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Episode II: Shot Glass CookiesSo Tuesday was my last eikaiwa (English conversation) class of the year, 'cause when class meets again on Dec. 23, the Emperor's birthday, I will be on a plane to Minnesota. Because AJ & I were doing a Christmasy sorta lesson anyway, and because baking cookies is awesome, I decided to make more microven cookies. This time, cut-outs, of the sort Mom doesn't get to make with me this year 'cause I'll just barely be home in time for X-mas. I went to Jusco to try and find cut-out cookie fixins, such as colored frosting and little cookie shapes. Unfortunately I couldn't find so much as a pack of food coloring, and there were no holiday-themed cut-out patterns, just a bunch of wonky hearts that curved in to one side for some reason.
Not to be discouraged, I picked up some powdered sugar anyway and headed home to mix up the dough. I decided I'd make snowmen, that being about the only Christmasy thing I could think of with just white frosting. I ended up using a shot glass to cut out the cookies and arranged them in columns of three to make the bodies, thusly --->
Their faces and buttons are made of crushed chocolate bar. You wouldn't believe the price of sprinkles in this country.
(Sorry it's all sideways, my photo software is dumb)
They were a big hit with the class - everybody wanted a second helping, and it was a good thing there were only 10 people there, because I barely managed to squeeze 24 cookies out of this recipe and I gave a few out between Sunday, when I made them, and Tuesday night. Anyway, here is the very simple recipe (again, unless you alter it, this will only yield MAYBE 24 cookies, and that's only if you use a shot glass or something of equivalent size to cut 'em out. Bigger means fewer):
6 tablespoons melted butter
1/2 cup sugar
* cream these together until smooth & approaching mousse-like consistency *
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
* stir these in next *
1 & 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
* stir these in SLOWLY *
~ oh yeah, should prob'ly tell you at this point to pre-heat the oven, if you have one, to 350 F. I just set my microven for 170 C (approximately the same) and let it run for a bit right before I started baking.
~ put the dough in saran wrap & let it sit in the fridge for about an hour. Alternately, if you have no central heating or insulation like me, turn off the heat and set it on the kitchen counter. Works just as well.
~ roll it out to about 1/4 inch thickness, and using your shot glass or whatever punch out the shapes you fancy
~put 'em on a baking sheet, pop 'em in, and hey-presto in 8 - 10 minutes you've got cookies! Let them cool for a bit, then you can frost them using a mixture of 1 cup powdered sugar and juuuuuust enough hot water to make it good 'n pasty. Like rubber cement. Rubber cement you can put on cookies without poisoning them.
So I have had a craving for chocolate-chip cookies since about this time last week. Over the weekend I decided to do something about it and bake me some fluffy gooey goodness. Trouble is, there is no oven in my apartment.
You see, the Japanese don't believe in ovens. And much like fairies, ovens everywhere fall down dead when a large concentration of people steadfastly refuse to believe in them. It's very sad.
Because of the ethereal oven-death-zone which encases this country, Japanese microwaves have evolved to partially fill the niche of those fantasmagorical kitchen appliances which, legend has it, sometimes fit entire turkeys AND the side dishes in the same compartment. However, microwaves with baking functions are of course still microwave-sized. Thus it took me pretty much all afternoon to bake about four dozen three-quarters-sized cookies in my little microven (alternately, "ovrowave") on my wee-tiny dollar store cookie sheets which I held onto with wee-tiny polka-dotted dollar store hot pads. If only my feet had sprouted hair and my apartment building had shrunk and become partially encassed in the grassy hillside, I would have made a pretty fine hobbit on Sunday afternoon.
Here are the results of the first batch, which were undercooked by about one minute and 10 degrees Celsius, and which scrunched up like wet paper towels when I tried to remove them from the sheets:
And here is a good sample of the subsequent batches, which turned out just wonderfully and were very much appreciated by my co-workers today at lunchtime:
I also took a couple action-shots of the cookies in the nuker, just so's I could prove it to you all that everything I have said about Japan, ovens, and fairies is completely true:
On a somewhat perplexing note, the dough didn't smell at all like the cookie-dough I would make with my mum back in the States. I don't know how to explain it. Maybe it was the butter I used, or the eggs, or the flour, or the brown sugar, but something about that dough just smelled overwhelmingly Japanese to me. Only people who have eaten authentic Japanese food for any amount of time over two weeks will really understand what I mean by that, but I guess one of the subtle differences is that despite having a crap-ton of sugar and chocolate bits in it, the dough didn't smell sweet. Neither did it smell flour-y. I think it smelt of egg and oils mostly, which may be a function of the astronomically lower level of preservatives in everything out here in the countryside. Perhaps the natural odors of the raw foodstuffs come through more strongly without them? I don't pretend to understand food chemistry at all, so that's just a shot in the dark. Anyway, eerie foreignness of smell aside, I would say that this endeavour was a resounding success. And my fellow teachers agree. I just hope I haven't set too high a bar for myself on baked goods to pass around the office.
