And who said I wasn't a scientist???
All right, so someone said that I was more an artist than a scientist (baking is a science, cooking is an art...and I'm a terrible baker), and I took his challenge to the extreme by fucking with my own cookie recipe for 2 days straight....probably to his aggravation. To preface, the inspiration for the cookies discussed in this post comes from from a particularly failed attempt at making fudge. A friend from DC had come up for Thanksgiving on Wednesday night, and being the frenetic person I am, I forced him and another friend to make cookies for the forthcoming Thanksgiving dinner dessert. On our to-do list were chocolate chip cookies (to which I wanted to add molasses in my endless search for a fool-proof caramel-y chocolate chocolate chip cookie, a recipe I manage to fuck up nearly every single time and still not have found), chewy peanut butter cookies, green tea shortbread cookies, and a persimmon fudge. This is truly a random combination of sweets, I know.
Anyways, the focus of this post is the fudge, but the final product is the picture to the right. My mother had brought me some Fuyu persimmons when she came to visit a couple of weeks ago, and being the lazy shit I am about peeling fruit, hadn't touched them for a couple of weeks. As a result, they became some of the most flaccid persimmons in the entire world; they had oddest texture, the kind where if you let some stranger poke at them, they would make that horrible uncomfortable face you often see in awkward situations. Lazy I am, but wasteful I am not; Johnson and I figured the best thing to do would be to turn it into a candy (although...maybe it was just me doing the figuring). We chose persimmon fudge, but after seeing how time-consuming the real recipe was, decided to just melt some chocolate chips, add some cream, and mash in the persimmons. This would clearly work, right???
It did not work. This "fudge" wouldn't set, no matter what we did to it.
After discovering it would not set, not even after cooling, I settled on adding a ton of powdered sugar to it, about a whole box, and then letting it sit in the fridge overnight. While this did harden it, it was still the consistency of exceedingly sticky and gooey frosting....which, during the Thanksgiving dinner, delighted Pinky's nephew, who coated his cornbread muffins and cookies in the mess. Johnson and I eventually said fuck it to the fudge, thinking it was the end of that failed experiment, and he asserted that the only way we'd get rid of it all was from transferring the mess from wax paper to container, wax paper to container (as a good amount of it would be lost every time). In fact, the fudge-frosting so resembled a sticky trap that I even thought I'd put it out overnight to catch the brazen mice that have been invading the kitchen recently.
Who was I kidding? I just couldn't let it go. After sitting around a little the next day, I thought, "Maybe I'll take the leftover pumpkin puree mix, the leftover evaporated milk, the messed up fudge, and mix it all into a chewy cookie mix....this is a great idea, right?!" After some googling, I found that most people struggled with keeping pumpkin puree cookies chewy - it was inevitable that they'd turn cake-y. Many blogs said that boiling off the water from the puree (constant stirring on the stove until the puree becomes dry) was the trick to making the cookie chewier, so I thought I'd try that first. Briefly, 3 C fudge + 2/3 milk + 1 can of evaporated milk, constantly stirred (meaning don't stop stirring) until it has boiled down on low heat to a pudding-like consistency. I stopped at "pudding-like" rather than "dry" because it had been more than an hour of stirring on the stove, and I was constantly stressing that I'd burn the chocolate and slopping the mixture all over my clothes and socks. I thus gave up and turned to the cookie dough. The idea was to take basic cookie dough and mix the dough with the 3 cups of gooey fudge-y pumpkin-y milk-y mess, making a chewy marbled cookie. I used the Cook's Illustrated recipe for cookie dough with minor edits (also doubling it because there was so much "fudge," although in hindsight I should've tripled it). You can find this recipe elsewhere online, pretty easily.
The dough was far too sticky, wet and brown (had to let go of that marbling idea reallll fast); no matter how much I cooled or froze it, it was still a sticky mess. I tried adding 2 handfuls of flour, which seemed to thicken it, and then baking it at 350 degrees F...and the result was the cakiest cookie in the entire world...scratch that, it was pretty much cake batter. And I had SO MUCH OF IT! I was so demoralized, but even at 11 PM, I forged on with trying to fix it. I added a large handful of brown sugar, which spread them out, but still cake-like. I added molasses, which made them even stickier and spread them out even more, still cake-like and even messier! Look at the picture below! The brown sugar and molasses just made the whole cookies flatten out and go softer! It was terrible.
Original cookies is on the left (puffy and cake-y).
Added molasses, brown sugar and some flower, got the cookie on the right (much flatter, but very wet and still cake-like).
Partially relinquishing, I then stored 2/3 of the batter in the freezer (wrapped in wax paper and zip-lock bags), thinking that if I ever needed to make a cake in the future...well....
That left me with 1/3 to really get my fix on with, so I decided to mix in 1/2 a stick of melted butter (1/2 cup) and then let it sit overnight in the refrigerator. Next morning, I decided to run an experiment and see if I could find a satisfactory answer to HOW TO TURN CAKE-Y COOKIE DOUGH INTO CHEWY COOKIE DOUGH. And I think I may have found the answers (apologies, I have a terrible camera).
