Cookies!!
It has been cold, so I thought I’d bake something. I didn’t want to order from the ‘Net and no one seems to carry sultanas locally, so I decided against oatmeal cookies. Most people don’t bother to soak their raisins or sultanas in wine for a few hours before using them, so they tend to be hard.
I went with my second choice – chocolate chip based on the original Toll House recipe.
The recipe gives a laughable timeline: 39 minutes to cookies,
Reality involved finding a really good flashlight to scan the cupboards for a 3 quart bowl & two 1 quart bowls, the electric mixer, the beaters for the electric mixer, the cookie sheets, the cooling racks, the parchment paper, the spatula, the scoop, and the measuring cups & spoons.
The timeline also neglected taking everything out of the oven and finding a place for it. Then there was the time spent locating the step stool to be used to remove the battery from the smoke detector in the living room about 5 minutes into cooking the first batch. The process starts hours earlier when you take the two sticks of butter out of fridge to soften so you can cream in the sugar and vanilla.
After all of this I looked at the cost and devised a new system – put out the cooling racks and go to the store to buy three bags of Pepperidge Farm Chesapeake cookies. Open the bags and put the cookies on the racks and dump the bags in someone else’s wheelie bin.
The cookies I made are thicker and softer than the Chesapeakes, but the cost are close to the same for the ingredients. The chocolate chips and pecans are almost $7!
Update: From 2008 Kryten’s Grandmother’s Double Chocolate Walnut Biscotti recipe.
16 comments
Your problem is that you just don’t bake enough. If you did, you’d already know where all that stuff was.
My nested mixing bowls are top shelf in the cabinet to the left of the dishwasher. The cookie sheets are to the left of them on that shelf. The flour is in the airproof jar on the countertop, the vanilla in the cabinet above it, the brown and granular sugar 2nd shelf in the cabinet to the right of it, the canning salt on the top shelf of the cabinet to the right of *that*. Mixing cups are second drawer under that, as are the beaters for the mixers. The mixer itself is top drawer of the cabinet behind me at that point. Baking soda is under the sink.
Meanwhile while I’ve been assembling all this, the butter has been melting slowly in a small pot behind me (I cheat, I melt it then pour it into a metal mixing bowl to cool slightly). When I got the butter out to melt it, I got out the two eggs too and put them on the kitchen counter by the sink. So now everything’s pretty much assembled, I mix the baking soda and salt into the flour in one mixing bowl, then the sugar and vanilla into the butter, add the eggs, add the mixture to the flour along with the chocolate chips and chug chug chug with the mixer while doing so, and … voila. Ready to spoon out cookie dough onto the cookie sheets and start baking.
I’m more like an hour to cookies, but that’s because I make big cookies that need more time at a lower temperature to cook right (one of my friends says they’re more like scones than cookies, heh). While cookies are baking, I’m washing up all the mixing bowls and such. And I’m sorry, the real butter makes my home made cookies taste *way* better than any store bought cookie ever bought!
I have a lady who cleans for me and every 4 to 6 weeks she pulls everything out of the cupboards to clean them. She checks the dates on food, condiments, &c. and tosses anything past its ‘use by’ date. I will know where everything is for the next 2 to 4 weeks. She is fast and thorough, and as I live in the manager’s house I can’t have it in the condition of the house the cats live-in, a location where the vacuum cleaner is a demon from the lowest levels of hell that must be attacked with all resources.
I’m not saying that my cookies with real ingredients that you would find in my grandmothers’ kitchens don’t taste better, they do, but it is a lot of work for a couple dozen cookies.
Note: This is Florida – anything with any food value is in an air tight container and/or the refrigerator.
Brian
Even Micky-Ds?
Shirt
Shirt, I would go there in New York or California, but if it is out too long, like in a prep table at a restaurant, you really need to check for critters before biting in Florida. It was bad enough when I was a kid, but now we have all kind of new critters that have hitched a ride in containers and set up homesteads – like Mediterranean geckos, Burmese pythons , Vietnamese termites, & fire ants. I was referring to food storage in my kitchen.
So why is it that as far as I know, you can’t get store-bought cookies that taste anything like the Tollhouse recipe (including those from grocery store bakeries)? Can’t just be the butter factor can it? After all, real shortbread cookies aren’t hard to find, even if there only seem to be one or two brands. It isn’t just freshness either — Tollhouse keep pretty well if you can manage not to eat them right away.
For some interesting How2 info on cookie making :
The Science Behind Baking Your Ideal Chocolate Chip Cookie
http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/shortbread.htm
I also highly recommend browsing around on Wayne Schmidt’s This and That Homepage, a congenial compendium of one engineer’s personal hobbies and interests.
http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/index.htm
I went with my second choice – chocolate chip based on the original Toll House recipe.
this is THE BEST cookie recipe on the planet, and my favorite baked cookies. although I may have to try the wine-soaked raisins someday. mostly though I just make plain oatmeal cookies without the raisins.
btw, ur doin it rong. you mix the cookie dough and eat THAT, while cooking maybe one cookie-sheet-ful of cookies, just so the house smells good and you get to eat some right out of the oven (ok, maybe let them cool just a little bit.
