Cookie Madness 2014

About 2/3 of the way through Cookie Madness 2014
Yes, that's 20 dozen cookies on my Mom's kitchen table.

I spent the whole weekend and the first half of today up to my elbows in Christmas craziness. Including spending an hour in line and $130 at the UPS store. So, I'm not in the mood to do any science today. Which is a shame because I had a great article from the British Medical Journal all picked out. I'll save it for Wednesday.

Instead, what I'm going to do today is share some information from the front lines of bulk cookie baking. On Friday I told you a little bit about the history and science of chocolate chip cookie recipes and suggested that they make a great inexpensive Christmas gift. Today I want to share a little bit more information, this time more practice than theory. And brag about my 36 dozen cookies.


This past weekend my Mom, Mr. Dr. Kris, and I made five batches of chocolate chip cookies. Those five batches yielded about 30 dozen cookies (I tend to get six dozen cookies per batch, rather than the promised 7), which were packed into 13 cookie tins and then shipped across the country. That's where the $130 UPS tab came from. I got home tired but glad to be 75% done with my Christmas shopping when I realized that I had not made cookies for my friends here in Aiken. Oops! And so one last batch of cookie had to be undertaken. I still had almost everything I needed left over from what I purchased for cookie making Saturday and Sunday. I just needed 3/4 c. brown sugar and some chocolate chips. I found some brown sugar in my pantry. And for chips I found a mostly-full bag of mini Christmas M&Ms. I decided since it was just me and my (mostly) clean kitchen this time I would take pictures of my cookies to augment the written directions I gave on Friday.

Raw dough ready to bake.

"Line a cookie sheet with parchment. Use a small disher (about 1" diameter) or two teaspoons to drop dough onto sheet. Yes, these are small cookies. Space cookies at least 1.5" apart."

Remove them like this. Fresh out of the oven they are pale and puffy.
Up close you can see the edges are more golden than the tops.

"Bake for 12/8 minutes or until the edges are just slightly darker than the center."

A few minutes after coming out of the oven they are
darker, thinner, and crinkled on top. This is good.

"Once out of the oven, allow the cookies to firm up for 5 minutes before trying to take them off the tray."

Six dozen oatmeal chocolate chip cookies ready to go in their tins

"Move them to a towel spread out on a table to finish cooling."

All images by Me (CC BY-NC-ND)