Direction Connection

Rebecca really wanted to make a particular kind of Christmas cookie (Candy Cane Cookies) that her mom used to make. Her mom cautioned us that this could be difficult, noting that she’d had to go through her own trial-and-error learning processes over the years. She included a few pointers in her email containing the recipe, and closed with this: “It may take a couple tries to get the hang of it.”

Duly warned, Rebecca put me in charge. This arrangement turned out to be a really good thing, and not just because I own the KitchenAid Mixer. I didn’t fully recognize the superiority of my baking skills at first, but this gradually became clearer. Her mom had warned of the dangers of trying to work with dough that is too sticky or too dry, so I reserved some of the flour, thinking I could add it if needed to achieve the desired consistency.

A-ha! We ended up needing about 1/4 cup less flour than the recipe indicated. Disaster averted.

The recipe for the Candy Cane Cookies requires that the finished dough be split in half. We were to keep half the dough white, and add red food coloring to the other half (you see where this is going…?). So I split the dough in half, and put one half in a ceramic bowl, returning the other half to the KitchenAid Mixer bowl. I figured that would be the dough to which we would add the red food coloring, mix a bit more with the mixer, then begin shaping the cookies. But Rebecca had other ideas. I spied her hovering over the ceramic bowl with the teaspoon of red food coloring, and tried to divert her to empty its contents into the KitchenAid Mixer bowl instead. But, alas, she could not be convinced that this was the better course, and even looked at me solemnly and said, “No more mixing. I promise.” Almost immediately, she realized the wisdom of my add-food-coloring-to-the-KitchenAid method. Disaster wasn’t necessarily averted, but we recovered quickly and were on our way.

Next, we shaped the cookies. We learned a thing or two along the way, and pretty soon had two cookie sheets with uncooked Candy Cane Cookies on them. We had to admit, they looked pretty good.

It was time to put them into our preheated oven. For 9 minutes. Only, for the first batch, we ended up leaving them in for around a half hour.

I know what you’re thinking, and no, they weren’t burnt! Not at all, actually. They were baked nearly perfectly. But they were HUGE! We didn’t realize how much the cookies would expand in size in the oven. So they took a really, really, really long time to bake. The end result was entirely edible, but also really really big, cookies.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 25th, 2006 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.