Cookies

Allison Schmitz
Sep 5, 2018 · 9 min read

There’s a couple things you should know about me before I dive into this cookie making process: I’m probably the most impatient person you’ll ever meet, and I never make my own recipes. In fact, I normally stick to the same three meals that I rotate through during the school year which means my creativity is definitely lacking in the kitchen. These skills that I lack means that it was hard to find that perfect ratio and hard to wait for the cookies to finish baking. Despite all that, I made a pretty decent final cookie that was inspired by one of the activities I enjoy doing the most: riding my bike.

Final Idea

My final idea was the Edible Bike Chain (a chocolate/peanut butter cookie with pretzels and caramel) accompanied by some nice caramel “chain lube” (all powered by plants). This cookie is innovative in it’s preparation and presentation. It took some creativity to make the cookie cutters and cutting holes in both ends of each cookie. The Edible Bike Chain is also functional; each link can pivot and rotate around its pretzel connector.

The final product. Creating this presentation took a while.

Recipe

The actual recipe isn’t the most innovative, but I did study up on the components of a cookie and the correct ratios. I think this produced a pretty decent chocolate, peanut butter vegan cookie.

Cookie Ingredients:

  • 1 cup all purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup vegan butter
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar (suitable for vegans)
  • 2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1 tbsp unsweetened almond milk
  • Roughly 2–3 spoonfuls of peanut butter (personal preference)

Directions:

  • Mix together the dry ingredients (flour, sugars, cocoa powder, baking soda, salt).
  • Melt the butter and add to the dry ingredients. Stir in the almond milk.
  • Melt the peanut butter.
  • Once the dough has formed and everything is well incorporated, add the peanut butter.
  • Roll out the dough on parchment paper and use the chain link cookie cutter to make the links. Stack 2 chain links on top of each other to get the right consistency.
  • Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 9 minutes.
  • Once out of the oven, use the cookie cutter again because the cookies will lose shape in the oven.
  • Let the cookies cool down, then use a knife to poke a slight hole in the ends of each cookie. Then very gently use the pretzel-stick-sized cookie cutter to finish making the hole.
  • Flip the cookie over and repeat the step above to make sure that the hole went all the way through.
  • Stack one end of one cookie on top of another cookie and use a pretzel stick to hold the cookies into place.
  • Grease the chain. Drizzle the caramel sauce on the attached bike chain cookie.

Caramel Sauce Ingredients:

  • 1 cup full fat coconut milk
  • 3/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 tsp salt

Directions:

  • Pour all the ingredients into a pot and bring to a boil.
  • Once boiling, simmer at medium-low heat for 10 minutes and stir often.
  • Let the sauce thicken and cool down before placing in a jar and putting that in the fridge.

This sauce can stay good for weeks in the fridge.

Idea Generation

Whenever I have an open-ended project, I always start by relating it to my interests. Whether that’s climbing, hiking or biking. Or anything outdoorsy. But then I also thought about what I like in a cookie — chocolate, peanut butter, must be vegan- and that also generated more ideas like no bake cookies and frozen cookies.

The ideas that were most interesting to me were the bike chain cookies and the camping cookies, so I spent more time elaborating on those ideas.

Idea Test 1

“The Glamping Cookie” (because unlike how I planned, this would be one boujee camping trip). But, if you’re car camping this cookie could be for you! Using ingredients that you’d typically bring on a camping trip, along with camping cookware and some tinfoil you can bake this cookie over an open fire.

I started with what ingredients I normally bring on a camping trip and then I played around with putting those ingredients in a cookie. Ratios and whatnot.

For an added twist/extra component, I decided to make this cookie with only things that you’d bring on a camping trip (it was quite fun to mix the cookie dough with a spork and mini spatula-knife).

Ingredients include: raisins, coffee (make this first), quick oats, peanut butter, brown sugar and a banana.

Okay, so you probably won’t bring measuring cups with you on a camping trip, but I do believe in just “eye-balling” things, so you could always make a crap-ier version of this cookie on the trail. Through iterations of this cookie, I tried using just quick oats without grinding them and this made a very clumpy/separated cookie. So I ended up using a mortar and pestle (because I don’t have a blender/food processor) which made rough oat flour that made the cookie somewhat more cohesive.

With proper planning, you could definitely make this cookie work on a camping trip. Grind your oats beforehand, measure out all the ingredients beforehand, etc.

As for the baking process, this cookie might not be the most sustainable — you can only bake one cookie in the tin foil at once, but if you don’t care about producing waste, you can use a bunch of tin foil and bake a few cookies at once over the fire.

