I like to cook with my mom. It's a big thing in our family, but my cooking and how I think about it comes from her. When I found a cookie cookbook that blends science and creativity, I timed my review testing to make sure I got a chance to see her.
The book was discovered by me thanks to a food writer who lives in Seattle and runs a bakery in front of her house. Chris Taylor and Paul Arguin, a couple who work for the Centers for Disease Control at their day jobs, wrote The New Pie, an esteemed cookbook.
Cookbook recipes for cookies can be tiring. They mix it up in their book. They borrowed a trick from Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot to make their chocolate chip cookies use brown butter.
If you mix that by hand, Mom said, it's going to get gruesome.
We moved on to lemon cheesecakes. I pulled out the scale to see if it would be a good way to measure her by weight.
She set the big rolling pin on the scale as I tried to reconcile my hopes and dreams. It's 1, 236 grams.
It cuts down on cleaning since you don't have to wash the measuring cups, and it produces fantastic, consistent results since you pour the ingredients directly into the bowl.
I made brownies with my nephew Eli who is interested in cooking and is curious about timing and temperature in a recipe. You get wall-to-wall fudge if you cook brownies in a water bath called a bain-Marie.
My dad, who is not known for his sweet tooth, was the first sign that the book was going to be a hit. He took out a chunk of brownies with each trip.
We switched to pia colada oatmeal cookies with a history of the drink in the head notes. Normally, a cookie with a name like this wouldn't be my bag, but Taylor and Arguin features roasted pineapple chunks, shredded coconut, and dark rum. I didn't want to go full Malibu, so I gotMyers's. Mom's hand was very helpful in this case. She would look over my shoulder and say "three more minutes" after I peeked in the oven to make sure they weren't done.
After that, we made little coconut cookies that were made with Instant ClearJel to firm up the fruit-pie filling. Maybe it was the brand of preserves we used or that we could have used more, but it still sucks out the sides, which was a great excuse to double our intake. The fruit made a great foil for the coconut and coconut flakes. It wasn't everyone's favorite, but those of us who loved it, gave it a perfect score on the fabulousness scale.
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