eternity in a bowl of cookie dough

[jjhunter]

gentle readers, i have a conundrum.

for many years, my signature cookie for gifts and contributions to inefficient fund-raising endeavors has been the humble oatmeal scotchie, the recipe for which conveniently located on the back of every bag i buy of nestle butterscotch morsels. on each occasion, i would smugly anticipate the happy result of my picturesque culinary efforts. ten minutes into the recipe, however, i would suddenly recollect the sheer amount of time remaining and forthcoming toll on my wrists with passionate loathing. yet i consoled myself with the thought that two hours plus of hard work was simply the price i had to pay for my four dozen allotments of unhealthy delight.

imagine my joy at discovering an intriguing new recipe of equivalent impressiveness that only required a mere twenty minutes to prepare, for a grand total of thirty-four minutes to yield the first tray of total forty-eight cookies. these cranberry orange cookies seemed an excellent addition to my usual holiday baking, permitting me to economize with twice the number of cookie-gifts for at most only a fifty-percent increase in time.

but it was not to be so. i was stuck in my kitchen for a straight four and a half hours, causing much concern and chastisement from the other inhabitants of my dwelling.

to add insult to injury, i discovered that the nestle website blithely lists the prep time for oatmeal scotchies as ten minutes, and the cook time as seven. these figures, i wish to emphasize for those not following carefully, are half those posted for cranberry orange cookies.

this is not a state of affairs that can be permitted to continue. my dignity, my self-respect, and the minor matter of my reputation as competent in the kitchen depend on closing the achievement gap between myself and those posting enthusiastic reviews on cooking websites with frequent resort to all caps. i have decided to throw myself on the collective mercy of crowd-sourcing. listen closely, dear readers, for i do not say this lightly: help me, omnomnom kenobi et al. you're my least embarrassing source of hope.

x-posted to boilingwater

Font of post changed from courier new to 'default' as per request.

Comments

[amadi]

The trick to prep is mise en place. Get all of your ingredients, pre-measure, have everything that you need before you need it.

The dance of trays in and out of the oven is something rather unavoidable unless you've got enough trays to batch out all of your dough at once, and adequate counter space to rotate trays and let things cool properly. How many baking trays do you have? Cooling racks? How much counter space?

[jjhunter]

i do my best to have everything out and ready before i need it. not being in possession of a kitchen slave an assistant, this takes longer than i would like. i find myself suspecting that this essential prior assemblage is struck from the mockingly low 'prep time' asserted by the aforementioned recipes.

on friday, i found myself in possession of two large cookie trays for the first time in my baking experience. halleluiah. otherwise, i possess four of inconvenient size and rectangular shape, two by four grid capacity, and two more square, with three by four capacity. counter space is decent, but quite spread out. cooling racks may well be the rate-determining step in how fast trays can move in and out of the oven; before shifting the parchment paper + cookies off a particular tray, i must always shift the previous batch off my sole & rather decrepit cooling rack. on further consideration, the limited counter space near the top of the oven also complicates matters, requiring consolidation and/or relocation of cooling cookies relatively quickly.

i had not thought of attempting to 'batch out' all of my dough at once, but in hindsight it seems blindly obvious. it would solve the problem of overly warm dough and necessity of periodic chilling, permit closer monitoring of baking progress, and eliminate variance in starting time between concurrent trays. brilliant.

thank you for sharing your experience with me. surely i can engineer the flow of the oven stage more efficiently for my particular set of kitchen variables; must think on this further.

[amadi]

Having too many trays is as bad as having too few. I did chocolate chip today with one tray and two silpats. I batched one silpat, put it in to bake. Gave it five minutes to cool on the tray and batched the other silpat. Traded out, put batch two in to bake, let the other continue to cool, and on and on. I wouldn't pre-batch on parchment without a tray, though.

[fish_echo]

I've been able to pre-batch on parchment before, but only when transferring to a tray that has no raised sides and only when I have sufficient counter space that things aren't crowded.

[amadi]

I'd be concerned in a warm kitchen that pre-batching on parchment would end up with excessive spreading. I was battling that today on silpats which control spreading pretty nicely.

[fish_echo]

Ah, right, temperature.... So the last time that I had the counterspace to do pre-batching, I lived somewhere cold and the extra counterspace was right near a single-pane window, so I didn't have to worry about that. Thanks for catching me on that!

Wow, you must have had quite a warm kitchen! I hope today's baking went well regardless?

[amadi]

When the oven is on, my kitchen is a toasty warm haven. It's nice on a day like today when it never hit 40. I was keeping my battered chilled between batches and that was important today! The baking went well, there will be more over the next few days, more cookies, some cakes and shortbread!

[fish_echo]

Oh, that sounds lovely! (Both the warm kitchen and the cooking intentions.) I wish you the best of luck in the baking and the eating of those!