Cookies

Maria Campos
Sep 5, 2018 · 11 min read

Final Idea + Recipe

Mango Banana Cookies with Mixed-Berry Filling

Description: This cookie consists of a batter based on fresh mango and banana with a touch of mixed-berry filling made of blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries. The recipe is an adaptation of a traditional mango cookie, with the addition of banana for enhanced flavor and texture and a berry filling that puts a tart spin on the sweet cookie. The cookie is intended to be tropical and fruity in taste while also creating an unconventional pairing of mango with banana and berries in a cookie setting.

Ingredients for cookie dough:

  • Mango (1)
  • Granulated white sugar (1 cup)
  • Brown sugar (1/4 cup)
  • Cinnamon (2 dashes)
  • Ripe banana (1)
  • Baking soda (1 tsp)
  • Baking flour (3 cups)
  • Lactose-free milk (1/2 cup)
  • Eggs (2)
  • Butter (1/2 cup)
  • Vanilla extract (1 1/2 tsp)

Ingredients for mixed-berry filling:

  • Raspberries (12)
  • Blueberries (8)
  • Blackberries (20)
  • Granulated white sugar (4 tsp)

Note: Recipe makes approximately 36 cookies

Preparation:

  1. Peel one mango and cut it into small chunks or cubes.
  2. Blend together the mango chunks and the milk until a puree consistency is reached. Add mango/milk blend to a large bowl.
  3. Soften butter stick in the microwave for 30 seconds. Add butter, one banana, vanilla extract, and eggs one at a time to bowl with mango blend. Mix batter in large bowl with a spatula when adding each ingredient.
  4. Add granulated white sugar, cinnamon, brown sugar, baking soda, and baking flour to the large bowl with the rest of the batter. Mix batter when adding each ingredient.
  5. Check consistency of batter. If it’s not thick enough to place in cookie sheet right away, put the batter in the freezer for 30 minutes.
  6. Rinse raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries with water and mix them together in a blender until liquid consistency is reached and seeds are small.
  7. Pour liquid berry mix in a pan. Add granulated white sugar and stir at medium heat for approximately 10 minutes until a thick consistency is reached.
  8. Preheat the oven at 350 degrees F. Cover a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Take the cookie dough out of the freezer, use a spoon to scoop out 12 cookies, and place them at least one inch apart from each other and from the sheet edges.
  9. Bake cookies at 350 degrees F for 25 minutes or until they have turned golden.
  10. Take cookies out of the oven and let them cool for 20 minutes. Use a spoon to carve out a small hole on top of each of the cookies. Pour mixed berry filling inside of each of cookie hole.

Idea Generation

The focus of generating ideas for a new cookie revolved around pairing commonly used flavors into an unusual combination while retaining good taste.

The first steps involved laying out the rules of the assignment and searching online for basic cookie ingredients and their effect on cookie flavor and texture. I would consult this knowledge to determine how to balance ingredients to achieve the desired cookie.

Since I was born and raised in Costa Rica, I decided that it would be an interesting challenge to explore cookie ideas that reminded me of traditional foods or desserts from home. The first theme that came to mind was creating a tropical flavor of cookie, and then I brainstormed for a potential fruit to be the base of the cookie batter flavor. I narrowed down the base flavor to three different fruits based primarily on taste and consistency that would work for cookie dough. Then I listed foods that are commonly paired with each of those fruits as a way for me to avoid the combinations that have already been done and think about how to pair flavors differently.

I then explored other traditional Costa Rican dessert themes that I could adapt to a cookie form in terms of taste and shape.

I narrowed down the final cookie ideas to test based on the potential taste and the feasibility of the recipe. Mango has always been my favorite fruit, and its sweet taste and chunky consistency would make for a good cookie base. I wanted to combine it with another very different fruit, and based on personal experience, mango goes well with acidic flavors, so I opted for a mix of raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries to top off the mango cookies. The mango cookie with berries became my Idea #1 to test. The cajeta de coco (or coconut fudge) idea seemed more feasible than the granizado idea as it required no real baking. There was also more room to experiment with a fudge cookie than a sugar cookie with syrup, so the fudge cookie became my Idea #2 to test.

