What I Know About Cookies
May. 26th, 2006 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrissa1. 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,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
