Monday, April 02, 2007

First Cookie Attempt

intro
Inpired by G.'s delicious cupcakes with frosting which he made totally from scratch (including frosting), I decided to bake for the first time this year. G., if you're reading, please send me your perfected recipe whenever you have it! Before you move on, let me just warn you that a lot of this experiment was driven by desperation and laziness. Actually, let me give you the recipe first. You can read the long ramble later. I'll upload the photos (not so snazzy) on a later date.

ingredients
-a little less than 1/2 cup of oil (the recipe called for a stick of butter, which I had, but I didn't have the heart to use it all up just on some cookies, big mistake...)
-crushed oreo cookies (I crushed them with my bare hands)
-walnuts
-1 cup of flour
-3/4 cup of sugar
-1 egg

directions
1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Mix everything well.
3. Grease cookie sheet.
4. Scoop out mix with a spoon and drop onto sheet. Leave enough space between cookies. I made about 7-8 cookies with the recipe.
5. Bake for 8-10 minutes.
6. Let cookie cool and then serve.

story/rambling
Last time I baked was some year ago, the item was probably some sort of cookie, made from cookie mix in a box. At the time I had people bake for me, and being spoiled is awesome. Unfortunately for the baker, I max out at 2 cookies, which meant a lot of left overs--cold, hard cookies. One of my favorite parts of baking is actually smelling the fresh cookies being taken out of the oven. My least fav. part has to be clean up. But clean up is my least fav. part of cooking anything!

Today after being inspired to bake, I figured I should get a cookie mix, something very basic and very simple, like chocolate chip cookie mix. Obviously I had forgotten that Duane Reade is not exactly like CVS, the latter actually carried cookie mix (or maybe I'm mixing it up with Safeway and Vittles). The Duane Reade didn't have anything I was looking for and I was too lazy to walk to another supermarket. At that point I really wanted to put the baking project on hold.

Then it was around 10:30 and I was inspired to look up chocolate chip cookie recipes online. Some of them are pretty simple and I decided to modify one and create my own. I didn't have chocolate chip but I did have oreos and walnuts. So I used them. I also halved the recipe so I won't have too many left over cookies. The rest is history.

Lessons for future cookie baking: use butter, bake until brown, get a better spatula to remove cookie from sheet easier.

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