TWD ~ Cottage Cheese Pufflets

Cottage cheese pufflets are little cookies filled with jam or preserves. The slightly off-putting name comes from the cottage cheese used in the dough. Really, these are delicious little bites, even if my dough was finicky from start to finish. Head over to Jacque's blog, Daisy Lane Cakes, for the recipe - and the essential place to take a potential date or spouse! It's hilarious.

Now, my dough was sticky, gooey, worse than playdough. Dyed a gruesome red, it would be the perfect substitute in an interactive haunted house for fake guts. (Halloween is coming! Yay!) There was no rolling to be done, so I had to add quite a bit of flour. I think this made them less puffy, but it got them on the pan.

I quartered the recipe and made half of the batch on Thursday night. I was having an ultimate need-sweets-now-moment (aka break-up with long-time boyfriend and a major part of the reason I moved back to GA two months ago). I convinced myself that I would feel better making these than hitting the Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey.

I didn't get any pictures of these first ones. It was night and I planned to make the others while there was still some daylight left. Forward to Monday, enter buckets of rain dropping from the sky every second, and me remembering at 8pm that I needed to make the second round of Cottage Cheese Pufflets. I used a star cookie cutter, which meant larger (fewer) cookies and more filling. More filling is a very good thing. I used Muscadine Preserves from the Callaway Garden Country Store. I think these are the absolute best preserves in the world. I recently had a fried green tomato sandwich at Callaway Gardens and they put Muscadine Preserves on it. When I realized what it was, I had to stop, tilt my head, and then consult my mouth to see the verdict. Yum.


{FYI: Muscadines are a grapevine variety that, along with Scupperines, are native to the southeastern U.S. A vine at a friend's ripened about a month ago.}

In addition to the Muscadine Preserves, I added a little bit of a Hershey's bar to half of the pufflets. I'm not big on fruit + chocolate, but these were the best! Instead of being uber chocolately, it just added another layer of taste.