SuperMegaAwesome Cookies

I triumphantly returned to the world of baked goods on Sunday. I made chocolate chip cookies with walnuts from scratch. They're awesome.

Cookies, in my opinion, have suffered a PR crisis in recent years. Those pre-packaged dough tubes, where you just scoop and bake, take the magic out of a simple recipe. Those cookies can be good, but not as good as ones freshly made.

Part of my reluctance to make cookies from scratch has been butter. To make the dough, I needed two sticks of 'softened' butter. First of all, when I feel like cookies, I don't often have two sticks of unfrozen butter. When it is unfrozen, I always struggle to get it 'softened' without being 'melted liquid'.

I think a big part of successful cooking isn't just following recipes but being able to accumulate knowledge about processes and tricks. With the butter, I learned eventually that if I put the butter sticks over the part of the stove where the pilot flames burn (between the burners), they'll soften without melting.

Another trick I learned that may or may not have any bearing on the outcome of the cookies is letting the eggs warm to room temperature. I read this somewhere. I think it's for baking. Maybe it's for egging houses. Either way, it's better to have room temperature eggs than cold ones.

The point of the story is that I've eaten a lot of cookies in the last two days. Good cookies.