Butter: So one of the most important things to do when the cookie is too cake-y is to add melted butter (to increase the fat content). This addition of 1/2 a stick of melted butter to the mix (coming from the flat wet cake cookie batter) and cooking at 350 degrees F gave me a really good cookie! I think the butter counteracted the excessive spreading of the molasses and brown sugar. This cookie had crispy edges, was mildly chewy and still rose in the middle (it was dense, not puffy, in the center) to give it a nice crackle appearance. This cookie is the one on the right in the picture below.
Lower temperature: So this is what happens when you cook at lower temperatures (250 degrees F). You get the cookie on the left. It's the same exact dough as the cookie on the right, but the lower cooking temp seemed to make them drier, even more chewy and even more dense. Because the temp was low and they were cooking at a slower rate, when they spread out, the edges of the cookies caramelized and went very crispy; the center seemed to dry out a bit, hence making it more chewy and dense. Not a pretty cookie unless you're looking for a "sun" theme, but the texture was significantly less cake-like. Between these two cookies, I'd choose the one on the right, simply because it's more presentable...but they're both still damn good cookies, retaining a chewy quality.
I knew that adding molasses gave me a result I didn't want (too too wet and sticky), and I knew that brown sugar made them spread out. To what extent though? I wasn't doing the molasses thing again, but the brown sugar curiosity led me to mess with the remaining cookies, I added a handful of brown sugar to the batch at that point in time (with butter added and overnight rest). So what does b.sugar do to the cookies seen right above?
Brown sugar: the cookie to the left is the same cookie as the one above to the right. The cookie on the right in this picture is with the addition of brown sugar. It spread out a great deal, and the texture became almost caramel-like, chewy and bendy (a.k.a. too chewy). Now, I personally like this type of cookie because it's just like eating candy...but then I guess it's candy and not really cookie.
Higher temperature: So to "fix" this overly chewy brown sugar cookie, I decided to try and prevent it from spreading out without any more additions and building on my past discoveries. And here's how I found the perfect cookie for this batter. I raised the temperature to 400 degrees F to prevent the cookie from spreading out.
Voila! Now get this. This 400 F cookie has crispy browned edges, it puffs up around the outer ring, and the center remains chewy and soft and caramel-like! After so much failure, the enormity of this success completely made my day. In conclusion, or summary if you prefer, if your cookies are spreading out too much but they have the right chewiness, just amp up the temperature. Look at those edges and look at that crackle!
Final thoughts on chewy dough adjustments are are to not mess with flour, baking soda or powder, or eggs, because that stuff just gets way to complicated. Final pictures. Bottom left (original cookies), top left (with molasses), Bottom middle (with the addition of butter and fridge rest overnight, 400 degrees), Top middle (with the addition of butter and fridge rest overnight, 350 degrees), Bottom right (with the addition of brown sugar, 350 degrees), top right and picture to the right (with the addition of brown sugar, 400 degrees).
So yes, it was a busy Thanksgiving full of cookie-making. Perhaps I will return in a later blog to discuss all the other recipes...but for now.....that certainly was a enormous period of happily wasted, stressful, time. BUT, if you ever want to...
1. Turn your cake-batter into cookie dough
2. Take failed fudge or pumpkin puree or evaporated milk and make it into cookie dough...maybe try a marble...
3. Know what the fuck is going with molasses, brown sugar, butter, and cooking temps....
...then this post will hopefully help you.
Note: This recipe made WAYYYY too much cookie dough, so make sure you save it for cake batter or make the mixes in smaller proportions.
Anyways, the focus of this post is the fudge, but the final product is the picture to the right. My mother had brought me some Fuyu persimmons when she came to visit a couple of weeks ago, and being the lazy shit I am about peeling fruit, hadn't touched them for a couple of weeks. As a result, they became some of the most flaccid persimmons in the entire world; they had oddest texture, the kind where if you let some stranger poke at them, they would make that horrible uncomfortable face you often see in awkward situations. Lazy I am, but wasteful I am not; Johnson and I figured the best thing to do would be to turn it into a candy (although...maybe it was just me doing the figuring). We chose persimmon fudge, but after seeing how time-consuming the real recipe was, decided to just melt some chocolate chips, add some cream, and mash in the persimmons. This would clearly work, right???
It did not work. This "fudge" wouldn't set, no matter what we did to it.
After discovering it would not set, not even after cooling, I settled on adding a ton of powdered sugar to it, about a whole box, and then letting it sit in the fridge overnight. While this did harden it, it was still the consistency of exceedingly sticky and gooey frosting....which, during the Thanksgiving dinner, delighted Pinky's nephew, who coated his cornbread muffins and cookies in the mess. Johnson and I eventually said fuck it to the fudge, thinking it was the end of that failed experiment, and he asserted that the only way we'd get rid of it all was from transferring the mess from wax paper to container, wax paper to container (as a good amount of it would be lost every time). In fact, the fudge-frosting so resembled a sticky trap that I even thought I'd put it out overnight to catch the brazen mice that have been invading the kitchen recently.
