Mostly about cookies
I have basically been hibernating since Christmas (with a brief trip to New York for The Today Show), because my deadline for my next book was this week (I turned it in! You should get to read it this summer! Preorder here! FYI, it will also be in trade paperback, not just the two options currently listed -- that should update over the next few days!) (It should also be in audio, but I don’t know when that’ll be up for preorder, stay tuned!). So if you've sent me a tweet or email or message in a bottle, I either did not see it or responded nonsensically, my apologies! The only other thing I did was finish reading one book and also get obsessed with a specific cookie recipe. Will I tell you about both? Yes, absolutely, but before that: the ebook of The Wedding Party will be on sale on Amazon for $1.99 on Sunday, January 19th only! So if you have not bought it yet, here is your chance, and tell your friends!
The book I finished was Furious Hours, and it was fantastic! (I tend to read a lot of nonfiction when I'm deep in writing fiction, stay tuned for more about the two books I'm currently in the middle of, both of which are great so far). Furious Hours is a really original book -- part true crime, part history, part biography of Harper Lee, and it all works incredibly well and is a fascinating read. I have a very complicated (to put it kindly) relationship with To Kill a Mockingbird (as do many Black people who had to read it in elementary and high school), and I never thought I would enjoy a book centered around Harper Lee so much, but I really did. So much of the writing about her tends to be far too worshipful for my taste, and I really appreciated the honest, straightforward look at her and her work in this book, as well as the fascinating story about a five time murderer, his killer and the lawyer who represented them both -- the story she spent years working on but never published a book about. Also, a lot of true crime tends to creep me out (either by how much the writer doesn't seem to care about the victims, or how violent it is) but this book isn't like that at all. I enjoyed this book a lot and I hope you will too.
Cookie time.
Any of you who follow me on Instagram and watch my stories know I've been obsessed with these cookies for the past week. It all started because I was already in the mood to do some baking, which is always a good writing break for me, and then the New York Times Cooking Instagram account posted this picture. How could I resist? I had all of the ingredients, so I made the dough the next day, and made two of the wildly enormous cookies the recipe has you make, and have then made a cookie or two basically...every day since then (my last cookie is in the oven as I type). The dough recipe is very similar to your basic chocolate chip cookie recipe, but the way you bake them is very quirky: first, they're huge (like, the size of a saucer); second, you take the cookie sheet out of the oven three times during cooking and BANG the cookie sheet down, to make those ripples in the cookies, so they have a super crispy outside and a soft and chewy inside. They are very fun to make, and taste great, but I have some NOTES on the recipe, after making them so much this week, which I am happy to share with you below!
Giant Crinkled Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients
2 cups/256 grams all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 pound/227 grams/2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1 1/2 cups/302 grams granulated sugar
1/4 cup/55 grams packed brown sugar (light or dark)
1 egg
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 ounces/170 grams bittersweet chocolate, chopped into coarse pieces of various sizes
Instructions
Adjust an oven rack to the middle position, and line a baking sheet or two with parchment paper or aluminum foil. In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle, or just a large bowl, beat the butter on medium until creamy. Add the sugars and beat on medium until light and fluffy, about two to three minutes. Add the egg, vanilla, and two tablespoons water, and mix on low to combine. Add the flour mixture, and mix on low to combine, and do the same with the chopped chocolate.
Okay, so at this point, the recipe says the dough can be refrigerated for several hours or overnight, and I am here to tell you that this recipe works a lot better if you indeed do that! It's not an absolute, I went straight on to the rest of the recipe the first day and made two cookies and they were good, but they spread a LOT more than the ones I made after the dough had been in the fridge for a while. And, this is key: the recipe says you can make four of these on one cookie sheet, but if I had tried to make four of them on one cookie sheet right away, they ALL would have ran together, I am certain of that. If you do make them right away, I would recommend either only making two at a time, or making them smaller than the recipe calls for, just so you don't have a sheet of cookie (which would taste just fine! But that's probably not what you were going for).
When you are ready to make the cookies: turn the oven to 350 degrees. Form the dough into 3.5 ounce or 100 gram balls, which the recipe says are a heaping 1/3 cup each. My first few cookies were exactly 100 grams each (which is why I know if you did 4 cookies on the sheet and followed the recipe exactly it would be a sheet of cookie!) but I made a few in subsequent days that were in the 80-90 gram range and baked them for like a minute less and they were great. Place the balls of dough on your cookie sheet and put the cookie sheet in the freezer for 15 minutes before baking. If you, like me, do not have room in your freezer for a cookie sheet with four balls of dough on it, do what I did and put the cookies on either parchment scraps or (exactly what I did) empty butter wrappers and put those in smaller bowls or plates and put them in the freezer, and tuck the cookie sheet in the fridge to get cold while the dough is in the freezer.
NOW THE FUN PART. Bake the cookies for 10 minutes. The cookies will be a little puffed in the center. Then, take the cookie sheet out of the oven and bang it down (I did this on top of the stove) so that the edges ripple out a little and the inside falls, and put the cookie sheet back in the oven. Set your timer for 2-3 minutes later, and bang the cookies down again. 3 minutes later, do it again! Then 2-3 minutes later, take the cookies out of the oven. In total, they bake about 17-18 minutes (or a little less, depending on if you've made them slightly smaller). Take them out of the oven, and sprinkle some Maldon salt on top of the cookies (optional, but I love this). Now, and this is another key they don't mention in the recipe: these are cookies you have to wait to cool before you eat them! I mean, they do sort of say in the recipe to let them cool, but recipes always say that and most cookies are great warm, but these are orders of magnitude better when you let them cool all the way before eating. (This last tip comes from Sophie, one of the Two Bossy Dames, who also went on a cookie adventure last week).
Have a great weekend, everyone! I hope wherever you are, you have good books and lots of cookies!
Jasmine
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