cookies

A Cookie Trick

As much as I miss Diana for her winning personality, I mostly miss her for her cookie sheets. It was with her cookie sheets that we first made the greatest cookies of our lives–you can read the recipe here. Meg of Megnut rejected these cookies when she tried them and called them “too thin,” but I still think they’re the best.

Yesterday I was all set to make them when I made a painful discovery: Diana, despite my efforts to thwart her, remembered to take her cookie sheets. Her cookie sheets, unlike mine, are flat with no sides and the cookies made on them came out perfect every time. The ones made on mine often got burnt around the edges or black underneath–my cookie sheets have sides.

I was almost ready to give up, when I had a “eureka” moment.

“What’s wrong?” asked Craig.

“I’m having a eurkea moment,” I answered.

The eureka was this: I could bake cookies on the BACK of my cookie sheets. Flip them upside down. Lay parchment across them and bake them that way. Look:

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See what I mean?

So I made the batter as usual and, as I revealed in a previous post, I used an ice cream scoop to get the batter on to the sheets:

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I also flattened them with a wet hand, a trick I learned from one of my regular TV shows (Barefoot Contessa)? They went into the 350 degree oven and I was going to switch the sheets after 9 minutes to cook another 9 minutes more, but at that point they were already a perfect golden brown and the edges were dark. So I made the executive decision to take them out 9 minutes early and guess what?

They were fantastic. I mean you saw that picture above, look at this one:

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What more could you want from a cookie? And you can recreate these at home this weekend using my trick. Who needs Diana and her stinkin’ cookie sheets? From now on I will use her for her personality and nothing more.

Let’s Make Our Cookies Bigger

People of the world, aren’t you tired of tiny cookies? You know the kind I’m talking about. They’re the kind that you end up making when a recipe says, “Drop cookie batter by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets.” That’s what the recipe says for Nestle’s Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies, which I made again tonight (here’s the recipe from the first time I made them). They’re great cookies–sweet chemical morsels embraced by wholesome natural oatmeal–and I definitely enjoyed them when they were small. But tonight I wanted them bigger.

To make them bigger here’s what I did: I used an ice cream scoop. I scooped out big blobs of batter, pushed the little handle on the scoop and dropped them on to parchment paper placed on my cookie sheet. The recipe was to make two dozen, I made nine. Then, instead of using the time allotted on the bag, I baked them until they were flat and brown around the edges.

And you know what? I got exactly what I wanted: big, smile-inducing cookies. Everybody loves a big cookie. So don’t cowtow to the tiny cookie gods just because they yell at you from the side of a bag. Get yourself an ice cream scoop and make your cookies bigger: you’ll be glad you did.

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