Pastry Bag & Cookie Press

There are 23 recipes in the Piped Cookies chapter. This week I made a 4th and 5th batch of these. As I recall, my first try was the Langues de chat (Cat's tongues). These were thin cookies that spread while cooking and resulted in a thin crispy cookie. My second recipe was a meringue, Walnut Boulders. These were easy because I have made meringues before and so knew what to expect vis a vie consistency, texture, baking times, conditions.
So now we get to the 2 I made this week. One is called W's and the other, Paste di Meliga or Italian Cornmeal Butter Cookies from Piemonte. Both of these cookies called for a pastry bag to be filled and the cookies to be formed by piping shapes through a tip. Right. Both doughs were so dense that it took all of my strength just to get a bit out of the pastry bag. I fought with the bag and surmised that this is how male chefs keep fit. My upper body strength is no match for these cookies.
Anyway I slogged through with the Italian Cornmeal Butter cookies but gave up and used a cookie press on the W's - which became wreath like looking. They both taste alright, but what a pain.
The third offering this week is the Honey Pecan Squares which has a buttery crust topped with a honey, pecan, butter, sugar (what's not to love) topping. The whole thing is baked and then cooled.
I'm off to Pittsburgh to pick up my son, Anil and then we are off to Washington, DC where he will be interning in a medical robotics lab all summer.