I got up early today to make the dough for the spoon cookies, and decided to multiply the recipe X 5, instead of 4, in the hope of getting a few more of these little charmers. This meant 10 sticks (2 1/2 pounds) of butter, and I was getting mixed up as to whether my multiplier was 10 or 5. I was so happy after I successfully browned the butter, and I got everything cleaned up and headed off to work. About halfway there, I realized that although I had multiplied the sugar & butter by 5; the 10 sticks, and 3 1/4 cups of sugar, NOT 7 1/2 cups of sugar – I put in 3 TBLS + 1 tsp. of baking soda (1 tsp. x 10). The cookies are really fragile anyways, and all that extra soda would just make them fall apart.
I guess a more conservative scientific cook would have at least test-baked a few, to test if the blowing up from too much soda theory was valid – but I didn’t have the heart to invest anymore time. I threw it out and started over. And actually, I was supported in this move by our current house guest, who’s come from Atlanta to do research here at UW, and who bakes a lot. She pointed out that too much baking soda also tastes really bad – so I would’ve had overly fragile, not even good tasting, cookies.
Dumped dough
12 hours later, 8:30 p.m., about 3/4 of the second batch of dough is baked, and I am listening to my students present online, hoping to get back to baking and jamming by 9:30.
16 hours later, at 12:30 a.m., I went to bed with 153 little spoon cookies resting on trays to set their jam. Means I made over 300 of the little mounds – yikes. And it was my only cookie kind of the day, in an increasingly compacted cookie season. But still, my heart is mending.
2012 spoon cookies – yup, there’s lots of them. And for breakfast this morning I got to have yogurt with ultra-thick cherry/strawberry preserves – the fruit strained out of the jam I used to fill the cookies
