, we drove farther into town to see the Carousel Museum. Extra bonus? Combined with the Carousel Museum were a Museum of Fire History and a Greek Culture exhibit.

After a few days of emails going back and forth, my friend suggested I write a book since she was looking for usable feedback like this, even suggesting the title. I was lazy, so I pasted our emails onto my blog. That’s how books get written these days anyway, right?

.

After doing some research, I found that this is more commonly referred to as an oyster fork. I couldn’t find any information on why it’s on the right or how it was developed. But after looking at some image searches of oyster forks, I have a theory.

I think they evolved from oyster spoons that conformed to the shape of a shell. I found very few references to oyster spoons in general, and not at all in place settings. I guess they were more effective with prongs, but already had a place on the table back in olden times. Based on this, I believe that a spork would also be placed on the right of a dinner plate in a formal place setting.

So I thought more about why I am so grumpy. And it’s not because she is a *bad* intern, at all — based on effort alone she gets an A. It’s more that I do not enjoy being in charge and responsible 24/7 for her project and my own stuff. It’s the same feeling of annoyance I get when my day is full of commitments that break up the day so I feel like nothing gets done.

So, it’s not her…it’s me. :-P

My career is doomed, isn’t it?

Welcome to my life! ;)

At a certain point you have to make the trade-off between what you, yourself, can accomplish and what you want accomplished as an end-goal.

I can be the smartest person in the world, but I can only do as much as 1 me can do. Even if I could automate processes and be more efficient than 10 average people (I wish!), I can still only do as much as 1 me (by definition).

If I can train 1 person to be half as efficient as me, moving forward, we’re producing at a rate of 1.5 mes. So, the end goal can be set higher than what I’d do myself. And then… welcome to management. I’m worth more training more mes than I am actually doing the work. Still coming to terms with this*. Intellectually, I get it (why CEOs are worth so much). But it’s so not what I want to spend my time doing.

As for your career, no, it isn’t doomed. Well, not necessarily. You’re going to have to deal with this more as a requirement in academia than you will in other careers. So either you tolerate it or you find some way to convince yourself it’s worth the investment. For me, I always have the option of finding a dark corner and going back to my technical work. If you’re headed for research/teaching, you have to convince yourself it’s worth it.

The way I see it, if you want your career in research, you’re definitely going to be in charge of projects 24/7. At least if you want to do anything really interesting. And that means baby-sitting. A lot. But that also means, once you reach a certain level, you’re going to be able to pick the people you want around you to baby-sit the next generation of minions. And then you get to do really cool stuff! :)

*This is all stuff Ian has explained to me on numerous occasions. I just keep forgetting/losing perspective. He definitely has the people skillz in our relationship.

I am the worst mentor/intern supervisor ever. :( I am getting annoyed at little problems because we solved them two weeks ago, why aren’t you doing what we decided to do? WRITE THINGS DOWN. And I realize that I am not an expert at using this software either, but if you have the same problems over and over, but I never do, it’s probably not the software. That’s a failure to do each of the steps in the right order. Remember my suggestion to write them down?

I’m also grumpy because I’ve had to adjust my schedule to accommodate her (her carpool gets her here about an hour before I would like to arrive), and coffee only helps so much. And she is super sweet and really excited and interested, but I just. can. not. hide my frustration, and I don’t think I’m being fair to her at all. I owe it to her to be all “hey, this took me awhile to learn, but writing things down when there are lots of steps turns out to save a lot of problems” and try to TEACH her how to work through these things, instead of hiding in my office with my coffee.

Uggghhh. Suggestions?

A few years ago, we had this intern who did a terrible job following instructions and completing a list of tasks. He would always forget to do a step or only incorporate some untrackable subset of the comments given on a deliverable. We resorted to asking my friend’s mom (a special ed teacher) for suggestions.

