Our friends brought a corn casserole which my husband had a spiritual experience to and some brownie cookie bite things. Here's the delima. My cookies are always a massive failure. Always! But these cookie bites were fantastic, I ate like 15 of them. They were fluffy enough but moist and dense enough, they had chocolate chips in them. I was baffled. I have figured out that either 1. my neighbor/friend is the best cookie maker in the universe (which could quite possibly be true) or 2. she lied and used a box. Ok so either way I'm still a fan of the cookies and Sarah, don't you tell me if you made them from a box or from scratch, I would rather look up to you in the cookie department :)
So this is what my cookies always ALWAYS look like:
This past weekend I attempted to make cookies. I followed the recipe from Joy of Cooking to the letter. (except I added m&m's instead of chocolate chips but I don't think that matters) I let Jaime taste the dough and he was like 'woah, this is the best dough ever, these are going to be awesome cookies' or something like that. But when I baked them they looked like this:
So my question is this. What the heck am I doing wrong? Someone told me that I should use Crisco instead of butter. I just don't know if I could do that though. Sarah the next door neighbor friend asked if I used real eggs not the egg beaters... please. I'm not THAT healthy... wait, how did she know that I had bought egg beaters last week? No, honestly I didn't put them in the cookies, I did the cookies exactly how the recipe asked.
What am I doing wrong people?
In other news, cute things about my piano students. Yesterday a four year old student was showing me all the work he did in his Notespeller 'quiz' book. I praised him very much for doing a whole page! Then he said "yes, I was really trying to make you happy". His mother and I exchanged looks, it was adorable.
Next student comes in with a pinkie finger that had been slammed in a door. He did a very successful job of using his ring finger instead during the lesson. Half way through the lesson he reached over very quietly and poked me in the leg with the finger-that-was-about-to-lose-it's-nail-and-was-slammed-in-the-car-door. Gross. Little boys. Ew.
NEXT student comes in with blood pouring out of her mouth! I guess it was my day. Her mother said that it must have been a lose tooth but I've never seen a loose tooth be so bloody. (and on another note, am I going to have to deal with things like this when I have children? :) I checked back in on them in the bathroom almost five minutes later and it's still bleeding, bless her little heart. Apparently an orthodontist put a bracket on the baby tooth that came out so it wouldn't really come out all the way. How crazy! I felt so badly! They got a make up lesson for that one and got to run off to the orthodontist for some emergency care.
Thankfully the rest of my evening was much less eventful. And the dinner with friends was lovely.
What did I do wrong with the cookies?
Your dough is too warm. Put it in the freezer for say 30 minutes before baking. Also, always put the dough on a cool pan. That means if you only have 1 cookie sheet, wash it in cool water between batches. I know batches is the wrong word to use here, but I don't know what other word to use.
ReplyDeleteBatches is perfect. Batches batches batches.
ReplyDeleteTry adding up to 1/2 cup more flour; be sure the butter isn't too soft and ditto on cooling the dough.
ReplyDeleteCarrie-I used to feel the same way as you about crisco vs. butter. But, it makes a HUGE difference. I now use butter flavored crisco with my cookies and they are never flat and their texture is unbelievable :)
ReplyDeleteOh ya, one more thing I've learned. Bake them at 350 degrees for 10 minutes, and not one minute more! They will appear underdone and will need to sit on the cookie sheet for about 5 more minutes before you can move them.
ReplyDelete