cookies
Summary
In the hopes of producing a new and creative cookie, I scrolled through many different online recipe sites to learn more about the current state of cookies. In doing so, I generated many unfeasible ideas due to the state of my kitchen, although I was extremely excited about some of them. I finally settled down on a couple ideas before testing them out for taste. I learned many seemingly basic and logical things from the experience, including the idea that baking is significantly easier with a well-stocked kitchen, but by experimenting with the recipes and shapes of the cookies, I ended up with what I believe to be a creative cookie.
Final Idea
I present: Red Bean Walnut Braided Cookies!
This was inspired by the Mid-Autumn Festival, which conveniently lands on September 15 this year. During this day people fill themselves up on beautifully crafted mooncakes mostly filled with red bean paste.
The braided cookie is made with a modified sugar cookie base. Inside the cookie braids, there is a mass of red bean paste and granola chunks. To top it all off, there is a sprinkle of walnuts on the top.
This cookie is different than currently existing cookies in that it uses a braided design that is generally seen with breads and pastries. Additionally, red bean paste is associated with Asian breads and pastries, but is rarely seen in cookies. The granola and walnuts add a certain level of crunch to the cookie. All of these concepts combined together add to the overall creativity of the cookie.
Recipe
Ingredients:
· 1 cup (2 sticks) room temperature butter
· ¾ cup granulated sugar
· 2 eggs
· 1 tsp baking powder
· 1 tsp vanilla extract
· 3 cups flour (plus more for rolling dough)
· ½ tsp salt
· Water
· Sweetened red bean paste
· Chopped walnuts (optional)
· Small granola chunks (optional)
Instructions:
1. In a bowl, cream together the butter and sugar.
2. Beat in 1 egg, the baking powder, and vanilla extract.
3. Mix in the flour and salt. Use your hands to press together the cookie dough. If it does not come together with your hands, add in a teaspoon of water and try again. Set aside.
4. In a separate bowl, mix together sweetened red bean paste, a dash of water, chopped walnuts, and small granola chunks. The amount of red bean paste and water depends on the preference of sweetness and thickness of the cookie filling. Set aside.
5. Roll out the cookie dough balls on a floured surface to a desired thickness.
6. Cut out approximately 4x4” squares in the dough and make 4 one-inch marks on two opposite sides, as shown below.
7. Place a line of red bean paste down the center of the dough and fold each of the braids over each other.
8. Place the cookies onto a cookie sheet one inch apart from another.
9. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
10. Beat an egg in another bowl and egg wash the top of all the cookies.
11. Scatter a desired amount of chopped walnuts onto the top of the cookies.
12. Bake for 20 minutes, or until the edges start turning golden brown.
13. Remove the cookies from the oven and allow them to cool for a few minutes before enjoying!
Idea Generation
The thought of a creative cookie led to 3 major changeable aspects of the cookie:
· change in creation method,
· change in shape, and
· change in flavor.
A change in creation method would equate to stir frying, steaming, or even boiling the cookie dough, all of which would change the very definition of a cookie. There was a fleeting thought to dip a piece of cookie dough in alcohol and setting it all on fire. There are a lot of problems that would have needed to be worked out, but the main one was that my mom disliked the very idea of starting a fire.
As I was walking through the kitchen appliances aisle (to purchase a hand mixer), I remembered that someone had made grilled cheese sandwiches in a toaster. There does exist toaster-safe bags somewhere, which can be used to “bake” the cookies. It is certainly difficult to control the cook time and temperature of the toaster, especially given my luck with acquiring varying degrees of burnt toast when the toaster is sitting at the same setting.
Then there are the people who have put all sorts of foods into waffle irons, including standard chocolate chip cookies. This can be adapted to all types of cookies, only limited by the imagination. Too bad I do not own anything remotely close to a waffle iron or panini press.
Pancake art was, and might still be, a big hit on the internet. Even though I do not possess any artistic skills on the griddle, I thought that it would have been fun to prepare cookie dough mix as an alternative to pancake mix and continue in a similar fashion. Since I do not own a griddle, nor do I know anyone who does, testing that idea was completely out of the question.
