Week 9- baking

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Well, as if I haven't been making enough cookies around here, this week was cookie week in Baking. We made coconut macaroons, carrot cake cookies with a cream cheese filling, oatmeal raisin, chocolate jumbles, chocolate chip, and flourless chocolate chewies. Yes. That's alot of cookies.

The coconut macaroons turned out pretty, but the texture wasn't correct. CJ said that it wasn't our fault, though. She's pretty sure the recipe wasn't right. Many of the recipes that we take from our On Baking book need to be edited, as it turns out. The cookies ended up being hollow on the inside and, if not extremely careful taking them off the pan, the bottoms would fall off and it would just be a hollow top of a cookie. They looked pretty, though. The original recipe was for lime and pineapple coconut macaroons but we chose to make the variation that called for eliminating the lime and pineapple and using jam in the centers instead.



The carrot cake cookies also didn't turn out QUITE right. They ended up being VERY cake-y and were too fragile to pick up and sandwich in the full size. We, instead, cut thee baked cookies with cookie cutters to make them smaller and then sandwiched them with the cream cheese filling.


I didn't really care much for the oatmeal raisin cookies, either. The taste was really yummy. It called for orange juice concentrate, which we were out of, so we substituted pineapple juice instead. That gave it a really nice flavor, but they weren't the texture of oatmeal raisin cookies that I enjoy. Most of the cookies we made were not the texture I like. I think part of it was that I prefer smaller cookies, and we were using these huge scoops to make these, so the cookies ended up extremely large, so we had to cook them longer for the centers to set up which gave them a crispy outside. I like chewy cookies, not crispy cookies. It's all a matter of preference, though.

The chocolate jumbles came out fine, but I was a but underwhelmed with them overall.

I was hoping the recipe for the chocolate chip cookies would be amazing. I have YET to find a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that I love. I have HAD great chocolate chip cookies, but haven't been able to make them from scratch that I am satisfied with. I like it when the cookies stay more compact and, again, are VERY chewy and soft. The ones I have always made end up spreading alot and getting crispy on the outside edge, very brown on the outside edge, and are really thin. I asked CJ and she said to chill the made cookies on the pan before baking. They still spread. She then said that I may just need to mess with a recipe and figure out through trial and error a recipe that works for me. I will do that one day. In the meantime, I have sugar cookies to make. Haha.

The one cookie that I really enjoyed was the flourless chocolate chewies. They had walnuts in them and were light and almost meringue-y crispy on the outside but super chewie on the inside and the nuts gave it a nice texture contrast, as well. I know I said I don't like crispy cookies, but this was a whole other crispy. It was kind of a flakey crispy, not a well done crispy. I gave a few of these to a guy who ordered a "mixed bag" of cookies from me and apparently his wife devoured them to the point that he is planning on making a bunch of them himself over break.



One more week of actual Baking and then we have our final and cleaning. At this moment in time I have 100% in this class plus 13 reserved bonus points. I suggested that the person with the highest grade should get the reward of not having to clean. Haha. Not happening, but it was worth a shot.

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