Cooking Chronicles of a Librarian Assistant

In my last post I did a spin off on something I am used to cooking. This week, however, I am bringing you my first time experience of… Baking cookies!

When you see the photographs of all these baking books it looks so easy! There certainly is a science to making cookies, I don’t know what it is but I am willing to keep practicing to find out.

This time I used Marta Stewart’s Cookies.  My brother has joined us at the library to help with the cataloging process of our 5,000 books and pick this one for us to try out.

Here is a list of the recipes that I tried with the help of my brother, who at 15 years old is a better cook than I am:

Coconut Macaroons

I followed this recipe very closely to what was given and it went great! It was the favorite one at home of all three recipes. I was skeptical at first because I thought the coconut would not be able to stand the heat and could burn before my eyes, but I was wrong and that was proven on the softness and great taste of the Macaroons. I recommend you to try this one, with a glass of milk!

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

I am very fond of oatmeal cookies, though I don’t really enjoy oatmeal.  I love to eat them at people’s homes, at bakeries, at summer camps; it seems pretty easy to prepare, so I wanted to prove myself and do it. I didn’t use unsalted butter. I used regular butter. Thinking that the cookies were not going to grow in the oven I set a generous quantity of dough on the pan to later find out that my cookies would grow a bit too much. The flavor was good, but the texture was way off.

What I wonder: Can texture been thrown off by the kind of butter that you use?

Chocolate Almond Marsala Cookies

I apologize in advance for not using Marsala in this recipe. I was looking for something specific that had two of my favorite things in the world, almonds and chocolate. Once again I used regular butter instead of unsalted butter. The flavor was… okay. The texture was terrible once again and I am blaming THE BUTTER.

One important thing I learned (that all students at ICC learn) was mise en place which is the French term for having all of your ingredients ready. I read this somewhere in the books of our library (waaay after I baked these cookies) which explained the outcome of my recipes mentioned above.

I used to think that you can learn almost everything from books, but I was wrong cooking is NOT one of those things. Stay in Culinary School kids! Is worth it, and you can save money by not wasting ingredients.