Recycled for current intern:

1. Tell her to write things down.
2. Remind her to grab her notebook before you talk.
3. Tell her “you should write this down.”
4. Write it down in your notebook when you talk to her to give her cues for things she should be writing down. (And to document what you told her; more for my kind of work environment than yours, since I need documentation for performance reviews if things escalate.)
5. If you’ve already done these things or this is ineffective, follow up face-to-face talks with emails with the instructions listed out.
6. Have her check off each step on the list before asking you questions.

Basically, use every mode of communication available to you and remind her when she asks questions to follow *all* the steps.

I go through this pretty much every year. I started the cycle again 2 months ago! We get these enthusiastic new grads/interns in… I remind myself that they don’t know anything, teach them to carry a notepad around & when to write things down, and baby-sit them. A month (a week?) goes by and I get endlessly frustrated that they can’t do 2 things without asking a question they’ve already asked 10 times!!??

So, it’s normal. Or at least what I consider normal. ;) It’s good to recognize your frustration. Feel free to share with her that you know you’re frustrated, but you really do want her to learn this or whatever would sound sincere from you.

I’ve gotten to the point that I just tell people I’m not naturally a patient person and I’m working on that. If I seem annoyed, it’s not personal and it’s my problem to get over. And they should please look past that and ask me questions anyway because I’ll be even *more* annoyed if I find out later that they could have avoided wasting time doing something wrong.

Plan to set aside half an hour every day, like office hours, to answer questions all at once or walk her through that day’s task for the 20th time. If it’s scheduled into your day, it’s less disruptive and gives her an easy opportunity to re-ask questions that would otherwise bug you when you’re trying to get work done. Do this at her desk/computer so she can walk you through what she thinks she should be doing and you can add in extra steps as needed.

Reward her for doing anything right. Once she’s a little functional, you can pick and choose what’s actually useful for the task at hand. Think behavior modification: reinforcing successive approximations.

P.S. The best thing I did for my engineering career was study psychology. The classes I use more than anything else in my day-to-day life:
- PSYC 3044: Behavior Modification
- PSYC 2044: Psychology of Learning

About 3 weeks ago, I went roller skating for the first time since I was a kid. I ice skated in middle school, but ended up quitting once I got to high school because I didn’t have time. I rollerbladed a few times in the interim, but this was my first time on old-school quad skates. It went pretty well, but I couldn’t stop at all.

A week later, I bought a pair of third-hand (foot?) skates from one of the other girls training for the derby. I’ve been training about 2 hours/day, 4-5 times/week since then. Tryouts were Tuesday night and I found out last night that I made the cut for Fresh Meat Camp!! There’s going to be at least one more set of cuts. But if I make it through the 12-week training, I’ll be eligible to be drafted onto one of the teams. I am *so* excited!

The toughest thing for me so far is getting over my fear of falling. For the most part, I’m geared up in elbow, wrist, and knee pads, plus a helmet and mouth guard when I’m doing anything crazy. So it doesn’t actually hurt that much when I fall. And once I convinced myself of this, I was able to learn new tricks. I even jumped over 6″ cones at tryouts for the first time!

Thanks to Lenny for actually remembering where his rollerblading pads were and letting me borrow them! And thanks to Seamus (Healey’s 7-year-old) for loaning me his elbow pads! And big, big thanks to Ian for making me dinner the past few weeks when I got home at 10pm starving.

Training starts next week… and I’m missing the first practice because I’ll be at a conference for that one evening. Oh well. I’ll be here the rest of the summer.

Oh yeah. And I graduated!

Animal House – 1978
Apocalypse Now – 1979
Blues Brothers – 1980
Odd Couple – 1968
Breakfast Club – 1985
Blood Simple – 1984

Taking the 2-digit year, we converted to the equivalent ASCII character, unscrambled the letters to get: DUPONT. Took the metro to the Dupont station for our next clue.

