pantry cookies #1

 I finally did the long overdue thing and scoured the pantry to toss any expired things. It was maybe the most painful and cathartic thing I've done. It's still a work in progress, though. As we all know, we have to throw our parents' precious I-can-still-use-slash-eat-that in secret, so I'm still finding untouched, unopened packages of things that are definitely stale as fuck but otherwise look fine. To the rock hard mooncakes from 2013, my dad says "I can still steam that." Lol okay then.

And again, yes, if you know me, this is absolutely where I get it from.

Anyways, when I saw this month's bucketlistbake is a 5-cookie cookie box, I dug through the pantry for anything that's still edible. The goal? To make myself feel better for the full dumpster of packaged foods. To pretend like I'm alleviating the black hole of snacks my dad has created for himself. To not buy things that will go unused for a year after I leave (see: ricotta I found in the fridge from the last time I was home in 2020...).

So for cookie #1, we're starting here with these Pure fruit bars that are only a couple months out of date. [You don't have to get me started on my expiration date rant... I obviously draw the line at 8 years out of date but a few months is fine and also... just use your common and five senses.]

I'm tempted to just take these with me as they'd make good camping and hiking snacks, but in the meantime I've picked out all the raspberry lemonade ones to make fruit filled shortbreads.

So these guys are a Ted Lasso shortbread base - made with Chinese bun flour because it was the only non self rising, non whole wheat, non bread flour in the cabinets. And this is me assuming bun flour is less glutinous than bread flour but someone fact check me on that.

I halved the recipe because I only had 8 raspberry lemonade bars. And then split that in half to mold a rectangle in one section of one of two large baking pan options. Side note: I do have a dinosaur cake pan though.

Then I lined up the thicker-than-expected fruit bars and tucked them in under the other half of the shortbread dough. It was a piecemeal activity. Very manual. Surprised I didn't fuck up the bottom layer in the  process.

And hey! They actually turned out great. Nothing burned, no unsightly oozing. The shortbread cooked all the way through. And the sweet tart filling paired super well with the butter sandy cookie. The cross section was not optimal but I should've known. Now I just need to find a little pink box to pack them in like they do in the show.