Cookies
Crispy and chewy
Rocky where the oatmeel meets
The soft warm chocolate
[Note on the joy-ku: I’m maintaining chocolate is only 2 syllables, so if you wonsider me wrong, I ask you to please humor me here…]
I’m baking cookies. Lots of them. Not because I really want to eat them – that is, I always do, but I decided to sharply cut my sugar intake on my last birthday. Yet here I am, standing in the kitchen every other day, testing out a new cookie recipe or tweaking it. Next to me is a large glass jar, the kind you use to pickle vegetables and store reserves. In the US, you’d picture a Ball Mason Jar, in my area, you’d think of a Weckpot.
It’s not there because I decided to join the Pinterest-craze about seven years too late. I have a plan, you see. I’m making DIY-cookies-in-a-jar for my family. Seems easy enough: just nicely layer all the dry ingredients in a glass jar, have the kids decorate it festively and then addd a very simple recipe label to it (add butter and an egg, make dough, make balls, put in oven, enjoy). I figured, if we can’t celebrate the holidays together with our extended family, maybe we can bake some cookies together over Zoom and think of one another when eating one later.
Thing is, I have ordered large glass jars. Beautiful large 1 Liter glass jars, that I only discovered were too large when I opened the box they came in and started trying recipes.
With yet another semi-lockdown in effect, going to a store and checking them with my own real hands and eyes for size had been a no-go. So I sourced them online, making a big deal out of ordering from a local store and discovering that there are way too many types and sizes of glass jars…
Now, they do look the part. That’s one requirement checked off! Next up: fill them with beautiful layers of perfectly measured dry ingredients.
Aha. Hmmm. See, I had researched some really cool recipes before. Yet so far, none of those fit my jars. The jar would either overflow with oatmeal, or sit half-empty, eying me with disappointment and making me feel inadequate in giving it what it needs (parenting metaphor needed, anyone?).
The American recipes I had found and gotten all excited over, naturally all had these funky measurements that made it hard for me to judge the volume. Plus, they were made for different size jars, and I wasn’t going to buy yet another set of glass jars (cheap, they are not). As for the European ones, well - turns out those were also conceived for different jars, or didn’t fill the jar nicely enough.
My little helper is transferring the oven-fresh cookies from the baking tray to the cooling racks. Yes, that’s right: there’s two racks waiting, because we doubled the recipe for testing. And in writing this, I stumbled upon this site with cookie-cooling-info.
Fortunately, I can count. And I enjoy experimenting. So I started multiplying the recipes, to great pleasure of my kids who loved the voluminous amount of cookies rolling out of our oven. But the jars couldn’t take all the ingredients. And while it would be easy to multiply by 1.5 – this doesn’t work so hot for eggs. Try adding half an egg successfully…
So for the past few weeks, I have been baking, testing every batch right out of the oven to see where I needed to change the timer, the temperature, adding more butter o what-have-you, and surprising my kids with the copious amounts of cookies to dig into. All in all, I have been portraying a very exemplary 1950s housewife, thank you very much.
Yet today, I think I cracked it. I think I arrived at a recipe that fits all the requirements:
- Looks good in the jar (fits, and has lovely colors and enough layers)
- Is easy to throw together for the people receiving the gift
- Is delicious, has the right balance between crispy and chewy
- Makes me feel good about having tried for so long
So now all I have to do, is make the packages.
