Cookie recipe

In January, my little goodie for "Tea Time" was a plate full of Coconut Snowball mini cupcakes. My recipe was not a recipe as I followed the ingredients on the Pillsbury box. So, I thought this month, I would bring you something made from "scratch". This proved to be interesting........Here we go........

In the picture you can see an old cookbook. It's one of several that I bought at Wit's End Antique Shop last summer. Rumford was a company that made baking powder. There is no date on the cookbook and no copyright. It's just a little book that was probably a promotion to get the ladies to buy Rumford for their baked goods. I found a cookie recipe that sounded good. I also found one in the Sprye cookbook pictured above. I decided I would sort of "combine them" to make a really good cookie. I experiment all the time and usually the results are tasty. I expected the same ........

The recipe is as follows........

1/2 cup butter (or butter flavor shortening)

3/4 cup sugar

2 large eggs, well beaten

1 tsp. vanilla

2 1/4 cups flour

1 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

Cream butter and sugar, then add beaten egg. Mix in vanilla. Set aside. Mix dry ingredients. Add half dry ingredients to butter/sugar mixture. Then add remaining dry ingredients and blend thoroughly. Drop by teaspoonful on cookie sheet or roll dough balls in sugar and bake. You may flatten dough with glass for a flatter cookie. Bake at 375 degrees for 8 minutes. Cool, frost and decorate if desired.

That's the recipe I came up with so I began to mix. I creamed the butter and sugar.


Then I added the beaten egg ....................

...........and the vanilla and mixed well.

I set the liquid mix aside and prepared the dry ingredients. Blended them well, then added half the dry ingredients to the butter/egg mixture. Then I added the remaining dry ingredients and blended the dough thorouhly.

The dough was stiff and a bit sticky .........................

..........but I rolled it into balls by "flouring" my hands so I would not have more dough on my fingers than in the cookie balls.

I placed the cookie balls on the ungreased cookie sheet. And here, I must apologize for when I saw the close-up photo of my cookie sheet my first thought was.........gee, they're going to think they'll have to take up a collection and send me new cookie sheets! Guess these have been around awhile. I will make them look like new for next cookie bake. :-)

So, with the cookies ready to bake, I popped them into the oven (yes, I preheated it and it was ready to go) and they looked like this when they finished baking............

Hmmmmmmmmmm........I thought they would flatten a bit when they were baked. Not at all what I was expecting. I had plans to imprint a heart on each flattened cookie (the little one in the lower left of the photo) and fill the heart with red sugar sprinkles. It didn't work. Instead, I just sprinkled red sugar all over the top of the whole tray of cookies. I ate one and it was interesting. Very vanilly flavored and.........

So, I tried another tray of cookies. This time, I flattened the cookies with a glass. I remembered that one of the two recipes I was using had done this. And here's what they looked like this time...............

The cookies were flatter but still not as flat as I thought they might be. I pressed the hearts, tried my red sprinkles idea and stopped at one done.

The rest of the cookies got frosting stars. Much easier although not as bright as the red hearts would have been.

The cookies baked up nice and even, round ones and flat ones and they reminded me of something...............they were kind of dry - maybe too much flour? - and strangely they were crisp - actually "hard as a rock" on the outside but kinda crumbly on the inside. So when I made my tea today, I knew exactly what I would do........ I would dunk those little puppies in my tea. That's just what I did and they were really tasty. And that's when I realized that I hadn't made cookies after all..........I made Biscotti and didn't even know it!! :-)

Now just so you know.......I am a really good "cookie, cake and sweet things maker" but every once in a while my concoctions don't work out quite like I think they will. Someday, I'll tell you about the pizza-flavored chocolate cake I made for my quilt retreat friends. :-)

Hope you enjoyed your visit and a good cup of tea.

Sandi