Let me just say: I just love Susan Branch.  I use so many of her recipes at Christmas.

Today I made Florentine Cookies.  You can find the recipe online HERE.

To start, I made candied orange peel.  This is the step that took the longest.  You can certainly buy candied orange peel to save time, but it won’t be quite the same.  To candy orange peel you cut it into little strips or squares and boil it in water, drain it, and repeat 2 or 3 times to remove the bitterness.  Then you boil the peel again with a small amount of water and some sugar.

Once your orange peel is done, the cookies are a snap to make.

Boil together your milk and sugar, add your orange peel (I didn’t use citron – I doubled up the orange peel), almonds, extract, flour and butter.

Once all of this is boiled together it looks like this:

It’s pretty gooey.  You have to use a teaspoon now to drop small little rounds of dough onto your cookie sheet.

While baking they will SPREAD, so you have to be sure to use no more than a teaspoon.

See? You end up needing to reshape them somewhat since they don’t always spread out evenly.

Once cooled, you can spread melted chocolate on the back of your cookies, and, using a fork, make little zig-zag designs in it.  This is really just for fun, though.

I like to stick them in the fridge or freezer at this point to speed up the cooling process so the chocolate hardens back up.

These are unbelievably delicious and mouth watering.  I like to hide a few of them from the rest of the family for me to enjoy when no one’s around.

Don’t tell.