By Tigris’s Fig Cookies
“During a predawn breakfast of liver pâté and fig cookies, we gather around Tigris’s television for one of Beetee’s break-ins. There’s been a new development in the war.” – Mockingjay, Chapter 24
This recipe takes a really long time to make, but in the end it’s totally worth it.
I actually split this into two days – yesterday I made the dough, and today I made the filling and cooked the cookies.
The dough was more or less straightforward, but the measurements were way off for me. It calls for 4 cups of flour, but I found the dough to be WAY too sticky. I added at least 1 more cup of flour (possibly more) until I was able to knead it nicely without it sticking everywhere.
Once the dough was the proper consistency, I wrapped it up and stuck it in the fridge for the night until I was ready to continue the next day.
The filling was pretty simple as well, but you will need a food processor. I suppose a blender could do an okay job as well. Just throw in the chopped figs, chopped orange, chopped apple, almonds, and raisins and let the food processor do its job!
I accidentally threw in the entire orange instead of just a half orange, so our filling was a lot more orange-y (and probably a bit less dry) than would be typical.
Once everything was processed, I kneaded some sugar and cinnamon into the filling as well.
Then the dough was rolled out, a quarter batch at a time, and filled with the filling. How thick is the dough supposed to be? What shape? Your guess is as good as mine. The instructions were extremely vague here, so I had to guess.
After the first couple of batches I found the best way to approach this was to make a very thin, long rectangle with the dough, and it should be about 1/8-1/4 inch thick (just make sure you can still fit 1/4 of the filling in there!).
The dough was wrapped around the filling, cut to my desired length, and then popped into the oven for 15 minutes.
This recipe makes A LOT of cookies. Enough for a school bake sale or a Christmas cookie exchange. And with the orange and cinnamon, they actually taste kind of like Christmas!
Taste: 9/10
These are very, very good cookies. I’m not even a big fan of figs, and I really like these. Mine might taste slightly different than normal, though, since I accidentally doubled the amount of orange I was supposed to use.
Difficulty: Average
Despite the vague directions, which may mess up your first of the four batches, these weren’t too difficult to make. They’re just very time-consuming. All in all, I spent about 3 hours making these over the course of two days.
Cost: Average
You’ll definitely need to pick up figs, raisins, an orange, and an apple. Possibly milk, shortening, flour, and/or almonds as well.
Suggestion:
When making the dough, if you find it’s too sticky, don’t be afraid of adding flour until it all pulls together and stops sticking to your hands and/or the bowl.
I recommend forming the dough into a long cylinder first, and then rolling that out with a rolling pin to be a long, tall, flat rectangle. The cookies look way more “normal” this way, unlike my first attempt where they were shaped more like biscotti (long skinny strips of cookie).
And don’t worry if you accidentally add in more of any one particular ingredient to the filling. It should still be delicious!
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