What I Know About Cookies

[mrissa]

1. Wet first, dry second, lumpy third. Sugar is wet, oatmeal is lumpy.

2. Parchment paper and an oven thermometer may not be necessary, but they can hardly be a bad thing.

3. White sugar is designed to taste like sweet. Just sweet. That's it. That's why we have it: for sweet that doesn't interfere much with other flavors. If you don't want your cookies to taste like just-sweet-that's-it, use another sweetening (brown sugar!, maple sugar, maple syrup, molasses, applesauce...) or make sure your cookies have other things in them.

4. Hungarian companies know from spices. "Sure, paprika," you may say to yourself, "but what do Hungarians know about good cinnamon?" Answer: lots.

5. It is silly to make cookies designed to appeal to people who are guaranteed not to eat them. This has obvious applications, but there are some subtler ones that may come back to bite you: will anyone who could possibly come into contact with these cookies notice or care if you've cut out a cocoa ginger moose cookie with a crooked back leg? No? Move along with your life, then. There are books to be read.

6. You can't trust how many cookies the recipe says it'll make, because those people are dirty rotten liars. People whose recipes you can trust in this regard: me, my mom, Aunt Ellen, ksumnersmith, and one of markgritter's grandmas but not the other. There may be others, but I can't vouch for them personally.

7. Eating raw eggs in cookie dough puts you at risk for salmonella. Taking a walk puts you at risk for sprained ankle, sunburn, getting hit by a car, lightning strikes. Loving people puts you at risk for getting hurt. Doing nothing at all puts you at risk for living a joyless existence until you die alone and miserable. You do the math on all this as you like, but I'll be over here licking the spoon.

Comments

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

I'm a person who needs to take huge risks in life, like holding blue chip stocks in mutual funds, going out after 5 PM without sun screen, and licking the spoon after I make cookies. Some of us just thrive on that adrenaline rush, I tell ya.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

All those risks are minor compared to the risk you take every time you get in a car.

B

Risk

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"Eating raw eggs in cookie dough puts you at risk for salmonella. Taking a walk puts you at risk for sprained ankle, sunburn, getting hit by a car, lightning strikes. Loving people puts you at risk for getting hurt. Doing nothing at all puts you at risk for living a joyless existence until you die alone and miserable. You do the math on all this as you like, but I'll be over here licking the spoon."

Hear hear.

B

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Hopefully this is a harbinger of mrissa-cookies at this weekend's soiree. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Alas, but I put raisins in them instead of mrissa.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

That's okay, I prefer my mrissa in one piece, not divided up amongst cookies.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Everyone has their own taste in mrissas, I expect.

Re: Risk

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Well, I've never had the mriss-containing version, but I'm fond of raisins in cookies and would venture to predict I might actually prefer the raisin-containing version.

I do make a dish known as 5 peppers dd-b with pork, though. Even the first time, it didn't have *that* much dd-b in it. (And no rat at all, so far as I know.)

Re: Risk

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

Well why not? Can't be anyworse than most domestic poultry.

Re: Risk

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

Or nutria. *blech!*

mm, spice cake.

[lutin.livejournal.com]

And I'll be over here eating cake batter.

You can, most definitely, Not trust how many whatevers my recipes
will make. Hell, I can't trust them. (giant cookies of doom: delicious;
many billions of tiny dot cookies: also delicious.) I don't even bother
with writing down ingredient quantities most times. Everything is a
wonderful, (maple or brown) sugar-ific mess.

Re: mm, spice cake.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My mom taught me to cook/bake this way, and yesterday it came back to haunt her. She had my Basic Crisp Recipe and was waffling about what fruit to put in it. "The strawberries looked good," she said. "So use strawberries," I said. "Don't they get awfully watery?" "You just --" I waved my hands explainingly. "--fix it."

She eyed me, and sighed, knowing that it was all her fault I'd answered that way.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I stopped making chocolate mousse because of the raw egg thing. This was made possible once I got a recipe that's baked but has almost exactly the same ingredients only with ground almonds added. Still, the texture's different, the mousse is not quite as overwhelming, and you do make a persuasive argument.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Oh and also:
I'll be over here licking the spoon.

I hope this is meant literally and that you now have the option to do so.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'm all the way to peak health yet, but a little spice cookie batter was not beyond me, hurrah!

