I'm interrupting the rest of the Alice work to mention that I made some from-scratch Oreos last night, via the Smitten Kitchen recipe.
I should preface this by saying we bought a package of real Oreos at the store the other day, and they...well, they just weren't very good. So I went on the hunt for a homemade version to get some proper chocolate sandwich cookies in my life, and found the above recipe.
And they're really good.
I should also mention that my cookies turned out gigantic. They're probably 3 x the size of an actual Oreo...I wasn't being very scientific when portioning out these cookies. I was making pizza dough at the same time, so maybe I can blame it on that?
This really isn't such a terrible problem, because you can just eat one instead of 2 or 3 smallies. But they'd definitely be cuter if you made 'em the size of real Oreos.
The only changes I made the recipe was to cut the white sugar down to 1 c, and add 1/4 brown sugar (so they'd be a bit softer/more chewy...just a preference.)
I also used all butter for the filling, since we never have shortening in the house, and it has that funny waxy aftertaste. Originally, I thought the filling would be much too soft, but since my cookies aren't super-crisp, and it's fairly cool here, the filling holds its own just fine...even if it does smoosh out the sides just a bit when bitten.
These are going to be really dangerous to have in my repertoire...because, like brownies, we always have the ingredients!
Drat.