high-bar baking

I’m hanging out with some line dancing friends this afternoon, so I decided to make Sarah’s Brown Sugar Cookies and Chocolate Sugar Cookies. I like to make her sugar cookie recipes in pairs; I think it’s fun. But I learned from last time that you can’t make sugar cookies and chocolate sugar cookies for the same event. People just do not give the plain (“plain”) sugar cookie its due, not when there’s chocolate sitting nearby. Then I spend the entire time as a weird promotor of the sugar cookie, telling people who absolutely never asked, “Don’t sleep on the sugar cookie!!!” Because for some reason I’m anthropomorphizing them and it makes me sad that the regular sugars aren’t getting picked for kickball. 

Fine, I’ll be an adult and own up to the real reason. I’m showing off. One hundred percent. There’s no earthly reason to make two batches of cookies for a hangout of six, even operating under the assumption I’ll leave them for the host to freeze and eat at her leisure. But when it comes to baking (especially with people who are not already under the influence of my culinary charms), I walk around like John Mulaney in one of his old bits, needing so badly for people to like me all of the time. My Achilles heel, really. 

So two different types of cookies it is. It’s also useful to have the chocolates around because people have a hard time understanding the brown sugar cookie, at least before they try it. Afterwords, they’re on board. But before — and I get it, I was the same way — they don’t have a mental model for a brown sugar cookie. They have the holiday idea of molasses cookies (which is one of the closer approximations, although no one’s ever made that connection), but nothing subtler and unspiced. I’ve had these mistaken for ginger cookies, for cinnamon cookies, for peanut butter cookies… people just don’t know what to do with brown. 

But they’re worth the temporary confusion on the part of your guests, and I recommend trying them out. It’s honestly one of my favourite recipes from 100 Cookies, and that’s saying something. They remind me of what I love about a chocolate-chip-less chocolate chip cookie, the one you got at the end of portioning dough when you were a kid and there weren’t any chips left in the bowl. I think other people went back to the fridge so no cookie went unadorned, but I know now that what I was so attached to was the brown sugar. Especially in a mediocre CCC recipe with generic semisweet chips, the chocolate can get in the way of that. 

No mods to this recipe; none have ever been needed. Oh, I did test once, though, and you should not get clever and try to use Demerara sugar to roll the browns in. It muddies the flavour. 

I’ve recently been playing with a tip from Zoë’s book (Zoë Bakes Cakes) where she recommends adding the vanilla into the fat when you begin mixing. So instead of putting the vanilla in at the end of the butter and sugar whipping process, with the eggs, you would add it to the butter right from the get-go. The idea is that most flavours are fat-soluble, so you want to give them as much time getting to know the fat as possible. I don’t know if it actually matters, as I haven’t done any sort of real comparison. But I know it smells very, very good in my kitchen, and that it is an easy thing to do that does not hurt. So I have no plans of stopping anytime soon.