A Food Dilettante's Musings: Baking Cookies from Scratch for the First Time!

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Baking Cookies from Scratch for the First Time!

The office is holding a cookie swap tomorrow, and this is the kind of push that I needed to face my baking fears. I baked a bit when I was in elementary school. I would bake cakes and breads on weekends after pouring over recipe books from the library. I lost touch with baking when I realized that other forms of cooking are so much faster with easier clean-ups. I no longer had the patience for bread to rise, for egg whites to get beaten into a nice fluff, for cakes to be decorated, and for the confections to bake--10, 30, 60 minutes seem like an eternity.

I thus devoted my entire Sunday to baking 2 kinds of cookies worthy of my time *wink*. Most of what I cook is without the help of a recipe. I either interpret a dish from my memory of how it tastes, or I create something. I can't risk that with baking! I have absolutely no solid knowledge in making sweets. After asking a couple of foodie friends and much internet research, I picked Saveur magazine's blog cookie pick-Une Gamine dans la Cuisine's mint chocolate chip cookies and Kayotic Kitchen's savory Italian cheese cookies.

The recipes are all hyperlinked to their names above so I won't post them here. I will post my photos and tell you that they are very scrumptious. However, I did make an addition to the savory cookie. I noticed how many people posted on Kayotic Kitchen that their Italian cheese cookies turned out on the dry side, so I added a 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of olive oil (I doubled the quantity from the recipe so maybe 1/4 to 1/2 tsp for the recipe) into the mixer along with the dry ingredients. They turned out really well!

Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies