When I would help my mom bake, I liked being the one to measure out brown sugar.
Unlike the flour, which you had to carefully place in the measuring cup and not tamp down, brown sugar was always meant to be packed in and smooshed down.
I still get a special joy from measuring it out. It’s a little like playing with wet sand, except you can’t lick your fingers off on the beach (or at least you shouldn’t).
I recently tried a very simple cookie recipe from the blog “Sally’s Baking Addiction.” I didn’t get my cookies to set up as much as I would have liked, but what resulted were extremely soft, sweet cookies that I could easily spend a month’s worth of calories on in very short order.
You can find the original recipe at http://sallysbakingaddiction.com/2013/12/20/chewy-brown-sugar-cookies/. I added more vanilla and cinnamon in my version.
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Chewy Brown Sugar Cookies
Ingredients
3/4 cup butter, melted
1 1/4 cups packed brown sugar
1 egg
3 teaspoons vanilla
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup sugar (for rolling cookies)
Directions
Beat together the butter and brown sugar until smooth. Beat in the egg and vanilla.
Add in the flour, baking soda, cornstarch, cinnamon and salt and mix until well-combined.
Cover and refrigerate for at least two hours.
Remove the dough from the fridge and preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
Scoop the dough out about two tablespoons at a time, roll it in a ball, and then roll it in the white sugar.
Bake for 8 to 12 minutes or until the cookies are set up nicely. They will still be very soft in the middle. Let them cool completely before transferring them into a container.
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Even though I let my cookies cool, they were pretty doughy in the middle and ended up sticking together pretty badly in the container (not that it stopped us from devouring them). I should have put layers of waxed paper between them.
We ended up breaking the resulting “mega-cookie” into pieces and eating it that way, and no one complained. After all, if you’re only eating pieces of cookies, you can’t count how many whole cookies you ate, right? (OK, so that’s what I’ve been telling myself.)
Sometimes the simplest recipes are the yummiest. It seems like lots of recipes today try to combine seven different recipes into one (something like snickerdoodle pumpkin pie cheesecake pecan chocolate drizzle bars), and it was nice to have a sweet, soft cookie with no bells or whistles.
Plus, I got to measure out a lot of brown sugar, so that was a nice added bonus.
Lindsey Young is managing editor of The Clarion, the Kansas Publishing Ventures newspaper in Andale. She can be reached at lindseyclarion@gmail.com.
