Rachel’s Cookie Club

As most of you know, and your waistlines can attest, I like to bake. I especially like to bake cookies.

I started my baking career early in life, helping Mom make batches of chocolate chip cookies. Before I had even discovered FIMO tools like the pasta roller, I was shooting dough out of the cookie press to make shaped and decorated press cookies. When Becca Loeffler’s family moved to New Mexico, we would spend hours on the phone talking and baking concurrently, hundreds of miles away from each other.

Of course my real cookie coup came in my senior year of high school, when Stephanie Williamson and I co-founded the Cookie Club. We formed an officially-chartered school club, but limited membership to senior girls (guys could join, but only if they wore a skirt on their assigned day). I drew up a schedule, and every Friday a different person was assigned to bring in cookies for the rest of the group. We made up official-sounding titles for everyone who wanted one, and Mr. Dunkum was our faculty sponsor. Every month or so, we would have a Cookie Club lunch where Steph would pick up Chico’s Mexican food for everyone and we would sit in Mr. Dunkum’s classroom at lunch to eat and share cookies. Good times.

In the years since then, I have added to my dessert repertoire, but gingersnaps will always be my signature cookie. They were also nearly the cause of a tragic accident in college. I made a batch of gingersnaps while home for winter break, and brought a large Tupperware container full of them back to school with me. A day or two later, I walked into my apartment after class, and saw my roommate Jen splayed out across the couch, an arm dropping to the floor with a half-eaten cookie beside it, her eyes shut but her mouth wide open and covered in crumbs. The cookie container lay ajar on the floor beside her, with just three cookies remaining. “Oh no!,” I thought. “DEATH BY COOKIE!”

Luckily, Jen had merely eaten herself into a food coma, not a more permanent state of cookie overdose. And she still requests gingersnaps whenever she comes to visit.

Although Rachel believes she sprang full-grown as a cookie maker when she was 16, I baked cookies with all of my kids. It was always a great activity, and actually pretty educational. You had to measure and do math. I always said I could whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookies in half an hour, or one hour if one of the kids was helping me.

Three things make the most difference in making cookies: the kind of butter or margarine you use, the amount of flour, and the precise time of baking. The same recipe will come out radically different as you vary those three things.

The cookies will spread into thin wafers if you go light on the flour, and stand in solid mounds if you use too much. I go light on the flour until I bake the first batch to see how much they spread out.

If adding flour to the batter makes it sweeter and thinner, you’re probably not adding flour. Powdered sugar and flour look remarkably similar to a 14-year-old boy.