cookies

Gabrielle Morris
Sep 5, 2018 · 12 min read

Final Idea+Recipe

Mixed Tea Sandwich Cookies

My final idea was to create Mixed Tea Sandwich Cookies, a combination of lavender chamomile tea-flavored cookies and green tea-flavored ones. This idea stemmed from my original desire to taste a lavender-flavored cookie, but I knew I had to expand on that idea. My sister suggested I used her lavender chamomile tea bags instead of searching a spice store for food-safe dried lavender, and when that test was a success I decided to repeat the process with my favorite green tea bags. I then combined the two using a frosting sweetened with honey, my favorite sweetener in my own tea, to give myself a complete cup of tea in cookie format. In this way I took the used idea of lavender cookies but added my own spin to it, making them more complex and unique, while still producing a cookie that people would want to eat, increasing novelty while maintaining value and feasibility.

All of the ingredients for the final cookies

My recipe was as follows:

  1. Mix 1/2 cup flour with 2 T white sugar and 2 T brown sugar.
  2. Mix in 1/4 cup of softened butter.
  3. Mix in 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract and 2 T milk.
  4. Cut open a bag of lavender chamomile tea and mix that into your dough.
  5. Form the dough into small spheres on your oiled, aluminum-foiled baking sheet, space them evenly, and bake at 350F for 13 minutes.
  6. Let the cookies sit on the baking sheet for 5 minutes after removing them from the oven, then transfer them to a plate to cool.
  7. Repeat the previous steps, but replace lavender chamomile tea with green tea.
  8. To make frosting, start by letting 1/4 cup of butter soften overnight.
  9. Mix that butter into 2 cups of powdered sugar.
  10. Add 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract and mix again. You should see no change in texture yet.
  11. Add 1 T of milk and mix.
  12. Mix in 2 tsp honey, blending until you reach an even consistency.
  13. Frost the bottom of a green tea cookie, and place a lavender chamomile cookie on top.

FINISHED

The best place to cut the tea bag is at the bottom
Step 1: flour and sugar
Steps 2, butter, and 3, vanilla
Adding milk, then tea, then baking
Making the frosting left:add softened butter to powdered sugar, center: what it looks like when you’ve mixed the butter, sugar, and vanilla, right: final mixed frosting

Idea Generation

Pages upon pages of cookie ideas
Ideas that came up after testing began, and modifications to the final frosting idea

On the first day or two after class, I came up with ideas in 3 different categories as shown in the first three pages of my notebook: 1) no-bake cookies, 2) new flavor combinations, and 3) new 3D cookie shapes. For each category I started with one initial idea and let my thoughts flow as freely as possible from one variation to another, occasionally hearing myself interject with questions of feasibility or originality. In the case of my first flavor idea, lemon and chocolate chip, I found out after Googling a bit that the idea had indeed been taken, several times in fact. Meanwhile, my train of thought about tetrahedral cookie pyramids was dashed by the possibility that they would not fit in the provided sandwich bags. In some cases, this voice in the back of my head kept pushing me to try for something more outside the box but also more doable, and I appreciate that. However, next time I would like to push past initial feasibility doubts to see what I could really make from ideas like tetrahedral cookies.

A new round of ideas started after class on September 6th, when a TA announced that the cookies do not have to be ‘baked’. While I heard classmates talking themselves out of deep-fried cookies due to the logistics of heating up that much oil in a dorm, I decided to try pan-fried cookies instead, perhaps connected to another idea in the back of my mind that involved adding vegetables to a cookie. Some ideas, such as freezing cookies into molds to make 3D shapes, continued to hit me after I started my Idea 1 and 2 tests, but for the sake of time and feasibility, I was unable to test any of those theories at this time. After a few days of allowing my thoughts to roll around as they pleased, I had two ideas in my head that were less foggy than the others: pan-fried cookies and a mix of categories 2 and 3, mixed tea sandwich cookies (potentially with cute cat faces drawn on top).

