Boing Boing » cookies

Chocolate Han Solo in Carbonite Sugar Cookie

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 21:52:01 +0000

Moogieland has a recipe, and photos, for this delightful Star Wars-themed sweet. Snip:

In a galaxy far, far away, I purchased the Han Solo in Carbonite ice cube tray from Think Geek. I knew that I wanted to use it to mold chocolate. But I wanted more than a chocolate bar. And by harnessing the power of the dark side, I added a sugar cookie layer. Yes, Dark Sith Lord, I have cookies. Da da da, dun da-daaa, dun da-daaaa. Now step aside Darth Vader, no using the force to raid the cookie jar!

(via Boing Boing Flickr Pool; photo: Moogieland)

Thin Mint Haters: Rise against your cookie oppressors

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 15:18:27 +0000

TIL that Thin Mints are not the most popular Girl Scout cookie. Yesterday, in Cincinnati, President Obama was booed when he mentioned that he preferred Thin Mints to all other Girl Scout cookies.

This surprised me. For several reasons. First, I didn't realized they took cookies that seriously in Cincinnati. Maybe it's time to visit Ohio. Second, as someone who has long preferred Samoas (aka Caramel deLites), I always felt as though I was in a serious minority. Like my family grudgingly ordered one box, mostly for me, out of an order that was primarily made up of Thin Mints.

And, on the one hand, this is a realistic perception. Thin Mints are the Girl Scouts' best selling cookie—accounting for 25% of all cookie sales. And yet.

And yet ... that does not tell the whole story. After all, if we Samoa and Peanut Butter Patty (Tagalongs) fans were to join forces (and we should), we would account for 32% of cookie sales. And if you look at the Girl Scouts' online poll, you find that 33% of respondents preferred Samoas—compared to 28% who preferred Thin Mints.(Not a very scientific poll, but this doesn't seem to be the sort of thing Gallup covers, so the Girl Scouts were my best shot at providing nationally relevant results here.)

So, basically, people who are only kind of okay with Thin Mints—you can feel justified. People who absolutely hate them—that's cool, too. You aren't alone. There's more of us then there are of them, we just aren't a cohesive voting block.

Washington Post on Obama's Cincinnati visit

Girl Scout cookie sales data

Results of Girl Scout cookie poll

Cookie recipes for Christmas or any day

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 22:20:41 +0000

This year, as a Christmas gift to my family, I scanned the pages from my Grammy's recipe folio and turned them into a spiral-bound cookbook with the help of Lulu.com. The project took several months. But, through it, I feel like I was granted some extra time with the woman who was such an important part of my life. My Grammy is in that portfolio. The binder, held together with duct tape, has been around since my Dad and uncles were in high school. She typed the pages on her old typewriter and fixed the errors with correction fluid. She wrote notes into the margins—reminders about which recipes are best, what substitutions you could make, and what the measurements should be if you want to half or double the recipe. Looking at the recipes she chose to keep around, I see her. For instance, my Grammy was the kind of woman who collected no fewer than three recipes for spinach and bacon salads.

More seriously, the mix of recipes in this cookbook remind me that my Grammy was first, and foremost, a baker. Of the 315 pages, 106 of them are just bread recipes. If you look at all the baked goods, you've probably accounted for a good 2/3 of the cookbook. This is interesting to me, because while I love cooking, I am still at a level of baking that usually involves opening a box and adding an egg.

So I've set myself a challenge. Over the next year, I'm going to learn how to bake. And I'm going to learn from my Grammy. I haven't decided exactly how thoroughly I'm going to publicly document this process, but, suffice to say, a few of the recipes that work out particularly well are definitely going to end up here on BoingBoing. To kick things off, I'm starting with three cookie recipes that I baked for the first time yesterday and today—Cowboy Cookies (oatmeal-nut-chocolate chip cookies); Pumpkin-Nut Cookies; and Jam Thumbprint Tarts.

If those seem like weird selections for Christmas cookies, allow me to provide some context. In the Koerth family, Christmas cookies really meant "everybody's favorite cookies." Grammy knew which cookie each person liked the best. So, at Christmas, there would be as many as 10 different kinds of cookies, each flavor chosen to match a person. You could eat all the different kinds, but Grammy would also have a separate bag of your personal favorite set aside, ready to be sent home with you. My favorite are the Jam Tarts. My Dad loves the Cowboy Cookies. My husband didn't really have a personal favorite staked out yet, but through careful deduction, I've matched him to the Pumpkin-Nut. Grammy did make traditional Christmas sugar cookies—pine trees decorated with green sprinkle needles and Red Hot "lights". But only because my those are my Uncle Richard's favorite.

