My cookie jar is full!

I don't have much of a sweet tooth and generally like to snack on spicy and savoury things. Cookies are such a classic American snack..abundantly available everywhere with gazillion choices and generally loved by everyone. I have never been a big cookie fan and in the 3 years that I have been here, have bought cookies maybe 2-3 times. I find the commercial verieties too sweet for my taste. I associate cookies or biscuits (as we call them in India) with tea time and the habit of dipping them in tea before eating them. The cookies available here don't really lend themselves well to tea-dipping. Even in India I would prefer the not-so-sweet Marie biscuits over any other for tea dipping purposes. This week I thought why not try baking cookies at home..that way I can control how much sugar goes in and the quality of ingredients I use. My husband loves shortbread cookies so I thought I'd try them first. Of course I found a millions recipes online for shortbread and I finally settled on this one from La Tartine Gourmande. I chose it because the amounts of sugar and butter were much less compared to other recipes and I knew that I wouldn't end up making a hundred cookies in one batch. I made two batches just in cae I wanted to make some changes and it was my very first attempt so, I wanted a backup in case I messed things up. I ended up adding more sugar, about 3-4 tsps more to the second batch and I had also forgotten the salt in the first one. The entire process was very simple and there is a certain satisfaction one gets when you take that first bite of homemade cookies. They were crumbly and buttery and made my apartment smell sooo good! This is such a basic recipe that you can really play around with it a lot and I know I will add some vanilla essence in my next batch. I didn't even try these with tea..we finished them up in a couple of days. I don't think I can ever bring myself to buy cookies from a store again. I am also going to try a couple more shortbread recipes that I thought were interesting. I also made a batch of chocolate cookies which were everything I thought they would be and more! That's coming up in the next post.