Cookie Dough (Or, How I beat the Danes at their own game.)

C is for Cookieeeee!!!! Nom nom nom!!!

If that doesn’t bring back flashbacks for my dear readers, you’re either too young to remember, or you grew up living under a rock. As I remember, it didn’t matter what kind of cookies they were, Cookie Monster liked them all. Chocolate chip, sugar, macaroons, shortbread, he ate them all, or at least tried to. I seem to recall he’d manage to get about half of them in his mouth, and the rest would end up as crumbs in his shaggy blue fur. I’m similar in his eating habits, except I don’t have blue fur, and I found a way to eat the whole cookie without getting crumbs everywhere. Most of the time, anyways.

But there’s a problem brewing in this country, and it consists of pre-made cookie dough. Just scoop it out, bake, and enjoy. Even worse, now you don’t even have to scoop, the cookies come on a septic sheet of posterboard, you just slide them onto a sheet pan. They may taste ok, but go take a gander at the ingredient list on the back. Yeah, there’s stuff on there that I cannnot pronounce, and I am a chemistry nerd.  Plus, you don’t have to have a chemistry kit from your childhood to make great cookies. However, the people who manufacture these “cookies” do in order to keep you from getting sick and ensuring that they bake up ok.

“Oh, but I don’t have time in the evening to make a batch of cookies, and there’s too many ingredients.” Hogwash. When I made the very basic cookie dough ratio, it took 30 minutes, start to finish, INCLUDING BAKING. Get your butt off of facebook, and get in the kitchen. It doesn’t take that long. Honest.  Also, cookies don’t take that many ingredients. In fact, you can strip every cookie recipe down to three ingredients and still have a cookie (and a damn tasty one, I might add). Yep, three ingredients, but that’s it, you can’t go any further. As Michael says in Ratio (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Take the sugar away, and you have a roux. Take the flour away, and you have an icing. The ratio is a diamond.”

I couldn’t say it any better. So three ingredients, that’s it. If you’re like me, you probably have salted butter. If you’re using unsalted butter, you should probably add some salt, otherwise, the cookies will taste very flat.

So here they are, salted butter, flour, and sugar. That’s it. Not even vanilla. Honestly, you don’t need it as long as you have good butter. The butter is the key in this one. And here’s where the scale is handy. There is no dirty measuring spoons, no dirty mixing bowls. In fact, I did this whole recipe with a spoon (to scoop the sugar and flour), a spatula, the workbowl and paddle attachment on my mixer, and a sheet pan with some parchment. So much for making a bunch of dirty dishes. Another excuse goes away.

First step, I weighed out the four ounces of sugar, and added the butter, which in this case was a stick (8 ounces).

Strap it to the mixer, and commence creaming, and stopping occasionally to scrape down the bowl.

This step is really important, and one of those I find that people have the most trouble with. How do you know you’ve creamed the butter enough? Well, it’s not that simple, but I find that sound is just as good to go by as sight. When you don’t hear the sugar scraping against the bowl, you’re getting close. The butter should lighten in color and look something like this.

It looks fluffy. No lumps, smooth. Give it a taste. If you have the will power to keep going making cookies and not run off into the living room and plop yourself in front of the tv and eat this stuff straight off the spatula, your willpower is strong. I’ve been known to do just this very thing in the past. Just saying. I won’t fault you if you do too.

Ok, now that everything is creamed well, time to add the flour. Back to the scale, weigh out the six ounces of flour, and mix again.

Hmmm. Fail?

It would appear so. This didn’t come together into a cohesive dough. (I’ve sent Michael an email about this, to see if I managed to screw this up.) I could pick it up and form it into a dough, but it never came together on its own. Oh well, no biggie. The instructions say to either roll it into a log, put it in the fridge, and cut later, or roll into balls and flatten them. I voted for the latter, because I wanted cookies now, dammit. The dough actually rolled fairly easily. I then flattened them out with the back of a glass, and into the 350 degree oven they went.

Halfway through baking, I gave the sheet pan half a spin, and kept an eye on them as they finished baking. Those seven minutes were torture, I tell you.

Aha!! Cookies!!!

Put them on a rack to cool, and 10 minutes later, it was time to taste.

Remember those Danish butter cookies that would get really popular around Christmas time? Yeah, I’m trying to forget them too, because these cookies are exponentially better than those. Take that, you Danes! I’ve got you beat by a mile with this. They are buttery, without being too sweet. Just like how a perfect shortbread should be. I’d eat them all if I didn’t have any willpower.

So what’s the verdict? Win. Big win. Honestly, anything you added to this would just be superfluous, though some vanilla, some ground pecans, and a dusting of turbinado sugar certainly would be great additions. But if you’re out of chocolate chips, your pecans are stale, and your baking powder is expired, fear not. Cookies are still at hand, you just need some flour, sugar, and butter. Remember, don’t forget the salt.

The variations to this basic ratio are endless, which is good, because it will give me ample opportunities to write more about cookies. Change sugars, add eggs and/or leavening, and different combinations of flavorings and spices. That’s never a bad thing.

Ingredients

King Arthur all-purpose flour
Central Market unsalted butter
Imperial pure cane sugar

Next up, that quintessential French standby, pate-a-choux. Who thought shoe paste could be so appetizing.