After choosing my favorite two preliminary ideas, I did some research online about cookies to get my baseline ratio and a few extra tips. From lifehacker.com’s article “How to Free Yourself from Recipes with a Few Golden Cooking Ratios” I got my baseline cookie ratio of 3 flour: 2 fats (butter) : 1 sugar. Then from dish.allrecipes.com’s article “Perfect Cookies” I looked for any extra tips that would help me with tweaking my recipe. The tips I ended up using were as follows:

  1. cookies generally bake at 350F for 8–12 minutes
  2. cookies require all purpose or pastry flour, not cake or bread flour (cake or bread flour are formulated differently and would make the cookies spread less)
  3. brown sugar leads to chewier cookies than white sugar (many people use a mix)
  4. all ingredients should be room temperature when mixed together (without this tip I would have forgotten to soften the butter)
  5. cooling time matters: crispier cookies should sit on the baking sheet 1–2 minutes before moving to a cooling rack, while chewier cookies should sit 3–5 minutes

Some ideas hit me even after I began testing the fried cookies and tea cookies, such as adding the dough to a mold and freezing it into shape. I could cover the outside of a hollow mold to make a hollow cookie, or fill in the mold to make a solid cookie this way. Even after I made my final batch of cookies and put them together, I thought of putting food coloring in to differentiate which type of cookie was which (purple for lavender chamomile or green for green tea). From there I realized if I made enough separate batches I could make a stack of rainbow cookies. A variation of that idea was to make the sandwiches follow the colors of a flag.

Idea 1 Test

Setting up my testing ingredients

The first idea I tested was a non-conventional cooking method that I thought of in class on Thursday, September 6th: fried cookies. For this test batch, I wanted to keep the flavor simple, so that I could focus on evaluating the cooking method itself. I chose to make chocolate cookies, since I love chocolate, and added coconut flakes just for fun. The flavor was not the point of innovation for these cookies, so I chose a taste I knew I would like in a conventional cookie to help me better determine whether the frying messed with my final enjoyment of the cookie. My recipe was as follows:

  1. Mix 1/2 cup flour, 2 T white sugar, and 2 T brown sugar.
  2. Add 1/4 cup softened butter.
  3. Mix in 1/2 tsp of vanilla, 3 tsp cocoa powder, and 1 tsp coconut flakes.

I then had to add 2 T of milk so that the batter would stick to itself, making it workable. I melted a small amount of butter on a frying pan at medium-high heat, then placed a single small slab of cookie dough onto the pan. I tried to flatten it with a spatula, but the dough stuck to the utensil. From then on, I used my hands to flatten the dough on the pan. I allowed the cookie to sit until the bottom was solid, flipped it with a spatula….. and saw that I had burnt the cookie. I let the other side cook, saw that had burned as well, and set about trying to fix my technique to improve the second cookie.

I lowered the heat to medium-low, did not add any more butter, and flipped the cookie as soon as I could do so without breaking it, using the curved side of the pan to my advantage, as well as my fingers. This time, I had avoided burning the cookie, and when the other side had finished cooking, I had successfully cooked a pan-fried, edible cookie. In fact, it was more than simply edible, and I ate the whole thing. The outside was a thin shell, while the inside was still soft. The first cookie, however, due to the copious amount of burnt butter, tasted like a grilled cheese sandwich.

While the final technique proved successful, I was not fully satisfied for two reasons: frying the cookies on low took longer than simply baking them, and the plain uncooked dough tasted better than the finished result.

Top left: batter Top right:frying the first cookie Bottom left: frying the second cookie on lower heat, with less butter Bottom right: The second and first cookies, compared

Idea 2 Test

My second idea came from the long list of flavors I had thought of putting into cookies, starting with lemon and ending up here: lavender chamomile tea. Initially, after cycling through various fruit ideas, I wondered what lavender might taste like in a cookie. As it turns out, many recipes for lavender cookies do exist on the Internet, so I knew this could not be my final idea. However, if I wanted to mix this flavor with any other, I first needed to make sure lavender cookies could work. My biggest problem was finding food-safe lavender, until my sister offered me her lavender chamomile tea. Once I had that, I could tweak the base recipe from Idea 1 and test out my new flavor.

The recipe I used for this idea is as follows:

  1. Mix 1/4 cup flour, 1 T white sugar, and 1 T brown sugar.
  2. Add 2T softened butter.
  3. Add 1/4 tsp vanilla extract and 1 T milk, mix until it forms a consistent dough.
  4. Add 1/2 tsp of lavender chamomile tea, obtained by cutting the tea bag and pouring the contents into the measuring spoon.

