So, for my day job, I am lucky enough to work as a baker. Someday, maybe I will post some photos and braggings about how awesome it is to make my living this way, for I do truly, truly thank the fates for bringing me around to such a rewarding profession. I like baking so much, in fact, that sometimes, when I am done with my day job, I come home and bake some more! Often, I find that something I am making at work reminds me of another thing I would rather be making (and eating!) than whatever I am in the middle of at the time. On that kind of a day, I arrive home really excited to make the thing I am craving, but what I find is most sweetened is not my pallet, but the acute sense of freedom and enjoyment that comes from having a humble, achievable goal in sight for the evening. Plus, now that I have finished Tyler's vottar, I like to have pleasant ways to contribute to our daily menu without discouraging him from continuing to do as much of the actually substantive cooking as he desires... (mmm, lucky me, there was curry waiting for me at lunch time today!)
Recently, I found myself inspired in exactly the above-described type of moment, to make some oatmeal raisin cookies. Oh lord, I love oatmeal cookies. I like raisins in them, I also like butterscotch chips in them, also coconut or banana and chocolate chips (but less frequently, because usually I am partial to a classic chocolate chip cookie once we start adding chocolate). My mother taught me how to make oatmeal cookies when I was still small enough to do things like stick my knee through the rung of my crib on purpose so that someone would have to come help me. She would measure the ingredients and let me "help" by dumping the contents of the measuring cup or spoon into the bowl at the right moment. It is doubtful that she expected to really teach me at that age, as I am sure most two-year-olds wouldn't be expected to actually retain a multi-step process like cookie-making, particularly when it involves advanced motor skills, strength, and a literacy for measurement than the child has not yet acquired. But maybe this is one of those examples that would remind us to rethink our own ideas about learning and teaching, because I distinctly remember the steps of cookie making as illustrated in my brain by memory-images of our kitchen in my earliest home. I am not claiming to be a child prodigy--I'm quite sure I was probably the comparatively mature age of ten or eleven before I attempted to make cookies unsupervised, so the lesson had a lot of reinforcement in the years following my first exposure. And furthermore, I think there is probably no real mystery in what was really cementing the experience in my brain at the time: butter and sugar, plain as that. What more compelling argument for paying attention is there?
Step 1: creaming the butter and sugar
All good dough cookies start with creaming the butter and the sugar. When my mom first taught me how to make a cookie, she obviously did all the hard work on this step; I would get to watch as she strained to beat a bit of softness into that cold butter. The creaming is only done when all the butter chunks are smoothly blended with the grainy sugar. We always used a little white and a little brown sugar, which we poured and plopped respectively on top of the butter. I used to love how this looked, particularly when the brown sugar, which we would pack into the measuring cup with the back of a spoon so that it was level at the top, would retain the shape of the turned-up measuring cup, lying stiffly on top of this soft drift of white sugar. And there is a first wonderment I can recall: why does white sugar never stick together like brown sugar does? How are they both sugar, and yet they are so different in appearance and behavior?
We always blended our butter and sugar by hand, with a wooden spoon. I couldn't have imagined using a machine to mix cookie dough until sometime in middle school when I made cookies at one of my friends' houses. I think it was actually the day I made chocolate chip cookies with Lizard* at her house in sixth grade. We used her mother's mixer to blend all the ingredients in stages, which meant that no wrists or elbows strained one twinge in the making of those cookies... an utterly novel experience for me. We proceeded to make a very tiny batch of "normal" cookies for sharing, and then wickedly used the rest of the dough to make two gigantic "chef cookies," as we termed them, which were naturally meant solely for us. Those two cookies took up one entire baking sheet, and were easily as big as my face at the time. They also took foreeeeeever to bake, and we spent the long wait lying on the kitchen floor and watching through the oven window, playing our own guard dogs. Suffice it to say, making cookies with a mixer was still a total blast, but I was strangely reluctant to give up the ritual of struggle associated with hand-creaming cold butter and sugar. I still am, and even when I have a mixer at my disposal, will choose to use a wooden spoon and elbow grease if I am making a home-sized batch. Ergonomically speaking, it would probably be a smarter choice for me to chill out on the grunt-work, but that is honestly a bit of the fun to me. When you have spent a couple minutes laboring to work the butter into forgiveness, and then you reach the moment when you can crack and egg on top and add a splash of vanilla, the blend suddenly transforms into this perfectly stir-able thing, and the relief is just wonderful!