Time to slow things down a bit. There’s no need for constant motion, so take as long as you need to get a clear picture of what we’re telling you. Only by putting things in the right context will they make sense. Then you’ll see that our clues really are pretty simple; hopefully your blood pressure won’t stay so high all day! All we are looking to do here is broaden your horizons. Sometimes you know more than you think, it might all just be backwards in your head. It really only takes a couple insights, so we thought we’d give you some words of advice. Always take note of what is odd. There is no reason to make things harder than they have to be. Be patient with your brothers in arms — everyone gets the blues from time to time — and they will be patient with you. The game is all about staying calm. Now and again it might feel like the apocalypse, but it never is. We promise you’ll find a way through it all if you stick together. Think of it like building a house. Each of you must play your part and support one another without reverting to your inner animal. And there’s one easy way to avoid that. We don’t mean to club you over the head with it, but what have we always said is the most important thing? Breakfast.

Time to slow things down a bit. There’s no need for constant motion, so take as long as you need to get a clear picture of what we’re telling you. Only by putting things in the right context will they make sense. Then you’ll see that our clues really are pretty simple; hopefully your blood pressure won’t stay so high all day! All we are looking to do here is broaden your horizons. Sometimes you know more than you think, it might all just be backwards in your head. It really only takes a couple insights, so we thought we’d give you some words of advice. Always take note of what is odd. There is no reason to make things harder than they have to be. Be patient with your brothers in arms — everyone gets the blues from time to time — and they will be patient with you. The game is all about staying calm. Now and again it might feel like the apocalypse, but it never is. We promise you’ll find a way through it all if you stick together. Think of it like building a house. Each of you must play your part and support one another without reverting to your inner animal. And there’s one easy way to avoid that. We don’t mean to club you over the head with it, but what have we always said is the most important thing? Breakfast.

I’ll post up a hint at noon in case you’re stuck.

f = 12
g = 17
h = 3
i = 4
j = 3

Total passengers: 9.

The second train, we solve for the number of original passengers (n) when the man boards:

n – c + 2a – b + 3c – 2b + b – 2a + a – 2c + 2b – a = 6
n + a(2 – 2 + 1 – 1) + b(-1 – 2 + 1 + 2) + c(-1 + 3 – 2) = 6
n = 6.

Knowing the solutions are 9 and 6, we head to the metro station where one might transfer from Glenmont to New Carrollton: Metro Center.

Easy, right? Heh. It took us over an hour to get to the point where enough teams hadn’t solved it to figure out that one of the equations was written wrong. We then wandered around the metro station looking for the purple-visored fellow for our next clue.

The organizers expected that we would have no problem finishing by 6pm (with a 10am start). An hour into the first [time-sensitive] puzzle, we discovered there was an error in the solution. This was when we started to doubt we would finish on schedule…

I’ll be posting each puzzle separately with the solution in a different entry. This is Main Clue #1 (corrected; ignore negative people (as a general life philosophy, but also when calculating the number of people in these problems)):

A man with a purple visor boards an empty train with 3 other people. To quell the boredom of his commute, the man decides to count how many passengers get on and off the train at each stop. Unsurprisingly, no one departs at the first station, while f/2 + 2g people climb aboard. At the next stop, 3h individuals disembark as 5i+14j new people rush toward the newly vacant seats. Curiously, at station three, no one gets off once again, and f+2i pack themselves onto the train. The man, wondering why no one seems to work near the third stop, nearly misses the h+j people who hop off at the next platform. Grateful no one boarded to take their place, he notes the 2fg/i people getting off at the penultimate stop. Finally, he and the remaining passengers reach the terminus and disembark.

Silently cursing his hometown’s circuitous public transport routes, the man runs to an adjacent platform and slides through the closing doors of another train just in time. Before he can catch his breath and count how many other people are on the train, the doors open again, and c people get off, replaced by 2a new faces. The man finds a seat and tallies the next several stations’ traffic: b off, 3c on, 2b off, b on and 2a off, a on and 2c off, 2b on and a off. At the end of the line, the man and the remaining five riders disembark and exit the station. As he walks to work, the man calculates how many people were initially on the train.

There are 6 marbles in a bag: 2 black, 3 white, and 1 red. If you reach in and pull 2 marbles out at the same time, p is the probability that you get exactly one black marble.

