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Nothing beats the satisfaction of eating freshly-baked cookies.
Today I joined for a cookie making workshop at work as part of the Christmas celebrations. Normally I find cooking much easier compared to baking as the former allows for some room for error — baking requires more precision both in the ingredient proportions and oven timing/temperature. In other words, the more variables, the more things can go wrong.
For the workshop participants today, we had it easier as the base dough for the three types of cookies were already made by my colleagues who are clearly experts in cookie making. They took just two hours to make three large batches of cookie dough.
So the three flavours of cookies were: butter, gingerbread and oatmeal with raisin.
While the gingerbread and oatmeal with raisin dough held well in room temperature and contact with human hands, the butter one was much harder to work with. You basically had a limited time window to work on the dough because the heat from your hands or excessive rolling with rolling pin will cause the dough to disintegrate. You have to be quick and decisive about how you want to work with that dough.
I managed to make two star-shaped cookies before I destroyed the remaining butter dough, which had to be rolled back into a ball with clingwrap and put back in the fridge.
What makes a good cookie? According to my experienced facilitator colleagues, they should be crispy on the surface while being moist and slightly chewy in the centre. This was exactly what we got after we ate the cookies fresh out of the oven, our ‘reward’ for the cookie making session.
We did not even manage the baking part as different ovens have different heating characteristics (see, another variable to go wrong) and this was taken care of by one of our facilitators who had to constantly monitor the timer, and shift the baking trays of cookies to ‘even out’ the baking heat.
The next time you bite into a cookie (homemade or store bought), think about the numerous steps and hands that worked on it before it reached your hands.
Baking is really much harder than it looks.
