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History of ApproximationCookies|
Start with a hunk of butter that looks roughly equal 3/4 of a stick (this is what was available the first time, and it worked out well) and put it in a decent sized mixing bowl (a soup pot works reasonably well too). Cream the butter and add sugar until the butter looks reasonably saturated - ie, until it looks about like the butter sugar mixture does at the beginning of most cookie recipes. Add an egg and a small splash of vanilla and mix well. Add a relatively large scoop of flour to the bowl and add a pinch of salt and a few pinches of baking soda to the pile. Attempt to stir the salt and baking soda into just the flour that is in the bowl (the purpose of this is to help keep the baking soda and salt from ending up clumped together). Mix the contents of the bowl well. The dough is probably still quite sticky. Mix in more flour. Continue mixing in more flour until the cookie dough is roughly the consistency of PlayDough?. Pinch off chunks of the dough and roll them into slightly-smaller than ping-pong ball sized balls. Set them on some sort of baking sheet - it need not be an actual cookie sheet as long as its clean - an flatten them slightly so they will cook more nicely. Assuming you added enough flour they should not spread *too* much, so if you leave 1/2 inch or so between them you should be fine. Now, study the oven. Figure out how to turn it on. If the temperature dial is in Celcius set it to around 180, if it has temperature settings corresponding to the numbers 1-8, setting it to about 5.5 seems to work well enough. Wait until it seems hot. Put the cookies in the oven. Wait about 5 minutes and check on them to see if they look done. If they look nicely browned, they are probably done. Try gently poking one, if it doesn't feel squishy, you can call them done. When they are done, take them out of the oven and let them cool for a minute or two (or longer if you have that kind of patience). Remove them from the cookie sheet and try one :-). |
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Start with a hunk of butter that looks roughly equal 3/4 of a stick (this is what was available the first time, and it worked out well) and put it in a decent sized mixing bowl (a soup pot works reasonably well too). Cream the butter and add sugar until the butter looks reasonably saturated - ie, until it looks about like the butter sugar mixture does at the beginning of most cookie recipes. Add an egg and a small splash of vanilla and mix well. Add a relatively large scoop of flour to the bowl and add a pinch of salt and a few pinches of baking soda to the pile. Attempt to stir the salt and baking soda into just the flour that is in the bowl (the purpose of this is to help keep the baking soda and salt from ending up clumped together). Mix the contents of the bowl well. The dough is probably still quite sticky. Mix in more flour. Continue mixing in more flour until the cookie dough is roughly the consistency of PlayDough?. Pinch off chunks of the dough and roll them into slightly-smaller than ping-pong ball sized balls. Set them on some sort of baking sheet - it need not be an actual cookie sheet as long as its clean - an flatten them slightly so they will cook more nicely. Assuming you added enough flour they should not spread *too* much, so if you leave 1/2 inch or so between them you should be fine. Now, study the oven. Figure out how to turn it on. If the temperature dial is in Celsius set it to around 180, if it has temperature settings corresponding to the numbers 1-8, setting it to about 5.5 seems to work well enough. Wait until it seems hot. Put the cookies in the oven. Wait about 5 minutes and check on them to see if they look done. If they look nicely browned, they are probably done. Try gently poking one, if it doesn't feel squishy, you can call them done. When they are done, take them out of the oven and let them cool for a minute or two (or longer if you have that kind of patience). Remove them from the cookie sheet and try one :-). |
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* If you discover that you do not have a grater that grates the ginger as fine as you would like you can just chop it up tiny. Also, cloves are amazing. |