Who was I kidding? I just couldn't let it go. After sitting around a little the next day, I thought, "Maybe I'll take the leftover pumpkin puree mix, the leftover evaporated milk, the messed up fudge, and mix it all into a chewy cookie mix....this is a great idea, right?!" After some googling, I found that most people struggled with keeping pumpkin puree cookies chewy - it was inevitable that they'd turn cake-y. Many blogs said that boiling off the water from the puree (constant stirring on the stove until the puree becomes dry) was the trick to making the cookie chewier, so I thought I'd try that first. Briefly, 3 C fudge + 2/3 milk + 1 can of evaporated milk, constantly stirred (meaning don't stop stirring) until it has boiled down on low heat to a pudding-like consistency. I stopped at "pudding-like" rather than "dry" because it had been more than an hour of stirring on the stove, and I was constantly stressing that I'd burn the chocolate and slopping the mixture all over my clothes and socks. I thus gave up and turned to the cookie dough. The idea was to take basic cookie dough and mix the dough with the 3 cups of gooey fudge-y pumpkin-y milk-y mess, making a chewy marbled cookie. I used the Cook's Illustrated recipe for cookie dough with minor edits (also doubling it because there was so much "fudge," although in hindsight I should've tripled it). You can find this recipe elsewhere online, pretty easily.
The dough was far too sticky, wet and brown (had to let go of that marbling idea reallll fast); no matter how much I cooled or froze it, it was still a sticky mess. I tried adding 2 handfuls of flour, which seemed to thicken it, and then baking it at 350 degrees F...and the result was the cakiest cookie in the entire world...scratch that, it was pretty much cake batter. And I had SO MUCH OF IT! I was so demoralized, but even at 11 PM, I forged on with trying to fix it. I added a large handful of brown sugar, which spread them out, but still cake-like. I added molasses, which made them even stickier and spread them out even more, still cake-like and even messier! Look at the picture below! The brown sugar and molasses just made the whole cookies flatten out and go softer! It was terrible.
Added molasses, brown sugar and some flower, got the cookie on the right (much flatter, but very wet and still cake-like).
Partially relinquishing, I then stored 2/3 of the batter in the freezer (wrapped in wax paper and zip-lock bags), thinking that if I ever needed to make a cake in the future...well....
That left me with 1/3 to really get my fix on with, so I decided to mix in 1/2 a stick of melted butter (1/2 cup) and then let it sit overnight in the refrigerator. Next morning, I decided to run an experiment and see if I could find a satisfactory answer to HOW TO TURN CAKE-Y COOKIE DOUGH INTO CHEWY COOKIE DOUGH. And I think I may have found the answers (apologies, I have a terrible camera).
Butter: So one of the most important things to do when the cookie is too cake-y is to add melted butter (to increase the fat content). This addition of 1/2 a stick of melted butter to the mix (coming from the flat wet cake cookie batter) and cooking at 350 degrees F gave me a really good cookie! I think the butter counteracted the excessive spreading of the molasses and brown sugar. This cookie had crispy edges, was mildly chewy and still rose in the middle (it was dense, not puffy, in the center) to give it a nice crackle appearance. This cookie is the one on the right in the picture below.
I knew that adding molasses gave me a result I didn't want (too too wet and sticky), and I knew that brown sugar made them spread out. To what extent though? I wasn't doing the molasses thing again, but the brown sugar curiosity led me to mess with the remaining cookies, I added a handful of brown sugar to the batch at that point in time (with butter added and overnight rest). So what does b.sugar do to the cookies seen right above?
Higher temperature: So to "fix" this overly chewy brown sugar cookie, I decided to try and prevent it from spreading out without any more additions and building on my past discoveries. And here's how I found the perfect cookie for this batter. I raised the temperature to 400 degrees F to prevent the cookie from spreading out.
Voila! Now get this. This 400 F cookie has crispy browned edges, it puffs up around the outer ring, and the center remains chewy and soft and caramel-like! After so much failure, the enormity of this success completely made my day. In conclusion, or summary if you prefer, if your cookies are spreading out too much but they have the right chewiness, just amp up the temperature. Look at those edges and look at that crackle! 
Final thoughts on chewy dough adjustments are are to not mess with flour, baking soda or powder, or eggs, because that stuff just gets way to complicated. Final pictures. Bottom left (original cookies), top left (with molasses), Bottom middle (with the addition of butter and fridge rest overnight, 400 degrees), Top middle (with the addition of butter and fridge rest overnight, 350 degrees), Bottom right (with the addition of brown sugar, 350 degrees), top right and picture to the right (with the addition of brown sugar, 400 degrees). 
So yes, it was a busy Thanksgiving full of cookie-making. Perhaps I will return in a later blog to discuss all the other recipes...but for now.....that certainly was a enormous period of happily wasted, stressful, time. BUT, if you ever want to...
1. Turn your cake-batter into cookie dough
2. Take failed fudge or pumpkin puree or evaporated milk and make it into cookie dough...maybe try a marble...
3. Know what the fuck is going with molasses, brown sugar, butter, and cooking temps....
...then this post will hopefully help you.
Note: This recipe made WAYYYY too much cookie dough, so make sure you save it for cake batter or make the mixes in smaller proportions.
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