Friday, February 08, 2008

Julia Child, I Am Not.

Do these look like sugar cookies to you?


I believe I posted previously about my greatest new cookbook, Small Batch Baking. I had made vanilla cupcakes and they were pretty yummy.

I had a craving for sugar cookies, and figured with my sister coming in last weekend that it would be fun to make the dough the night before she arrived, and then make cookies with my million and one cookie cutters the next day. The other sugar cookie recipe I have, which is from my friend Heidi and is so very, very yummy (though dairy-laden), makes entirely too many cookies for my needs so I turned to my small-batch cookbook.

I found this recipe:


And set to work making the batter. Can I just say that it is amazingly annoying and difficult to measure 1 tablespoon plus one teaspoon of egg? Anyway, since we're dairy-free in this household, I substituted Smart Balance light for the unsalted butter.

Well, apparently that is not a proper substitution, as the dough didn't quite cooperate. I knew I was in trouble when the directions said to turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead it for 30 seconds. I was skeptical when I looked at my runny dough, and definitely knew something was wrong after I stuck my hand in the big pile of GOO. I had quite the time scraping the dough off with a silicone Pampered Chef spatula.

The dough looked and tasted like chocolate chip cookie dough without the chocolate chips, so I just reached into the cabinet, pulled out the Ghirardelli semi-sweet chips (which are dairy-free, of course) and eyeballed the amount.

I baked them according to the recipe time, plus another 7 minutes or so. I'm glad our new oven has a light inside.

The verdict on these cookies? They were ok for a last-minute improvisation, but I won't bother with that recipe again until/unless I can use real butter. They were rather crunchy and not like I like my chocolate chip cookies to taste. They weren't awful, and the entire dozen lasted only a day, but I will stick to my old chocolate chip cookie recipe in the future!

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