COOKIE!

[cjsmith]

I just made up a cookie recipe, cobbled together from hints of other cookies I've made. Then I added flavors I figured I'd like.

1 cup butter, softened
3 cups flour
2 eggs
1.5 cups granulated sugar
1/4 t salt
1 t baking powder
1.5 t vanilla extract
1.5 t almond extract

I made walnut-sized balls out of the dough, swatted each one with my fingertips to flatten it somewhat, and baked at 375F for 11 minutes.

Boy, are they GOOOOOOD.

They're a bit dome-shaped and cakey though. Maybe a little less flour.

The next batch will get lemon extract and chopped-up bits of dried apricot, instead of the vanilla and almond.

[Edit: Yielded 45 cookies. Of which, unfortunately, I burned six.]

Comments

[gs.livejournal.com]

Save me one of the vanilla-almond extract ones!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I saved you a whole bunch. Someone brought a luscious chocolate almost-no-flour cake tonight, and my cookies didn't even get noticed.

Haven't gotten around to making the fruity ones.

[lkeele.livejournal.com]

Yaaay, slop-nuggets! My favorite 'kind' of cookie! (Or rather, my favorite cookie-schema).

Slop-nuggets. Take some stuff in your kitchen you really feel like throwing into a cookie. Throw it in. Add enough "cookie" type stuff (flour, sugar, butter, egg) to make it cookie-ish.

My last slop-nugget recipe had chunks of Cadbury's hazelnut chocolate bar, and a good dose of molasses. I'm dying to try slop-nuggets with bananas and honey, but the bananas around here always disappear before I can bake with them.

Lemme know how the apricot ones worked!!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

That sounds great! Slop-nuggets! Perfect name. Although when the only "creativity" involved is picking an amount of almond extract, it's not quite so ... lively feeling. :-)

Haven't gotten around to doing the apricotty ones. Probably tomorrow afternoon.

[lkeele.livejournal.com]

Slop-nuggets! Perfect name.

Can't take credit for the name -- I lifted it from a Bruce Coville book (he writes fantasy/sci-fi for 10-year-olds).

Don't diss your almond extract experimentation. Experimenting has to start somewhere, and it sounds lovely besides. :)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Hadn't meant to diss it, just thought it sounded less "slop-nuggety". :-)

Bruce Coville sounds fun!

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

Possibly less flour, but possibly also (or instead?) less egg. Add some other liquid to make up from any missing liquid in the eggs, if you try it....

Yum. They sound delicious.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Less egg, huh? Really? Okay. Hmmmm. What other kind of liquid could I add? Not water, surely? Oil??

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

Have you made many boxes of pre-mix brownies? You may remember that on the boxes they'll say "for cake-like brownies, use x number of eggs. For chewy brownies, use y number of eggs" (where y is always smaller than x). Egg is a binder, and will tend to create "taller" structures, leading to higher, cake-ier cookies. If you want chewy, you probably want a smaller amount of egg.

For the liquid, yes, possibly water. Oil possibly as well. How much of either would depend in part on whether you had any of either in the original recipe. Other liquid sources are also possible, limited only by your imagination. Here are some that you might want to consider at various times:

water, oil, egg (though not for this one), buttermilk, milk, cream, juice, alcohol (especially liqueurs, though remember that the alcohol itself will burn off, so it'll look like more liquid than it functionally provides), Italian soda syrups (DaVinci is good for sugar-free), pureed fruit, beer (can be good in certain breads, for instance).

And let me just say that I think you're brave for creating your own recipe for cookies. Baking is so much of a science that I'm usually loathe to mess around with it much. I'm much free-er with cooking. But I tend to follow pretty closely to a recipe with most baking. :^)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

for cake-like brownies, use x number of eggs. For chewy brownies, use y number of eggs

Ahh! I was thinking crispier, instead of chewier. Would I go for less egg for that, too? I have no idea what effects will be created by various changes in proportion.

Thanks MUCHLY for the liquids list - I'm still in the very early stages of experimentation, and I don't know what I can get away with and what I can't. I've heard of beer in bread, too, and as a base for fondue, but I'm now twisting my brain to try to figure out what kind of cookies might work well with beer. Oatmealy type stuff? :-O :-)

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't think I'd put beer in cookies either, though as you say, certain oatmealy-type ones might work with that! It was more of a general liquids list. I might put beer in some quickbreads, though.

Hmmm. Crispier--let's see. That would need probably more shortening, possibly less flour, though I'm not sure. Maybe more sugar? Also, possibly a higher temperature, and/or a longer cooking time?