Baked Sunday Mornings: Election Palmiers

I am to be a blue girl living in a red state, and in a state as deeply red as mine elections can be pretty boring, frustrating, and comical. I thought these election palmiers might bring some spice back into these anti-climatic midterm elections and may ease the pain of the Mia Love victory.
These cookies are pretty simple and contain a few ingredients, something that is fairly rare from a Baked recipe. However, for such a simple ingredient list there is a fair amount of instruction. The first task is to make puff pastry, which I had never done before. I put butter, water, lemon juice, flour, and salt into the freezer and left them for fifteen minutes. After a short 15 minute stint in the freezer everything was thrown into the food processor, where I had to use all of the water/lemon juice to get the dough to hold together in a pinch test. It did take a minute to get the dough to come together on the counter, but then was pretty easy to perform the requested folds and into the fridge it went. In my pre-baby life I would have been anal and timed the refrigeration times, but post-baby the dough stayed in a little longer then the requested times. Rolling and folding of the dough are preformed one more time before the cookie making magic happens.

The actual putting together of these is where things feel apart, and I have no one to blame but myself. I skimmed the directions, and since things had been going so smoothly, just figured I had this one in the bag. Well, I began rolling out the dough without first dusting the bottom parchment or the top of the dough in the cinnamon sugar (I omitted the cayenne as I do not like spicy desserts). Then like a crazy person, I rolled this out to the size of a half sheet pan, when really I just needed a piece of parchment this size. Needless to say, I am pretty short and using a rolling pin can prove challenging. This required all my strength, and at the time I was really proud at myself for sticking with it and getting oh, so thin. For some odd reason, I decided to look back at the recipe only to notice that I had done everything absolutely wrong. I then gathered all my dough up and into the fridge it went. I should have called uncle at this point, but I felt too invested and decide to let my dough firm-up and reuse it. I then followed the recipe to a tee. The result was a pretty uniform, but dense cookie (I had 24 total), as the dough really got the life rolled out of it. All things considering they were not that bad, but maybe I am justifying them because of how badly I messed-up this recipe (yet, somehow I managed to eat ¾ of them). I also felt like the cinnamon taste was a little lost, which was a little disappointing considering I used some Vietnamese cinnamon. I really need to give this one a second shot, with a box of puff pastry on hand, just in case.
Check out my recipe following fellow bakers at Baked Sunday Mornings. They can probably give you a better sense of how these cookies were meant to taste.

Recipe from: Baked Occasions by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito