Oreo-style Cookies

UPDATE: My brother claims that he adores these cookies. He even asked whether I blogged about them! He thinks that they're amazing and sweet and cookie-ish. My sister also likes them too. Therefore, I will make these for them at some point in the future.

I like Oreo cookies, even though I generally prefer soft cookies over crunchy ones. Oreos, however, have a specifically... dusty, gritty, cocoa taste. I think that I'd make these again, but I'd let them be soft/bake them for a shorter amount of time. I'll just continue to eat Oreos from the packet (without the filling. I don't like Oreo filling much.) I got the recipe from a website (*insert bitter rant here, into which I will not divulge*) that got it from Smitten Kitchen but I changed some of it to include whole wheat flour and less butter.

INGREDIENTS for about 36 flat cookies 6 cm in diameter

100 g white flour

35 g whole wheat flour

240 g caster sugar

120 g butter

pinch of salt

0.25 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

50 g unsweetened cocoa powder

1 egg

METHOD

1. Let butter soften in a bowl.

2. Throw everything into the bowl except the egg.

3. Cut butter. Keep cutting. You will start off with a powdery mixture (west of image below), but over time, you'll get something that looks like cookie crumbs and and SMELLS LIKE OREOS!! (south east of image).

4. Crack an egg into the crumbs and mix until you get a thick, scoopable batter. Each cookie is about one sort-of-heaped teaspoonful of batter. Remember to grease the pan with the butter wrapper!

5. Bake in an unpreheated oven at 182 degrees C/360 degrees F on the lower rack for 8 minutes if you want soft cookies or 10 minutes if you want hard cookies. They will be shiny.

6. Let cookies sit in oven for 10-15 minutes.

7. Take cookies out of oven and stick them on a cooling rack. They may seem really soft when they come out of the oven, but they harden slightly over time. I find it easier to put the cookies upside down on the cooling rack.

ALTERNATIVE METHOD

After step 4: microwave the scoops of cookie dough for 45 seconds. Take out of microwave, flip over, and microwave for another 30 seconds. The cookies from the microwave are crispier (for sure) and taste a little more greasy. However, they cook ~4 times as fast, so that's a plus, right?

Late July Vanilla Bean and Green Tea Sandwich Cookies

I'm going to admit it; I was highly swayed by advertising. The phrase "Green Tea" caught my eye, and I believed that for once, I could buy a green tea flavoured cookie from a non-specialty store!

I was so upset when I realised that these sandwich cookies do not taste like green tea. Green tea is actually the last ingredient on the list. In fact, if it weren't for the placebo effect [after chewing on the cookie for simply ages and thinking, oh! Perhaps that bitter note was the green tea!], I would honestly just say that they are normal sandwich cookies.

Compared to Oreos, however, they are much more flavourful. The cookies are crunchier, more chocolately, and more crumbly textured [instead of the uniform texture of Oreos]. The vanilla filling isn't that waxy, actually tastes vanilla-ful, is less sweet, and really melts well in my mouth. It has dimension, unlike the Oreo cookie filling.

Of course, I may be swayed [yet again] by the fact that these are organic and reputedly made by one family [although how they get each cookie to look perfect with the indents and stuff is beyond a "one family operation", in my opinion, and as the website states that this is all cooked up by one mother, she should understand that other mothers/people in general don't like spending 2x the amount of money to buy something that is already unhealthy. Except for the mental-chillness of eating cookies, they are physically not really healthy, no matter what people say.

My Brain Isn't Fried!!

...But my food is.

Today I did absolutely no work. I had an extra half an hour of spare time because we finished comp sci recitation early, and I had an extra two hours of spare time because we got out of bio lab early. My Thursdays usually go from 9 to 2, then 4:30 to 7:30. Today, however, I had all this extra time! Perhaps I should've done some homework. I used it very unwisely, but very wisely all the same; I slept, I read The Hobbit , I went to Quiz Bowl, I watched Robocop ... and I fried apples!

At 10pm, my dorm house had Fry Night; there were fried Oreos, fried apples, fried pop-pastries, and one fried cherry pie [which I fried!]. I wanted to fry an orange, but apparently oranges are too watery...

So, here is a fried Oreo. Since the kitchen table area apparently lacks lights, I had to use flash, and with oily hands and people swarming around picking up food, picture-taking was a bit difficult. I'm quite unhappy about this image, but I can say that the oreo cream was literally dripping, and it looked like icing. The cookie was moist, and the batter was...well, fried batter. 90% oil.

The rejects...

...tasted great too!

These are a close up of the fried Oreos; they look so perfectly elliptical!

After a while, I decided to help out at the fryer, and this reminded me of Spongebob although I don't think I've actually seem him frying fries; he does have a deep-fryer though [I think?]. J, who had been at the fryer, had burned himself a bit when the oil splattered on him, which made me scared to use a wooden stick to flip the fried items over... but I did it anyway, so now I smell like fryer oil. It was fun, though!

I made a few batches of stuff, and this was the last batch; the huge thing in the middle is a cherry pie. A pre-packaged oblong cherry pie. I couldn't flip it over with a wooden skewer/stick, so I had to use a knife, and it was seriously difficult to manoeuvre it, with oily hands. I thought this was really fun, though, and a few specks of oil did fling onto my arms but they were really minuscule, so it's alright.

I really loved the fried apple; it reminds me of fried apple pie which I used to adore in HK, from McDevil. It was perhaps more enjoyable than the fried Oreo, to be honest. I accidentally ate some fried pop-pastry, because I thought it was just an abnormally small piece of fried Oreo. It tasted like melted pop-pastry, and I decided just to finish the rest of my chunk instead of wasting it, despite the fact there were PHO and HFCS in it. Oh, that reminds me; today I was eating a calzone and realised that there was small cubes of ham in it...because I suddenly tasted ham. I suppose that was a bit upsetting. Oh well...

Here is the fried cherry pie...cut into pieces because it was really huge. I didn't eat it, though. They also tried to fry chocolate but the batter kept slipping off or something.

I'm really glad I went and helped out. It was all delicious and fun, and I have to say I did have an amazing day!