Idea 1 Test

Mango Cookie with Caramelized Berry Filling

Description: This idea consisted of a mango-based cookie dough that replaced eggs with bananas and had a hole on top filled with a caramelized berry mix.

Preparation process:

  1. I peeled two mangoes and cut them into chunks. The chunks were then blended with 1/2 cup of lactose-free milk.

2. I softened 1/2 cup of butter (1 stick) in the microwave for 20 seconds. The butter was added along with 1 cup of the mango/milk blend into a large bowl.

3. One cup of granulated white sugar, 1/4 cup of brown sugar, 2 very ripe bananas, 1 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract, 1 tsp of baking soda, 2 dashes of cinnamon, and 3 cups of baking flour were all added to a big bowl and blended together with a spatula.

4. After the first tasting of the cookie dough, it was observed that: 1) The banana taste was overpowering the mango taste. 2) The batter was too runny for cookie dough. It looked like cake batter instead.

5. To help the cookie dough taste and consistency, an additional 10 oz of mango/milk blend, 4 1/2 cups of flour, 1 1/2 cups of granulated white sugar, 3/4 cups of brown sugar, 1 egg, and 1 1/2 tsp of baking soda were added.

6. The taste was improved, but the dough still had a very runny, cake-like consistency. I wrapped the bowl in Saran wrap and placed it in the freezer for 90 minutes.

7. I placed 6 cookie scoops on a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper and baked them for 25 minutes at 350 degrees F. Then let them cool for 10 minutes.

8. I rinsed 12 raspberries, 20 blueberries, and 8 blackberries and used a fork to mash them together in a bowl.

9. The mashed berries were put in a strainer over a pan, draining all of the liquids onto the pan. Three tsp of granulated sugar were added to the berry juice, and the mix was stirred at medium heat until a thick consistency was reached.

10. A spoon was used to cut a small hole on the top of the cookies, where the reduced berry mix was poured.

Main takeaways:

  • Bananas have a very overpowering taste. If a mango taste is desired, use more mango and less banana. Also the more ripe the mango is, the better it is for taste and ease of blending.
  • Eggs help bind batter much better than bananas do.
  • The banana gave the cookies a consistency very similar to that of banana bread — very chewy and thick, which wasn’t too bad.
  • Freezing the dough helped a lot with the runny batter issue. Use less liquid ingredients next time to make the dough thicker from the start and not have to add so many more ingredients.
  • The reduced berry mash gave the cookies a very nice flavor touch. Getting the berries to caramelize or thicken enough takes a very long time. Also the amount of berries used was only enough for about 3–4 cookies.

Idea 2 Test

Chocolate Almond Fudge Cookie Balls with Strawberries

Description: This idea is inspired by a traditional Costa Rican dessert that is a no-bake coconut fudge ball. This adaptation adds chocolate to the mix, uses almonds instead of shredded coconut, and includes graham cracker crumbs for a thickened, more cookie-like consistency. The fudge cookie is then wrapped around a fresh strawberry.

Preparation process:

  1. I put 4 graham crackers in a Ziploc sandwich bag and crushed the cookies by hand until only crumbs remained in the bag.

2. Two cups of condensed milk, 1 cup (2 sticks) of butter, 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract, 1 cup of unsweetened chocolate chips, and 1/2 cup of graham cracker crumbs were all added to a pan.

3. The pan was stirred constantly at medium heat until boiling occurred. The heat was reduced to medium-low, and the mix was cooked for an additional 5 minutes.

4. Strawberries were rinsed and cut in half, making sure to remove the stem.

5. The fudge cookie mix cooled at room temperature for about 1 hour until it was thick enough to be made into balls.

6. The fudge was made into a small ball and wrapped around a strawberry, putting shaved almonds on the outside of the ball.

Main takeaways:

  • There was a big pool of butter on the fudge that was not absorbed by the mix. The butter had to be drained, but ideally the butter should blend in.
  • It takes a very long time for the fudge cookies to cool down enough to be put into ball form and stay that way.
  • The strawberry does not stick well to the fudge cookie, making it almost impossible to wrap them in fudge.

