Holiday baking! One of the best parts of the holiday season is that grocery stores put baking staples on sale. This year, that’s netted me slightly larger than usual savings, and in return, I have been seeking out holiday themed recipes.
We didn’t make pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, so as I flipped through more of The Cookie Connection, this recipe for spiced cookies seemed like a good substitute. It doesn’t have pumpkin, but it has a similar spice blend.
However, it is an oatmeal cookie, which has sometimes worked out great and sometimes poorly.
This batch also fit the recent trend of rushed baking. Rather than planning ahead, I realized we were already using the oven for dinner, so I rushed to get the batch out that evening.
For once, I actually did mix the dry ingredients ahead of time. It takes longer, but it seemed important to actually distribute the spices. There’s also a bit of rosemary at the top for a surprise flavor.
The dough starts by creaming together the butter and sugar. I don’t have a picture of it, but I’m guessing I actually cut up the butter before I mixed the dry ingredients so it could warm up slightly before creaming.
The eggs were supposed to be room temperature, but I presumably didn’t have that much time, so I just put them in warm water.
I have a plastic shield for the top of the mixer, but I’m usually too lazy to use it. It just seems like another thing to wash, so I take my chances and hope the dry ingredients don’t fly out of the mixer onto the counter.
You can probably guess what happened this time.
The dough was relatively firm after mixing in the oats.
I baked the first batch at the instructed temperature. The pictures in the book don’t look like they spread much. Mine did, and I started to worry.
Oddly, the recipe includes pan-banging, too, so I did it, and the edges began to set very dark while the inside was still uncooked.
I pulled them out before the inside was fully cooked and let them ride on the baking sheet. I think the next two pictures more or less illustrate how they continued to cook even after out of the oven.
So this recipe didn’t work out for me: they definitely spread too much. To verify and counteract this, I played around with the rest of the dough over the following weeks. I went all the way from totally frozen to refrigerated, conventional to convection, large to toaster oven, but none of it worked. They all spread
Some did turn out much darker than others, but otherwise, they were quite similar. I presume the problem started with the dough, but I’m not sure I would try again.
Despite their appearance, the cookies tasted fine. The cookies were still tender when they were freshly cooked, but they quickly became fragile and crunchy with age.
If you want some holiday spices in your cookies, you can find the recipe on bake from scratch.