Mr. Chris(tie), You Make a Good Cookie!
My, oh my! Am I becoming a good husband-to-be or what? Today, I decided to try my hand at baking – for the first time ever pretty much. Cindy and I have come to an agreement that I am the cook and she is the baker. However, with her being gone most of last week and for the last two days, my cookie supply had run out. So, being the unemployed person with time on his hands, I picked up the spoon and had at ‘er!
There was a recipe in the cook book that we got for Christmas I wanted to try, having seen it immediately following the oatmeal raisin cookies that the little lady usually bakes for me. They are called Ranger Cookies and include oatmeal, coconut and dried cranberries (there are the other typical ingredients that go in a cookie, but you all know what those are and so I want bore you with ‘em). I got out the hand mixer and started mixing up the butter, sugar, flour, egg, etc as directed but after a while something didn’t seem right. After I bit it got too hard to mix with the mixer and so I started stirring with a spoon as the recipe suggested. But it got reeeeally hard to mix and my forearm and hand started to get sore. I even have a broken wooden spoon as a souvenir! I don’t know what I did wrong, or if I even did, but I eventually got to a mix that I thought looked like cookie mix.
The next hurdle was trying to figure out how big to make the mounds on the baking sheets. I thought I had it right the first round, but I think the fact that it took twice as long to bake than directed may indicate that I hadn’t. In my defense, the cookbook is in F and our stove is in C – even after converting, it is a little bit of a tricky situation as it is a fan oven and so you need to knock a few degrees off. After 25 minutes in the oven, I finally had some golden brown cookies to put on the cooling rack! So now it was time for round two and trying to get the right size of mound. Apparently my brain has a one-sized cookie perception because these ones turned out just the same. I have a feeling they might be a little under cooked in the middle as they are quite tall there, but I have not tried one yet and so don’t know. I will be having one with tea after dinner though, that is for sure!
Edit: I have tried them and they are pretty tasty! A little overcooked though, and so a few minutes less in the oven next time.
Here are some pictures from the session. I am going to sit here and enjoy my celebratory scotch, thank you very much. I think I deserve it!
