Hawaiian Drops: or, I don't know why I waited so long to make these

Bust out the ukuleles and get out a can opener, we're about to make the South Pacific Tourism Organisation cry!

Hawaiian Drop Cookies ¾ cup (firmly packed) canned crushed pineapple ⅔ cup vegetable shortening 1¼ cup sugar 2 tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt ½ tsp vanilla ½ tsp almond extract 1 egg 2 cups flour About ¼ cup dried sweetened coconut, finely chopped Heat oven to 325°. Place the pineapple in a strainer and set aside to drain. Have greased cookie sheets ready. Cream together the shortening, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Add the egg, vanilla, and almond extract. Beat until light and fluffy. Beat in the canned pineapple. Then add the flour, beating just until mixed. Drop by the teaspoon (or the half-tablespoon if you have one) onto the baking sheets, about 2 inches apart. Sprinkle the cookies with the coconut, gently pressing it into place if it tries to fall off. Bake about 15 minutes, or until golden around the edges. Source: Clabber Girl baking powder can

I copied this recipe off the back of a baking powder can years ago. It has lurked in a drawer ever since, next to every other "it might be interesting" recipe I have never made. Well, today we're bringing it out! 

Everyone else in the house has started to learn about questionable cooking terms from me. I told one person in the house I was making pineapple cookies. He said, "You know, if you used canned pineapple you could call them Hawaiian!" To this I answered, "I could and they did." 

But before we get out our pineapple, we had to start with the unnatural whiteness of shortening and sugar. Shortening unnerves me so much. It seems so artificial, like it's one step away from eating rocks. But nevertheless I put that scientifically-white fat into the cookies because the last time I swapped in butter, the cookies melted into a steaming-hot dough puddle. Also, we had a can of shortening threatening to go rancid. My hatred of wasting "food" (does shortening count as food?) collided with my concern for nutrition and health, and the cheapskate won.

We are told to beat in the egg "until fluffy." With our friend the Mixmaster, that took less than a minute. Also, the only color in this recipe is from the egg and a slight tint from the vanilla. Speaking of which, this recipe is very parsimonious with the flavoring extracts. Only the tiniest half-teaspoons of vanilla and almond are permitted into the cookie dough. We don't want to overpower the delicate flavor of shortening, now do we?

While all this excitement was occurring with the mixer, our pineapple was draining at the opposite end of the countertop. I was surprised at how beige it was. I always thought pineapple was a bright cheery yellow.

Ah, it's like we're bringing the South Pacific into our mixing bowl!

As the pineapple shreds mixed into the sugared shortening, it looked an awful lot like the Radio Pudding I made once. I've been meaning to make it again with cream cheese instead of butter, and may grab at the next excuse to do so. (If no one dares to call my bluff, I will call the cream cheese Radio Pudding a "Hawaiian salad.")

 

The finished dough tasted a lot like that semi-artificial canned pineapple filling. You know, the stuff you find in those trays of stale danishes that turn up in office breakrooms and are never as good as you hope they will be.

At this point, we ran into the only error in the recipe: the baking time. Even after the cookies started to brown at the edges, I let them keep baking until the full 20 minutes had elapsed as specified. I thought that perhaps these cookies are meant to get extra-crispy like biscotti, or perhaps that the pineapple kept them too wet in the middle unless one let them bake for a long time. That was incorrect. The resulting cookies were overcooked, dry, and bland. Our drops of Hawaii had become melba toast.

The next batch, which we baked for far less time, came out much better. They were very soft, and unexpectedly reminiscent of those coconut macaroons you can make out of leftover cake frosting. The texture was almost identical.

For a recipe published in this millennium, the Hawaiian Drop cookies tasted very old-fashioned. The pineapple was recognizeable, but not as dominant as I expected. The light scattering of coconut on top was more pervasive than you'd think. Even though these cookies have shortening, they tasted unexpectedly like those butter cookies that infamously become sewing tins- or in the case of my more maniacal friends, get turned into the ballast housings for indoor floodlights.

It turns out crushed pineapple is a surprisingly flavor-neutral addition to recipes. I guess a lot of the flavor goes away when you drain off the juice. But you get a slight hint of pineapple flavor, but mostly it adds a lot of moistness to cookies that may have been dry. At any rate, these cookies are not the platter of tropical flavor I expected, but they're so good I made them again anyway. 

I had to freeze some of these to give away later. But the cookies were so good that we ate them anyway. The pineapple flavor was a lot stronger upon defrosting them. So if you want a strong pineapple flavor, apparently you need to make these cookies a few days ahead and let them ripen in a sealed container.

These cookies were a lot better than I thought they would be. And the only splurge ingredients are canned pineapple and a little bit of coconut. So I would definitely recommend this recipe. The cookies are unusual but not weird, and they're just plain good.