Cookies basically come in all shapes in sizes, especially given the large quantities of cookie cutouts that exist in the market, therefore the only way I figured to go about it was to explore the concept of 3D cookies, as 1D cookies are not that interesting. Two ideas emerged. The first was concerning using square/rectangular building blocks with interlocking slits to allow the structure to stand up on its own. This seems like a fun CAD project, but considering the constraints placed on the size of the cookies, there were very little possibilities to work with.
The second option came from simplifying the 3D shape by building something with 2D cookies. This resulted in the thought of creating a topographic cookie, where each layer of cookie is a different flavor and color gradient, held together by some sort of frosting, jam, or other tasty glue substitutes. This seemed simple, since there was no need for wonderful cutting skills, but it would have resulted in a significant amount of batter and the need for flavor pairing. Plus, different sized “elevation” cookies would have needed different baking times, which could have complicated the process by a lot.
The only Youtube cooking channel I follow made a video called “3 of the Easiest Pastries” a few years back. They used puff pastries to make, as the title suggests, different shapes of pastries. From this, I figured I would be able to adapt the pinwheel and braided shaped into cookie forms. This would mean that the cookie must be malleable and does not stick onto hard surfaces, which would exclude a lot of cookies. Since this was a feasible task, I decided to incorporate this into a recipe to try later.
Flavor is the easiest thing to change about a cookie, which means that there are already a lot of different ideas created by baking enthusiasts. With the onset of the Mid-Autumn Festival, mooncakes and red bean paste exist everywhere, therefore I thought that it would be nice to incorporate that into a cookie. My mom also suggested that walnuts go well with red bean paste, so I decided to put those two together. The cookie base would have to be experimented with.
One of my good friends always eat granola bars and she suggested making granola bar cookies. They do exist, but I thought that it would be nice to incorporate granola pieces into cookie dough, and make fun shapes with it to bake. This would add extra crunch and fun into eating the cookies. This was fairly simple to make, so I also decided to try this.
Lastly, I am a fan of cream cheese wontons, as are many people. Since cream cheese can have a similar texture to cookie dough, it might be possible to create cookie wontons. The cookie dough would have to be edible raw, since deep frying the wonton will not result in cooking through the entire cookie.
Idea 1 Test
The first idea I ended up testing was creating some sort of pinwheel cookie with red bean paste in it, sprinkled with walnuts on top. With this in mind, I thought chocolate chip cookie dough, without the chocolate chips, would work well for this. I took a generic chocolate chip cookie recipe and used a quarter of the ingredients for a trial run. Even though the red bean paste was presweetened, I reduced the amount of added sugar to half of the quarter amount to prevent the cookie dough from overpowering the filling too much.
For the red bean filling, I guessed at the red bean to walnut ratio. Since being inexact with the filling would not change the taste of the cookie too much, I ran with a red bean paste to walnut ratio of 2:1.
After all of the ingredients were well combined, I covered the bowl with cling film and placed it into the refrigerator for an hour to chill the dough and hopefully reduce the stickiness. The plan was to roll out the dough between two pieces of wax paper. With a floured surface, the dough still stuck tightly onto the wax paper, so I scraped the dough and placed it into the freezer instead.
The hour and a half freezer time did literally nothing for additional unsticking of the dough. I did attempt to roll out the dough between two sheets of wax paper, but this happened.
Since the dough was too sticky for what I wanted to do with it, I ended up seeing if the flavor of red bean paste on top of a cookie would work. The amount of sugar was still a bit too much, but my parents and I both enjoyed the taste of the cookie, so I decided to go with red bean paste and walnuts as the final product.
I learned quite a bit from this cookie test. First of all, quartering the recipe does not mean that I will get the exact outcome, since some things are just that difficult to divide, like an egg. The cookie was ridiculously soft, and I was pretty sure that was not expect to occur. This is probably because in an attempt to pour in a quarter of the egg, I proceeded to dump in ½ an egg instead. There were probably better ways to divide the egg that I did not think of before I messed up. Secondly, I learned that kitchen tools are incredibly nice to have around. I ended up mixing everything with chopsticks and a spoon, which meant that a lot of the mixture was not very well combined. This is evidenced by most of the pictures on my phone.
