Jamie Lynn Stevenson can still remember the smell of walnut meringue cookies wafting from her great-grandmother’s kitchen. The “little piles of heaven,” also known in her family as bussels, or “kisses” in German, were dense but chewy, with hints of caramelized nut flavor inside.
“I was just salivating waiting for them,” Stevenson recalls. “And the great thing about these cookies is that they didn’t take very long to bake!”
But when she tried to follow the recipe in her own kitchen in Ashtabula, Ohio, after her great-grandmother died, she realized the cookies were not so easy to re-create. Stevenson knew the list of ingredients but had no clue about her great-grandmother’s measurement or technique.
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