Christmas time is cookie time in germany, here is a recipe, for uhm, many:
Ingredients:
- 500gr flour
- 250gr normal butter (no light version or something if extra salt)
- 250gr suggar
- 16 gr vanilla sugar
- 4 middle sized eggs
[because of stupid web browsers (chrome) the preview pictures can lie on their side, klick on them for high res blur pictures but with the correct orientation]
making this is really easy. Take eveything into a big mixing bowl. Tip1: Do not use a normal bowl, makes the mixing way harder. Tip2: Do not use a bowl that is too small, also makes the mixing harder. Tip3: DO NOT COMBINE TIP1 and TIP2 (like I did):
And combined with the eggs:
The bowl has no proper form for mixing in it, which made it quite hard, but it worked. The dough is ready when it is totally sticky:
Now wrap it up in cling wrap and put it in the freezer for at least 4 hours. This will cool down the butter which makes it easier to roll it out (everything is better with a thumb up):
After 4 hours you can start to roll it out, try to make it at least 0,5cm thick, excel the dough, put the pieces on baking paper, coat them with yolk and than add some suggar based crumbles:
Now comes the really fun part. We are software engineers, so we work like software engineers, even while baking. Rob Nelson talked about deployment pattern during his puppetconf talk (which I linked here and here):
okay => good => better => new tech => okay => good => better => repeat (expect the good and not the best, but repeat/iterate)
This is a perfect pattern for baking cookies! I made dough for four-five baking tins, so we got four to five iterations to start with “okay cookies” and end up with “freaking awesome cookies”. Here are the other baking tins that I prepared:
Here is a picture of the first result. They are perfect for our pattern because there is room for improvements!
They are really thin, I had them in the oven for 10 minutes at 200 degree Celsius (like the original recipe mentioned). What can we do to improve it? I made the dough a bit thicker, but didn’t change the time/temperature:
This looks better, but still not perfect. For the next iteration I lowered the time to 9 minutes:
And now I have a huge box full of cookies \o/
Thanks Rob for teaching me how to bake!