Creaming the butter and sugar together was disastrous in itself, where I just poorly smushed everything together before obtaining a sore arm, forcing me to stop trying. The cookies were probably not as fluffy as they are supposed to be.
Idea 2 Test
I also wanted to test out the granola cookie idea. I bought some granola cereal, which I am pretty sure are just granola bars that did not make it into packaging before they were broken. The granola bars were just crushed more to become “cereal”. I decided on baking the granola into a sugar cookie recipe, again quartering the recipe for experimental purposes. This was, again, a poor idea. In my defense, I did not want to eat so many cookies later. Plus, I also made this while the other was chilling in the fridge, so I had not learned my lesson just yet.
Everything went similarly to the first batch of cookies. I followed a generic sugar cookie recipe, hoping to test out the flavor. Since the granola was sweet and incorporated what I assumed to be a flour equivalent, I took out a half cup of the same amount of flour from the original recipe and substituted that for semi-crushed granola chunks, as well as reduced the sugar from the recipe. The granola was very difficult to crush without using some sort of hammer. I did try squishing each piece with a spoon, but that did not end up working too well.
After the batter was mixed, I realized the batter was way too runny to roll out onto wax paper, so I proceeded to add another half cup of flour. This definitely made the dough stick together enough to roll out on wax paper.
Two things happened here. The first thing was where the wax paper broke from the granola chunks scraping against the table as I was rolling the dough out.
Secondly, it was incredibly difficult to cut shapes into the dough because the granola chunks just do not enjoy being severed from the rest of itself. I ended up scoring the sheet in hopes of easy breakage after it bakes, and then overturned the entire cookie onto a cookie sheet to bake for 15 minutes.
The edges of the cookie looked and tasted wonderful and crispy. The rest of it looked somewhat pale, but still tasted great. The granola really did not add much more than extra crunchiness in the cookies, which was somewhat disappointing. All that happened was that there were random hard pieces of granola in the otherwise soft and warm sugar cookie.
I learned that granola is not a substitute for flour. Instead, it is an addition to the cookie mixture, much like chocolate chips in chocolate chip cookies. Additionally, leaving the cookie in one giant piece was not the greatest idea, especially since scoring the cookie did not help break it up.
Iteration
I decided to iterate on the fancy read bean paste cookies and find a cookie dough recipe that created more easily moldable and less sticky sugar cookies. I made a quarter of the recipe of a new sugar cookie recipe to create the pinwheel cookies. I did reduce the amount of sugar by half to see if it would bring out the red bean paste more. Everything was going well until I had to make the actual pinwheels. I decided to fold the pinwheel edges first, then put on the red bean paste mix. The cookie dough crumbled and broke extremely easily. I still managed to make a few pinwheels and some sugar cookie rectangles to try. As expected, the pinwheels did not look like pinwheels at all. Also, the sugar cookies did not have enough sugar, to the point where they almost tasted only like flour.
With the third iteration, I decided to make a full batch of cookies and add more water to make the dough stick better. This is where I learned that a full batch of something is far more accurate than a quarter batch. With the recommended amount of sugar and extra mixing, the cookie dough was significantly stickier than the first batch. I still added the recommended amount of water to make sure that the cookies have a small chance of cracking. This worked out to my advantage, where most of the pinwheel stayed intact, even as I transferred them from the wax paper to the cookie sheet. The red bean paste was placed underneath the folds of the pinwheel to reduce the amount bending the cookie had to undergo. To my family, the cookies taste pretty good, but they do not transfer well in packages.
At this point, the cookie dough recipe was basically set. To prevent any extraneous pieces from hitting random things and breaking, I changed the design from a pinwheel to a braid. This definitely helped reduce the cracking. The square equivalence of the pinwheel was 4x4” in size, which made for some massive cookies that were overcooked on the edges and maybe slightly undercooked in the middle. Since the cookie changed to a more uniform shape, the cookies were expected to bake more evenly. I took part of the new dough and tested out the design for the braided cookie, adding an egg wash on one. The new cookies were sturdier and cooked more evenly. The egg wash provided a crispier shell, so I decided to leave that in for the final version.
The only additional change to the final cookie was that I finally figured out how to crush the granola effectively to add more of a crunch to the red bean paste filling. The side of a large knife did wonders for obliterating the granola chunks.