[genevra.livejournal.com]

You can still make your preferred chocolate mousse recipe! Just go buy some pasteurized eggs. They don't taste (or feel, texture-wise) any different, but they are SAFE! I use them for my raw egg-laden french silk pie recipe, I love knowing I won't be making people sick with it.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Free-range eggs are much less likely to be infected, last I heard. Pasteurized eggs would be safe unless mis-processed or infected afterwards.

And, as many people are saying, the chance of infection in just a few eggs is quite low. It's in commercial environments when you crack a few *dozen pounds* of commercial-grade eggs into one big container and mix that the odds of it being infected approaches unity.

But Pamela stopped letting us eat cookie dough and lick cake batter bowls a couple of decades ago, and we never started again. At this point she bakes so seldom it hardly matters, though.

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

Most of the bigger hotels, bakeries and restuarants now use precracked and Pasteurized eggs because of labor costs in baking. Forex one of my pumpkin pie filling recipes uses 2000 Lbs of eggs among other things. Anyone want to hand crack that much?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Lots of things are extremely different when you're working on that scale, I'm sure; probably more than just the obvious ones like cracking a *ton* of eggs by hand being a pain, even.

[writerjob.livejournal.com]

You are very wise ...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am from a baking culture, you see.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Excellent.

I am a big ol' fan of raw cookie dough. I will note, for those who like the middle of the road, that freezing kills the salmonella, so if you want to put your cookie dough in the freezer and eat it the /next/ day, you can have your cake and fear it, too.

I generally don't bother, I admit.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And for people who are not big ol' fans, the delay may be worth it, or not doing it may be worth it; I am certainly not one to force people to eat cookie dough. (More for meeee!) But not eating a spoon now and then for fear of salmonella, well.

When I was 13, one of my favorite cousins (then about 35) came for a visit. I was throwing brownies together, and I told her the best part was the batter. She became upset. I quoted the odds to her and indicated my continuing intention to eat the batter. She became more upset. While I was putting the pan in the oven, she stole the batter bowl and ran water in it so I couldn't eat it.

The part that really made me mad was that she was perfectly willing to eat the brownies I had made. Too young to make brownie-batter related decisions for myself, apparently, but for her? No problem.

Still one of my favorite cousins, despite that.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

[[ I quoted the odds to her and indicated my continuing intention to eat the batter. ]]

Good show knowing the odds. Did you figure in a percentage for this tiny exposure (if any) building immunity in case you ever had a big exposure?

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

That is very very good to know. Thanks for the tip!

[cadithial.livejournal.com]

/waves from a fellow spoon licker. I'm also all for milkshakes with raw eggs. Did it all through high school with no problems.

[rosefox]

Eating raw eggs in cookie dough puts you at risk for salmonella. Taking a walk puts you at risk for sprained ankle, sunburn, getting hit by a car, lightning strikes. Loving people puts you at risk for getting hurt. Doing nothing at all puts you at risk for living a joyless existence until you die alone and miserable. You do the math on all this as you like, but I'll be over here licking the spoon.

How would you like this to be attributed in my .sig file? *)

Re: Risk

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Marissa Lingen is fine. Anything you want to quote of mine (as long as it's public) should be Marissa Lingen.

Re: Risk

[rosefox]

Done. *)

Re: Risk

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I freaked people out my first year in college by saying that I loved cookie dough (they were almost offended at the thought, as if I'd said I loved to hurt children) and going barefoot. Hothouse children, those girls. My mother makes cookies to send to school with my brother, and she'll call me and describe the process. It's horrible, but if she knows I'm going to be home within a couple days, she saves the dough for me.
I not only eat cookie dough, I eat day-old cookie dough chiseled from a block in the fridge.

I don't know how eggs are pasteurized, but if you want a germ-free chicken colony, you take eggs and wipe them with antiseptic so there aren't any bacteria on them. The eggs go into a big chamber with filtered everything so nothing gets in. Germ-free chickens! Great for immunity things.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I always thought my friend Gina's mother was the absolute best because she saved cookie dough chunks in the fridge if she made cookies while Gina and her brother Matt were at school.

Also, when we baked something, my mom would try to get as many chocolate chips or blueberries or whatever into the baked goods as possible, but Grandma would make sure there were at least a couple to eat in the dough. That was good, too.