Before baking, the cookie looks like mush, but basically fold/clump the tin foil around the dough and pop in the oven (or over an open flame).

Put the cookie in the oven for about 18 minutes. I think it has a longer bake time because it isn’t a conventional cookie batter. The final product turned out better than expected. Not so pretty, but is camping food all that pretty or presentable? No, if anything, you want your camping food to look more hodge-podge to get that “real” experience. Even baking it for a long time, the cookie still had a pretty “gooey” consistency. So if you dislike crunchy cookies, use oats instead of flour and brown sugar instead of granulated sugar, and make this cookie!

The final product after a second iteration of making the dough.

I learned that oats as a base rather than regular flour is more difficult to bake with. I don’t think I got the right ratios with this cookie because of that. And to make it more enjoyable, I would need to find that sweet spot with the “oat flour”. Also, probably grind the oats in a food processor…

Idea Test 2

My second cookie idea was my bike chain cookie where the 12 cookies linked together accompanied by a caramel sauce to mimic chain lube. The flavors were pretty conventional, but connecting the cookies took some creativity.

Before baking, I needed to make the cookie cutters. I did this by cutting up an aluminum baking sheet (for casseroles) and “molding” it around circular objects. Tape held the cookie cutter together. This took a while because I needed to play around with sizes.

The image to the left shows a bunch of round objects that I used to mold the cookie cutter. The image to the right shows the aluminum baking sheet that I re-purposed as a cookie cutter.

After my first bake, I realized that the cookies were too thin which caused them to be very hard and strangely chewy. I also realized that the cookies would expand and lose their shape and that baking a hole in the cookie was pointless because of this.

I started with way too big of a cookie cutter to make the hole in the cookie. This caused the cookie to break and was a diameter that I couldn’t match with even a pretzel rod (rather than a pretzel stick).

(1) Final cookie cutter shape with different sized holes. (2) The hole was way too big for the cookie. (3) The cookie didn’t hold its shape in the oven and baking the cookie with the hole already cut out was pointless.

As for my first iteration of the lube, I tried to make a vegan version of caramel with vegan butter and brown sugar. This never quite thickened the way I wanted to and the butter kept separating from the sugar. I’m a firm believer that anything can be made vegan, but vegan dairy substitutes have very different properties than the real deal…

From this iteration, I would make the cookies thicker and play around with how to make the hole and eventually connect all 12 cookies together. I would also need to improve my caramel sauce.

Iteration

From the first round of experimentation, I knew that I had some mistakes I needed to correct with my bike chain cookies. To correct the thickness of my cookie, I stacked two cookies on top of each other before baking. Then, once out of the oven I used the cookie cutter again to fix the shape.

Now this is where my patience was tested… Rather than using a cookie cutter to make the hole before baking, I waited until the cookies cooled down and then I used a smaller cookie cutter — one that I shaped around the pretzel stick. This worked decently well, but the force ended up breaking the cookie.

For the third experiment, I used a knife to kind of “prime” the hole and then used the pretzel-stick-sized cookie cutter to make the hole. This worked better, but some of the cookies kept breaking. To fix this, I used some peanut butter to kind of glue together the cracks. If anything, this just enhances the cookies and makes them look a little bit cooler. But, patience is key for cutting the two holes into the cookie.

As for the caramel sauce, I used coconut milk (the stuff that comes in a can). The fat in the coconut milk mimics regular butter better than vegan butter (which is just vegetable oil). This second version of the caramel sauce tastes waaaay better and is a better consistency.

Timeline

Tuesday 9/4: Create a practical timeline for creating a new cookie.

Wednesday 9/5: Start researching different non-dairy cookie ingredients, cooking methods, flavor pairing, etc.

Thursday 9/6: Start brainstorming cookie ideas. Blue sky ideation. Figure out what kind of cookie/theme I want to create. (Idea generation process of outline).

Friday 9/7: Gather ingredients/materials (maybe I need props) from Cub foods.

Saturday 9/8: ALL DAY COOKIE MAKING because I don’t have that much time during the week to be in the kitchen. Test out different recipes/ratios/flavors. Experiment with oven temperature and cook time. (Conduct idea test 1 & 2).

Sunday 9/9 (at night): Continue the baking process. Finalize that cookie recipe. (Maybe conduct idea test 2, if I run out of time on Saturday).

Monday 9/10 & Tuesday 9/11: Two days in the kitchen probably won’t be enough, so keep playing around and finalizing.

Wednesday 9/12: Finish blog post. And pop those final cookies in the oven for the bake sale on Thursday.

Thursday 9/13: Sell some cookies, eat some cookies. Probably not eat too many cookies because I doubt there will be many non-dairy cookies. :(

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