0: Departing Franconia-Springfield 10:22am
1: Departing Greenbelt 10:30am
2: Departing Largo Town Center 10:35am
3: Departing Huntington 10:37am
4: Departing Shady Grove 10:24am
5: Departing Branch Ave 10:38am
6: Departing New Carrollton 10:36am
7: Departing Fort Totten 10:42am
8: Departing Vienna/Fairfax/GMU 10:23am
9: Departing Glenmont 10:27am

Ian and I visited his brand new nephew on Friday! Declan was born 4/21/2011 at 2130. Mother and baby are both healthy and doing great. He has a displacement of 8 pounds, 11 ounces and has a length overall of 21 inches.

He opened his eyes a little while we were there, but was conked out for the most part. Looked a little angry about the possibility of waking up, as pictured above, so went back to sleep.

Anna had her baby shower last weekend. She and her friends trend toward crafty/functional showers, so we went around baby-proofing the house followed by decorating onesies.

There were some great designs! My favorite was definitely Mr. Yuck, though the dolphin Healey made out of the paint blob one of the kids squirted on a shirt was quite impressive.

At the banquet, we snagged primo seats at the head table and got to talk to the Dean of Engineering and his wife, President of the Society, and the keynote speaker, Astronaut Kathy Thornton (and Associate Dean for Graduate Programs in Engineering). She gave us a sneak preview of her talk for the evening as “space stuff.” Her speech is apparently one she gives often, but it was entertaining and endlessly interesting, so she seems to have perfected it over the years.

NewGirl2 and I had some fun banter with the Dean of Engineering when he found out we were both Hokies, but everyone was a good sport about it, especially since our company was a sponsor and we were recruiting their engineers. We traded stories with his wife who grew up in NOVA and used to teach high school classes on shorthand and typing.

It was a fun time and we got to try out a couple restaurants in downtown Charlottesville, which I hadn’t done before. Had dinner at Basil on Friday night and a snack at Marco & Luca dumpling shop (NewGirl2 had never had dumplings before!). The Saturday night banquet was super fancy at the Farmington Country Club. Got home late last night just in time to miss the dusting of snow that passed over the area.

*Not actually the second new girl in the company since the original NewGirl, but the only one I’ve had reason to mention.

E2 had her baptism today, followed by dim sum with friends and family. After cake and ice cream, E2 was ready for a jog before the long car ride home.

I finally got a chance to make another batch of white chocolate lemon cookies this weekend and they’re even better now! The recipe I posted before was tasty, but really difficult to work with for rolled cookies. The proportion of liquid to non-liquid ingredients was too high, leaving the dough soft, and there was too much leavening agent, making the cookies spread and not hold the rolled shape.

I decided to start with a well-tested rolled sugar cookie recipe from the Joy of Cooking this time. They came out much more uniform in size and a little less sweet, which I thought worked better with the sweetness of the filling.

White Chocolate Lemon Cookies II

Made 3 dozen sandwiches.

1 cup Unsalted butter, softened
2 oz white chocolate, melted
2/3 cup Sugar
1/2 tsp lemon oil
1 large Egg

In small bowl:
1/4 Tsp Baking powder
1/8 Tsp Salt
2 1/3 cups All-purpose flour

1. Mix melted chocolate and butter. Beat in sugar until well blended. Beat in lemon oil and egg.
2. Stir in dry ingredients.
3. Refrigerate dough until cold, at least an hour.
4. Working with 1 portion of dough (leave the other refrigerated), roll out and cut cookies, using 2- or 3-inch cutters, adding flour as needed. With a wide spatula, carefully transfer them from the wax paper to the cookie sheets, spacing about 1 inch apart.
4. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease cookie sheets.
5. Bake, 1 sheet at a time, in the upper third of the oven for 6 to 9 minutes, or until cookies are just slightly colored on top and slightly darker at the edges. Transfer sheets to wire racks and let cookies firm up, 1 to 2 minutes, then transfer the cookies to wire racks and let stand until thoroughly cool.