So these cookies may not match what you have in mind for the holidays. But that's okay. It just means you can make them anytime.

Cowboy Cookies

Cowboy Cookies are cookies for strong, silent loners who either have nobody around to judge them for eating a cookie that is made with two sticks of butter and two cups of sugar, or simply do not care.

Notes:

Grammy was big on sifting. To that end, she owned a hand-cranked flour sifter. I do not. I didn't really sift anything, and the cookies still turned out just fine. So why sift? There's a couple of things going on here. For one thing, back in the day, flour was more likely to have clumps in it, as well as bits of "extra protein" (i.e., bug parts). You sifted to get pure, light, fluffy flour. Another issue, and one that still matters today, is making sure the soda, salt, and baking powder aren't clumpy and are evenly distributed through the flour. I solved this issue by stirring those ingredients into the flour thoroughly with a fork. Finally, sifting can also help you make sure that the cup of flour you're measuring out is closer to an exact cup. It's easy to measure a cup of flour that contains more flour than the recipe intended, or less. I dealt with this by putting flour into my 1 cup measure a little at a time and tamping it down, and then leveling off at the end. It's probably not exact, but it's close enough that the recipe worked.
Liquid and solid: If you are used to making cookies with dry ingredients and liquid ingredients, this will be a bit weird, because the mixture of shortening, sugar, and eggs isn't quite either. (Insert your physics jokes here.) Don't worry. It will mix into the dry stuff with no problem.
Some thoughts on baking sheets: I ruined about half of my first batch of these. The bottoms ended up burnt black. I am not exactly sure what happened, but it's either one of two things. I might have over-greased a couple of the baking pans, creating a "frying" effect. Alternately, those pans might have been too dark. If you've ever worn a black t-shirt in summer, you'll have noticed that dark colors absorb more heat. This is also true of dark metal pans and things baked on them will bake faster. If that's all you have, try lowering the temperature or baking for a shorter amount of time. Also: Pull cookies out of the oven before they look "done". This is a big mistake that I made for years. If you wait until they look perfectly browned and solid, you'll end up with burnt cookies. In the photo below, you can see what the cookies should look like. Notice that they aren't real brown on top. They also looked sort of squishy still when I pulled them out of the oven. That's okay. Leave them to sit on the baking sheets for 10 minutes or so and they'll firm up the way you want them to.

Pumpkin nut cookies

For my own tastes, and those of my husband, I subtracted the raisins and added half a bag of white chocolate chips. You could add more. If you follow the substitutions suggested by Grammy here, you'll end up with something even vaguely sort of healthy. If that's what you're into.

Notes: The instructions here are pretty self-explanatory. There's only one thing I need to point out. When you mix together the wet and dry ingredients you will end up with a dough that is very different from standard cookie dough. It will be more like a cake or a bread when baked. There's a spongy poofiness to the dough that almost makes it seem like there's yeast in there. Which, to me, begs a question: What the hell is baking powder and what does it do?

As Wikipedia explains it, baking powder is sort of alterna-yeast. It's what you use to make baked goods a little more poofy and risen when you don't want to have the fermenty flavor that comes with yeast-based leavening. It works because baking powder is really just a combination of an acid and a base, cut with an inert starch. Get the powder wet, and the acid and base react, producing carbon dioxide. Bubbles of carbon dioxide create volume in the dough. Yada, yada, yada ... your Pumpkin-Nut cookies become something akin to individual hand-cakes.

Also: Because these cookies rise, rather than spread, you can pack them closer together on the baking sheet without fear of them oozing into one another. In the photo below, you can see how closely I baked these extra-large pumpkin-nut cookies. The distance between the cookies didn't change much at all between raw and baked.

Jam Thumbprint Tarts

Here is what I learned from making Jam Thumbprint Tarts: I am an asshole. Specifically, I am the kind of asshole who really, really loves deceptively simple cookies that are, in reality, kind of finicky and obnoxious. Sorry, Grammy.