*A fond nickname of yore, which will serve here in lieu of a proper name, to preserve the anonymity of my long-lost pal of old.
After all ingredients but raisins have been added: cookie dough!
The raisins in Svalbard come all the way from California, just like the handsome Tyler J. Krul.
Beautiful cookies!
Oh gosh, yum!!
I am incredibly proud of how these little cookies came out on this particular round. I made them again a couple weeks later, and had somewhat disappointing results, perhaps because my measuring tools are not exact. Professional baking has opened a whole new world of liberation to me, and I do encourage all home bakers to go ahead and wing it sometimes. Recipes are really only ratios, so I don't feel hindered by the fact that I don't have any formal measuring tools or a scale in my new home kitchen of now. For this recipe, I consulted the Smitten Kitchen oatmeal cookie recipe for my ratios: http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2009/02/thick-chewy-oatmeal-raisin-cookies/. When measuring, I use a mug and an actual teaspoon (like from the table setting) and eyeball everything. I sometimes decide I like a little dose extra or a little bit less sugar, sometimes decide I want to cut my white flour with a bit of wheat. I throw in cinnamon like it's going to add years to my life, and somedays I will be more or less careful about how even or round my cookies are. I had a baby-sitter once who showed up to our house with her own very clean baking sheets and measuring tools to make cookies. She insisted we make even balls of dough and make them as round as possible. At the time, this sounded like a form of lunacy. Did she not know that most of the fun of that particular stage of the recipe is trying to pry the little clump of dough off the spoon with your finger, so that at least a little bit of dough stuck to you so you could lick it off later? It's the licking it off later that is the fun part, hello! I think she was also against eating dough with raw egg in it. I don't want salmonella either, but I think only very, very... willful people can resist cookie dough on the fingers. Anyway, wherever you are now, dear, I am here to show you that yes, I can make nice, round cookies! Sometimes. The second time I made them up here, like I said, things looked very different, which would have been fine if it was purely aesthetic, but since the cookies didn't spread at all, they stayed a touch too thick and doughy in the middle, which is much less pleasing than these: nice, flat, bit of crisp on the edge with a pleasant chew all the way through... The Smitten Kitchen recommends chilling the dough ahead to get a hearty, chewy bake, but I absolutely adore the flat, slightly lacy and yet still chewy feel of these unchilled babies. Personal preference. For next time, I will be a bit more careful with my measuring, and perhaps attempt to recreate the orangey oatmeal cookies that I made for the galley in Antarctica. For those, I will add a bit of orange essence or plump the raisins in orange juice ahead of time, and also add some orange zest to the mix. Ooooo, or someday, it might be nice to make some candied orange peel and add that... Hmm.
Anyway, I can confirm one recipe wing-it risk that I took in making these cookies, which was to add a dollop of vanilla yogurt as a replacement for the vanilla extract that I haven't been able to bring myself to pay Norwegian prices for. I will say that the vanilla extract is probably worth the cost, easily... I think being surprised by the high price of tropical fruit and other exotic ingredients in the arctic is going a bit too far in the name of globalization. However, I already have this addiction to vanilla yogurt, and since I had it in the fridge already, I thought, why not give it a shot? The answer is, it works! Wonderfully. Just a little dollop, and there is a lovely, penetrating vanilla aroma in each bite. Fantastisk! I used the same substitution to equal success in a peach cake I made as well (and there is also proof positive that I don't mind paying up the big bucks for exotic fruit in the arctic when it is just screaming delicious summer at me from the fruit stand).
Ferskin Kake med Iskrem.
Again and again and again, please... I am remembering when Brook Lee won Miss Universe by answering "I would eat everything -- twice." Right on!
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