the myth of “melt in your mouth”

these cookies look pretty good, right? unfortunately, they’re not. well, they’re ok, but they were enough of a disappointment that you won’t find the recipe here. i saw a post on photograzing for “peppermint meltaways” and was intrigued. i’ve always been intrigued by things that claim to “melt in your mouth,” be it chocolate, meat, or cookie. for example, how does meat melt in your mouth, exactly? surely a bit of steak isn’t going to melt in your mouth the same way that, say, butter will? and even if it did, would you really want meat to melt in your mouth? i know that meat wouldn’t “melt” the same way butter would, yet i expect it to because of the connotations i attach to the word “melt” (probably, in no small part due to the ubiquity of those m+m commercials during childhood).

that isn’t to say that there aren’t things that melt in your mouth. the lemon-buttermilk pudding (essentially a pudding cake) at rendezvous recently reaffirmed that, indeed, something can look like cake, but literally melt away in your mouth. (sidebar: it’s been about two years since i had this pudding, and i had remembered it as being good, but not as good as it was that evening. it was exactly what i wanted at the end of a meal – cool, refreshing, light but rich…)

it was with all of these things in mind that i made these cookies. i wanted them to be impossibly light, airy, and crispy; buttery and pepperminty. the mechanism in the recipe that renders them “meltaways” is the replacement of some of the flour with cornstarch, and the use of powdered sugar. unfortunately, the meltaway effect was not the epiphany i expected. maybe it’s that i just don’t like cookies that “melt” – chewing some crispy thing just to have it dissipate immediately is a bit odd, and very different than chewing something soft (ie, cake) and have that “melt.” so these cookies were ok, but not amazing. i swapped out the sugar glaze for chocolate, which i thought complement the cookies pretty well; and they do look pretty if i say so myself. their mediocrity, though, is affirmed by the roommate test. after a week in the cookie jar, it’s still half full. this, after a batch of chocolate chip cookies lasted about three or four days. i guess it wasn’t meant to be.