I baked these cookies on an oiled sheet of aluminum foil in my toaster oven at 350. I chose the toaster oven because the batch appeared rather small, and I would not have to wait for my oven to preheat. I was also still cooking the cookies from Idea 1 on the stovetop, and was worried turning on the oven could somehow upset my temperature for that. I left the tea cookies in the toaster oven for 13 minutes, until the bottom edges had turned a golden brown. After removing them from the oven, I let them sit 1–2 minutes on the pan before moving them onto a plate to cool.

While the cookies did not spread out as much as I thought they would, everything else about them was satisfactory, from taste to texture. I asked my roommates to taste-test Ideas 1 and 2 and give me their recommendations, and the tea cookies won unanimously. One roommate did suggest, however, that adding egg would make the flavor richer, but that was an idea for the iteration phase.

Left: Mixed batter, Right: Cookies ready to bake
Finished cookies

Iteration

Based on my roommate’s suggestion, I recreated my lavender chamomile cookies, using the same recipe as before but doubled. I then added one egg, mixed the batter together, and set off the bake them. I noticed right away that this batter was far more liquid than before, but hoped for the best. All that hoping got me was…….

Adding egg made the cookies very flat and spread out

……this. Despite using twice as much of all the dry ingredients as in my first test run, the egg was too much for this amount of batter, causing the cookies to spread out very thin and giving them a flexible, spongy texture. They did maintain the lavender taste of the previous batch, although the taste now seemed weaker rather than richer. My roommate liked them anyway and ate them all.

My next test batch was for more tea cookies, but this time I used green tea instead of lavender chamomile, in anticipation of my final plan. I returned to the original eggless recipe, using a batch twice the size of the original Idea 2 test run. In this case, I ended up using the whole teabag to reach my 1 tsp measurement. I used the same process as before, but baked them in my oven instead of the smaller toaster oven. I was mildly surprised by the way these cookies spread out more than the first ones, and I ended up concluding that because these were made roughly an hour after the first tea cookie batch, the butter had softened more and thus caused the cookies to spread out more.

Green tea cookies and even softer butter

My next task was to make some frosting, so that I could stick the two different kinds of cookies together. I started with my mom’s recipe: 4 cups of powdered sugar, 1/2 cup softened butter (by now I was running out of sticks of butter), 1/2 tsp vanilla, and ‘milk to desired consistency’. I prepared a cup of milk, and decided to add it in slowly. I should have added it even more slowly than I did, as after adding 1/3 of a cup of milk to my mixture, I came up with this:

My frosting was far too liquidy, it would make a mess if I brought this to class

The consistency of the frosting was simply too liquid to work with. It ran off the whisk like water, and I knew that if I used this in my cookies, they would create an absolute mess. So I prepared another batch of frosting, but this time I added the milk only a tablespoon at a time, whisking thoroughly in between. I set out another stick of butter and waited until the next day.

This time, I used the frosting recipe outlined in the Final recipe, though I added 1 tsp honey after the vanilla, then the milk, then 1 more teaspoon of honey in an attempt to enhance the honey flavor and remove some lingering clumps of powdered sugar. While I did not reach the strong honey flavor that I had originally imagined, I found that the honey helped to neutralize the vanilla slightly, giving the frosting a less overwhelming taste that would help the tea flavors persist.

At this point I grabbed one green tea cookie and frosted it. Then I frosted a lavender chamomile cookie and sandwiched the two together. While the taste was satisfactory, occasionally switching between the frosting and the teas, I resolved to use slightly less frosting in the final cookies to help avoid having it ooze out of the sides. Thus, in the final cookie I only frosted one tea cookie and stuck the other one on top.

My last test cookie! I meant to take a better picture but… I got excited and ate the cookie before I could

Timeline:

  • Tuesday, September 4th: Collect course materials and begin blog post
  • Wednesday, September 5th: Begin ideation
  • Friday, September 7th: Choose 2 ideas and begin researching/collecting baking ingredients
  • Saturday-Sunday, September 8th-9th: Begin baking small batches, pick one idea and tweak until satisfied
  • Monday, September 10th: Begin editing final blog post
  • Tuesday, September 11th: Finish final blog post
  • Wednesday, September 12th: Bake final batch of cookies for class
  • Friday, September 14th: Write assigned peer reviews

    Gabrielle Morris

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