Cookies-Divine

Since my surgery, I have worked very hard at eating cookies. There was a brief moment in my life when moderation ruled: in the years before the surgery, my sweetheart and I would stop at two cookies after supper. But after, it seemed, what did it matter? Occasionally I like to make the anosmic’s joke that “those who can’t smell, don’t.” As a parallel form of reasoning, if you can’t taste it, it’s as if you haven’t eaten it in the first place, so have another cookie.

A little over a year after the surgery I traveled to England, where I was reacquainted with the biscuit. Cheap and plentiful, they tasted of crispy sugar flavored with chocolate or ginger or textured with oats. And when I later went to visit the man I thought I loved, he had filled his cupboards with a variety of biscuits to greet me. He was, I suppose, another boyfriend who sought to fatten me up – though in this case it was for the kill (he traded me in for a newer-younger-thinner-and-quite-possibly-duller model two years – and approximately twenty boxes of biscuits – after he fell in love with me; I haven’t eaten a British biscuit since).

As store-bought delicacies go back in the States where I live, I’ve always preferred the crunchy: Oreos (the low-fat are crunchiest), ginger snaps, chocolate wafers that snap too, and shortbread that offers a soft crunch and that tastes clearly before and now as butter-sugar-flour. But lately I’ve been baking cookies again myself. I blame/credit my brother Bowman, who gave me the Milkbar cookbook for Christmas after we spent a fall day trolling New York in search of Milkbar peanut butter cookies for our peanut-butter-loving older brother. This cookbook is a revelation, its author Christina Tosi a genius. For me, it’s done for cookies what Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cake Bible did for cakes. Making cookies with Tosi’s methods is like making cookies for the first time.

Aside from the miniature treats made in my Easy Bake Oven, cookies were the first sweet I baked by myself. I always made them by hand – creaming the sugar and butter with a wooden spoon, beating in the eggs and vanilla, adding the flour and baking soda and salt. The batter was reasonably smooth, but it sat in thick doughy masses, like a series of small mountains rather than one big sphere of yum. Now I’m mixing with my Kitchen Aid (orange, of course). Blending the eggs after the butter and sugars takes up to ten minutes in the Milkbar way. This changes the texture completely: the cookie dough becomes smooth, more like batter, actually, than dough. And Tosi tells me that you have to refrigerate cookie dough to get the right consistency when baked. As for baking, I have been experimenting to get the perfect texture; it took me more than three batches before I got it right. I’ve learned to let the cookies appear to be not entirely done when I take them out – the sides are browned, but they haven’t quite flattened, and unlike a cake they most definitely do not spring back to the touch. Instead they fall when they cool, so that the look is ultimately what one expects in a cookie, but the texture is just chewy enough, like the Milkbar delights I’d come to love and thought I could never reproduce myself.

At some time of in-between singlehood, a friend told me that it was a crime I didn’t have a family to cook for. Today I’m baking cookies for my students. Is this a relocated maternal instinct? Perhaps. But it’s also bred of the knowledge that they have quicker metabolisms than most of my friends and they don’t yet eschew cookies like grown-ups are supposed to. In any case, everyone needs an audience – readers, listeners, cookie-eaters. The best audience members – and you know who you are – are all three.