Iteration

Based on the final cookie taste and the execution of the cookie, the mango cookie (Idea #1) proved most successful and with appropriate room for improvement. Prior to attempting to make the recipe again, I took time to evaluate the main takeaways I had from the taste of the cookie and the preparation process, and I created a list of changes to be made to the recipe:

  • Use one mango instead of two in order to reduce the amount of liquid used in the dough and thus solve the problem of the batter being too runny for cookie dough.
  • Use one banana instead of two to prevent the banana taste from overpowering the cookie. The banana would be used primarily to enhance taste in case the mango did not show up well enough after baking.
  • Use two eggs instead of one. The egg in the Idea 1 Test was added after realizing that the batter was not binding well through the sole use of bananas. Now the eggs would be used to bind the batter properly and improve the consistency of the dough.
  • Use the original intended amount of dry ingredients to make less dough than before. The previous attempt involved 7 1/2 cups of flour and an overall increase of dry ingredients at a 1.5 ratio to the batter, which turned out to be an excessive amount of additional ingredients for only a small increase in dough thickness. There was a lot of leftover dough.
  • Add ingredients to the bowl progressively to thoroughly mix the batter and avoid the burden of mixing a lot of ingredients together at once by hand.
  • Blend the berries together rather than mashing and straining them to make the mixed berry reduction filling. This would largely decrease the time it takes to strain the berries and also result in a higher volume of berry filling for the same number of berries used. The skin of the berries would also make the filling thicker, which would decrease the time required to cook the berries to the desired thickness.

Implementing changes:

  • One mango was used, which made it easier to blend together with the milk, and it added less liquid overall to the batter.
  • The ingredients this time were added one at a time and mixed according to whether they were dry or wet, which made the hand-mixing process more effective.
  • Using one banana and two eggs vastly improved the consistency of the cookie dough. The dough was still runny enough that it needed to be frozen, but freezing took 30 minutes instead of 90. No need to add more dry ingredients.
  • The mango taste was also very evident in the batter, unlike last time, where the banana taste had largely taken over.
  • Blending the berries proved very quick and easy. There was no time spent thoroughly mashing them and waiting for the liquid to be drained with the strainer.

Interpretation of results:

The second attempt at the mango-banana cookie recipe proved successful. The cookies tasted significantly more like mango, and the single banana was more muted in taste but still created a nice, chewy texture for the cookies. The consistency of the dough was thicker and more like typical cookie dough than previously. The blended mixed-berry reduction filling ultimately had the same taste as before, which was the preferred outcome, but the process of making it was more straightforward and efficient in terms of time spent preparing it and amount of ingredients used. Overall, the changes made from the previous attempt at this cookie idea resulted in a tastier cookie and a more time-productive, less wasteful baking process.

Timeline:

  • Tuesday, 9/4: Brainstorm cookie flavor ideas. Work on outline and timeline.
  • Wednesday, 9/5: Complete outline and timeline, due at 10 pm. Research fundamental cookie ingredients. Look online to see if brainstormed cookie flavor ideas have already been done.
  • Thursday, 9/6: Establish two final cookie ideas. Determine ingredients needed and cooking process.
  • Friday, 9/7: Buy ingredients at Target. Run cookie ideas through roommates to get their opinions and input.
  • Saturday, 9/8: Prepare first cookie test run. Record steps and ingredients used for a small batch. Eat finished cookies and record own observations of the product. Have roommates and friends try the cookies and get their feedback on improvements needed. Repeat the same process for the second cookie test run.
  • Sunday, 9/9: Examine notes and criticism of both recipes and make necessary changes to establish a final cookie recipe. Get more ingredients if needed and bake a test batch of the final cookie. Take notes. If the recipe is successful, bake a final 12-cookie batch; otherwise, make modifications to the recipe until it works.
  • Monday, 9/10: Gather pictures and notes of the idea generation and implementation processes. Begin writing blog post.
  • Tuesday, 9/11: Work on blog post.
  • Wednesday, 9/12: Revise final blog post and submit before 10 pm. Have cookies ready to go for the next day.
  • Thursday, 9/13: Bring a dozen cookies to class. Cut 6 into small pieces, and keep 6 whole for photos and bake sale. Work on peer review.
  • Friday, 9/14: Peer review due.

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