- Use butter. Seriously, your cookies will be denser and more flavorful if you use butter instead of shortening.
- Use only 3 parts semi-sweet, 1 part milk. I'm referring to chocolate chips. If you use this combination, for some reason, the chocolate flavor will be kicked up a notch.
- Use Old Fashioned Rolled Oats. If your recipe calls for oatmeal, please throw out the quick oats. Rolled oats will make your cookies chewier and tastier.
- Not all cookie sheets are the same. It's a good idea to practice with different kinds of sheets when you try out a recipe for the first time. Some cookies work better with thick sheets, some work better with thin sheets.
- Raisins belong with pumpkin. Who started putting chocolate chips in pumpkin cookies? That's gross.
- Make the cookies you like. You know I why I rarely made peanut butter cookies? Because I don't like peanut butter cookies. (How does that make your cookies better? You probably won't practice a recipe you aren't eating.)
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Secrets from a cookie snob
I am a total cookie snob. This week was finals and there were some ladies (I'm guessing mom's of some of the students) were just handing out chocolate chip cookies. I took some, of course, and within the first bite I knew that they had used vegetable shortening. I've trained my pallet to be able to tell the difference, but that's not all. So, here I will share some secrets to make your cookies better.
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2 comments:
We all like your cookies and enjoy reading your blogs. Here are some suggestions from a writing snob:
1. Proofread at least once, more if you will be graded or paid. Reading aloud helps too. I once knew an editor who read a text backward when looking for spelling mistakes and typos. She said she didn't get pulled into the sense that way.
2. Have someone else read what you have written. They may or may not catch things your proofreading should, but they will tell you what they found hard to understand or harsh.
3. Don't indent bullets (my preference, dating from Unisys days). It's just as effective and doesn't waste space (especially if you have to have subordinate bullets).
4. Watch out for rewrites or rephrasings. It is easy to put the new phrase in and neglect to get the old one all the way out.
5. Given a word choice, choose the simpler word. Not only will you reach a wider audience, but the simple words won't distract from the message as less familiar words sometimes do.
I am very proud of what you have become and are becoming. You write well. These suggestions are off the top of my head as your cookie suggestions are off the top of yours. Only some of them apply to this particular blog. I'll let you figure out which apply and which do not.
Dad
Thanks for the complement. As far as what applies to this post: the indented bullets were just part of the auto-formatting, but I'll pay better attention to that in the future; I do say some things that could be construed as "harsh," but I was trying to do it in a playful way (it may not have come off that way). After rereading, I haven't found any typos or grammatical errors, nor have I found any time that I used an overly complicated word, so I think that's it.
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