Notes:

"It is better to chill this dough overnight." If you are like me (i.e., sort of lazy and naturally antagonistic) that sounds like a challenge. So I decided to test it. You know. For science. I split my batch of this dough in half. One part I baked immediately. The other part I put in the freezer for 45 minutes. Surprisingly (and I feel really weird questioning Grammy here) I found the un-chilled dough easier to work with. The chilled dough came out of the freezer even more crumbly than it originally had been, so smushing it up and forming it into stable balls took more effort. They also had more of tendency to start breaking apart as I put the first dent in them. And, post-baking, I found no difference in structural integrity of the cookies. This result could be a YMMV thing. My "more crumbly and frustrating" could be your "easier to deal with". It's also possible that 45 minutes in the freezer isn't a reasonable substitute for overnight in the refrigerator. But, either way, the un-chilled dough made cookies that were perfectly fine.
About the nuts: The recipe here calls for chopped pecans. That's fine. It's what I used today. But Grammy also made these with black walnuts from the timber and they are infinitely better that way. If you can get black walnuts, use them. Either way, make sure to break the nuts down into pretty small pieces. I started with pecan baking pieces and then smashed them up finer with a potato masher.
Achieving the ideal jam hole: As the instructions say, this is a two-step process. You can't get around that. The dough will be very crumbly. A lot of it won't even be stuck together at first. It'll just look like little riced grains. You'll need to mush it up and work it around a bit until it's kind of the consistency of play-dough. Then roll it into a ball. The balls should be small. You want these cookies to be compact, in order to lessen their chances of falling apart later. In the photo below, you can see the unbaked cookies lined up on a tray, with a 1/2 Tablespoon measure set out for a size comparison. I got 9 cookies out of a half-batch of dough.

Make your primary dent shallow. Otherwise the dough will start to break apart. A soft press of the thumb will do it. Don't worry if this isn't big enough to hold jam. You'll widen and deepen it later.

This is what the second denting should look like. If you've ever made a clay pinch pot, it's a lot like that. You don't want to leave the bottom too thin ... widen the hole, don't just deepen it. It's okay if there's cracks on the edges of the cookies. They do that.

Apply jam immediately after removing from the oven. You want the cookies nice and warm so the jam can sort of melt into them a little. Once they're filled though, leave them alone for a while until they've cooled down completely. You really, really want to give them every opportunity to firm up. It helps the structural integrity. Here's the half batch of cookies made from non-chilled dough, filled with apricot preserves.

Perma-cookie wars continue: KISSMetrics sneaks cookies back onto your computer even if you turn off every cookie vector

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 15:37:55 +0000

A group of respected security researchers have published a paper documenting the tactics used by KISSmetrics -- a company that counts Hulu and many other Internet giants among its customers -- to install and read back cookies on your computer even if you don't want them. Using a kind of kitchen-sink approach, KISSmetrics is able to track your computer even if you've got cookies, Flash cookies and other common cookie-setting vectors turned off. It's one thing for companies to say that they only gather information about users who allow such tracking; it's another thing for a company to go to endless lengths to circumvent their users' best attempts to shield themselves from tracking.

“Both the Hulu and KISSmetrics code is pretty enlightening,” Soltani told Wired.com in an e-mail. “These services are using practically every known method to circumvent user attempts to protect their privacy (Cookies, Flash Cookies, HTML5, CSS, Cache Cookies/Etags…) creating a perpetual game of privacy ‘whack-a-mole’.”
“This is yet another example of the continued arms-race that consumers are engaged in when trying to protect their privacy online since advertisers are incentivized to come up with more pervasive tracking mechanisms unless there’s policy restrictions to prevent it.”
They point to their research that found that when a user visited Hulu.com, they would get a “third-party” cookie set by KISSmetrics with a tracking ID number. KISSmetrics would pass that number to Hulu, allowing Hulu to use it for its own cookie. Then if a user visited another site that was using KISSmetrics, that site’s cookie would get the exact same number as well.
So that makes it possible, the researchers say, for any two sites using KISSmetrics to compare their databases, and ask things like “Hey, what do you know about user 345627?” and the other site could say “his name is John Smith and his email address is this@somefakedomainname.com and he likes these kinds of things.”

Flash Cookies and Privacy II: Now with HTML5 and ETag Respawning (paper)

Researchers Expose Cunning Online Tracking Service That Can’t Be Dodged (Wired) (via /.)