I suppose that someday I will actually get salmonella from eating raw cookie dough, at which point I will probably cook all the cookie dough, but until then . . . .
PJ, the NPR article [thanks] covers several points, but the quality of the chocolate chips, the shortening vice butter, artificial vanilla, the sweetener, preservatives, all add to the change in flavor. The Toll House version is more expensive, and the money difference shows in the taste. Mrs Field’s cookies at their stores were as good, because they used the same ingredients you would use at home. They were also expensive.
Hipparchia, if you insist on eating the dough, cut it in half and add one egg to the half you are going to bake. The egg is the carrier of the Salmonella.
We had Mrs Fields here for awhile. usually in larger shopping center’s. I used to love those cookies. 😀 I assumed they were a franchise. I don’t know if they are still around. 🙂
Yeah, it’s the eggs hipparchia. Though eating the dough without egg in it changes the taste of course. 😉 SO better when they are cooked IMHO!
And there’s always my Choc Biscotti recipe I posted ages ago! LOL
I never use vanilla flavor in my cooking. It’s mostly sugar syrup. I use the real vanilla essence. It’s more expensive of course, the the real vanilla deal. 🙂
My fave bakery here makes excellent shortbread cookies. They have 2 choc chip varieties. One with 24% choc chips, one with 40%. Not the cheap supermarket chips either. 😀 I got some on Tuesday. Only the 24% though, I found the 40% a bit too rich & melts too fast when I dip it in my coffee! LOL
I added a link for the biscotti.
Vanilla extract, like salt, not only has its own flavor it does nice things to other flavors.
Yes, you have to be careful about what you dunk, or the cookie ends up in the bottom of your cup. 🙂
Awww! Thanks for that. Gran would be ‘pleased as punch’ as she used to say! 😀 And I still have no idea what the reference is. *shrug* But I understood what she meant! 😆
For me, real vanilla is also a good sweetener, so less sugar needed. 🙂 The bakery that makes the shortbread’s usually dust them with sugar, but they make some without that now for diabetics. I thought that was nice of them (even though it also meant broadening their market a bit). 😉
It should be rendered ‘as pleased as Punch’, a reference to Punch & Judy puppet shows. Punch was portrayed as self-satisfied with his nefarious schemes. Today one could say ‘as pleased as Trump’ as both both are schmucks.
Perhaps the lady who cleans could settle the issue of where everything is by leaving notes and sending the baker on a treasure hunt. Every week. Unless the cookie day is repeated, upon which the notes can be negotiated.
Cookies should always have a dough eater. Baking half is a great solution. Another solution to FL weather is to place the dough into the refrigerator for a day or so and then drop them or roll into a log then slice it. They will not spread far enough to be crispy and stay soft in the middle. Tollhouse has my vote every time.
On the occasions where I do make cookies I use the flavor of all natural vanilla. Dark brown sugar is a must and eating the dough is mandatory. This leaves no room for disappointment in the finished product. Leaving the oven for storage saves time and energy. One could always make a cookie preparation cabinet at a reachable level.
As for critters, I don’t share well some of them. Def not cookies.
Happy baking everybody!
I do not do anything that might be construed as a criticism of her work. She is the most efficient and effective person my Mother ever used and I don’t want to break in a new team.
In my next batch I’m going to replace the all baking soda with a baking soda / baking powder mixture. The baking soda version was too ‘cake-like’ for me. Obviously real butter, vanilla extract, and dark brown sugar are required, otherwise you’re wasting your oven cooking the batter.
Baking powder isn’t a good substitute, it will make it rise even more. If it is too “cake-like” adjust the amount of baking soda. Also, the temperature at which you bake makes a difference, as does the temperature of the butter when you mix the ingredients. A lower oven temperature and warmer butter lets it spread more before it rises resulting in lower flatter cookies. A higher temperature freezes it in place sooner. It sounds like your oven is running a bit hot, run it about 10 degrees cooler and put a pizza stone on the rack under the cookie sheet to keep it from getting direct infrared from the heating element (assuming an electric stove, not as much a problem with a gas stove).
Personally, I like cake-like cookies, one of my coworkers accuses my cookies of being “basically disguised scones”. But that’s me.
Instead of a teaspoon of baking soda, I’m going to try a ¼ teaspoon of baking soda & a ¼ teaspoon of baking powder for a crispy outside with a soft center. I’m also dropping the oven temperature by 10° because I think it is running hot [Gas].