My Adventures In Cookie Baking…
I will start this post by divulging that:
- I am the granddaughter of a baker.
- The family bakery put my father and all his siblings through college.
- The family bakery is still up and running in Zion, Illinois.
That being said, the art of baking obviously doesn’t get transferred down family lines through blood. It takes some practice, which this 23-year-old is still working on.
This weekend, I thought I would try to make the Oatmeal Smiths recipe from Frites & Fries that came across my greader the other day. The picture looked tasty and the recipe seemed simple enough:
- 3/4 c. unbleached all-purpose flour
- 1 1/2 c. Quaker Oats Quick Oats
- 1/2 tsp. baking soda
- 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- 1/2 c. unsalted butter
- 1/2 c. light brown sugar
- 1/4 c. cane sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp. vanilla
- 1 Granny Smith apple, cored, peeled and diced into 5mm cubes
Preheat the oven to 350F. Combine the oats, flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon in a large mixing bowl. In a small bowl, melt the butter and let it cool. Add the sugars and vanilla into the small bowl, and then add the egg. Combine the small bowl into the large bowl filled with the dry ingredients. Using a soup spoon or a tablespoon, scoop the batter onto a cookie sheet lined with unbleached parchment paper, spacing them at least 1” apart. Bake for 10 minutes or until golden.
I followed the recipe word for word and what do I get? These:
Cookie fail. Don’t worry, the green crocodile is providing the “Waa wannn” for us all. At this point, I was ticked, remembering my last attempt at baking cookies, which was this:
Flat, flatter than flat chocolate chip cookies, made with the recipe on the back of the Toll House chocolate chip package (the classic). I figured the reason that they didn’t rise was that the flour and brown sugar I had on hand could have been up to a year old. But with the Oatmeal Smiths, I had new flour and sugar on hand. Clearly I was wrong.
What to do then? Consult our good friend, Google. The search “why are my cookies flat” provided a few links and now I think I have the answer:
- The butter needs to be cold. Notice how the recipe calls for melted butter. I was just following directions! But this piece of advice was in pretty much every forum. Apparently butter, which contains water content, makes the dough thinner and more prone to spreading on the pan. Some recommended substituting 1/2 of the butter with shortening, which doesn’t have any water in it.
- The dough needs to be cold. Along the same lines as the butter advice, but some people chill the dough in the fridge before baking. Some put the whole cookie sheet and dough balls in the freezer for 5-10 minutes before baking. After the first botched oatmeal smith batch, I put the dough in the fridge for a little bit and it seemed to help. The second batch remained somewhat “cookie-like,” and I would be curious to try it again for longer.
- Use parchment paper or a silpat liner. Okay, so this I didn’t find in the search results but it did come to mind as I was scraping the cookies off the cookie sheet and thus disfiguring them. A Silpat liner will definitely be on my Christmas wish list this year.
Can anyone offer any other advice?
And finally, to prove that I actually can bake things (other than cookies), here is the Glazed Lemon Bread from Simply Recipes that I made for Traveling Brunch the other day. Must have gotten the butter temperature right on that one. ;o)
