high-bar baking

“Do you have a cookie cutter?” More of them than you want to know about, lady. 

“What? Why?” Someone cares?

“These cookies are all so perfect! How did you get them all that perfectly round? Did you use a cookie cutter?”

A coworker held up one of Alison’s Salted Chocolate Chunk Shortbread cookies as she asked. 

Two thoughts came to mind, one of which was an inside thought and the other which I expressed out loud. They’re not even that round, my dude, and “Oh, no, not at all! They’re log cookies! I rolled them in a log and then sliced them!”

We can debate the first one (it’s true, but I suppose we could have an argument where you’d be wrong. That would be fun for one of us), but the second one is more interesting. It’s a fun little perspective shift, isn’t it? Roll all the cookies flat, then stamp them out, versus forming them into round logs and letting a couple minutes of initial effort pay off when you slice them in a few hours. All of a sudden, getting perfect-ish circles requires no special tools. Barring gravity, and it would be way more special to work without that than with it. 

The story’s too much fun to imagine it’s anecdotal, but gravity always makes me think of the Space Race. America spent thousands of dollars getting a pen to work in space (Look, if it isn’t true, don’t correct me). You don’t think about it, but that’s the only reason pens work, the gravity. In space, something has to push the ink down (“down”) toward the paper. They figured it out eventually, after putting loads of research into it. The kicker to the story is usually this: how did Russia do it? They gave the cosmonauts pencils. 

Keep it simple, stupid. 

Right? Wrong. The addendum to the story is twofold: graphite from pencils will short out electrical circuits if left to wander the air of a closed space station (no gravity to send it to the floor, remember?). And we still use the pen technology. Not for pens, that’d be overkill. No, for something useful; dispensing medications at desired flow rates. How’s that for American ingenuity? 

Except, for the love of God, can we put the whole “feet” thing to rest and get on with meters? I had a pilot at my last job who liked to say, “Feet and miles are the American way! We made it to the moon with feet and miles!” Yes, but can you imagine how much easier it would have been working in base ten? Finger math, people! Tens all the way down! None of this “29 knuts in a sickle, 17 sickles in a galleon” business. 

Speaking of things we don’t need, you don’t need the egg on these cookies. It’s extremely messy to paint egg wash on the outside of a log just to roll the whole thing in sugar, and my delicate sensibilities can’t handle the task. Especially since I don’t have to — just roll the log in sugar when it’s still soft, before you refrigerate it! You’re welcome. 

Oh, and these cookies are really good.