In keeping with my tradition of cooking strange things when I'm manic, tonight I was craving cookies. However I had no money, no cookie mix, and all the recipes I could find in my house were waay too complicated or required baking powder, which I did not have. While tearing the kitchen apart however, I did find several boxes of pudding in the back of one of the cupboards, along with a large bag of powdered sugar.

So after making a huge mess of my kitchen, I invented these cookies, which have a slightly odd texture and a light, delicate lemon flavor and go really good with hot chocolate. Please enjoy them in good health.

Ingredients:

2.5 Cups (595 mL) of flour (to start with, you will need more later)

1 & 3/4 cups (420 mL) powdered sugar (more for optional garnish)

1 Stick of butter (about 113 grams), softened.

1 Egg

2 Cups (475 mL) cold milk

1 Box of instant lemon pudding mix

About a spoonful of baking soda

About one half that same spoonful of vanilla extract

Optional: A half a bag of Heath toffee chips and a few handfuls of slivered almonds, which I found in the back of my cupboard.


Preheat oven to 350, or 176 for you metric kids. Combine all ingredients except pudding mix, optionals, and milk in a large mixing bowl. Stir until they are blended. Add pudding mix, then milk. Stir, then allow about five minutes for pudding mix to soft set. You'll know that it has because it will be MUCH more difficult to stir. Beat the heck out of it, stirring until there are no lumps. Batter should now be about the consistency of thick cake batter. If you are going to add optional ingredients, now's the time. Add more flour until the dough is so thick it becomes very difficult to stir... If you pick up a lump of it in your hand and then let it drop it will drop in big, thick chunks from your hand. Give the dough one last stir, taste to see if it's sweet enough (Mine wasn't quite, so i added a handful more of the powdered sugar.) Take a moment to pray to your favorite kitchen god. Then spoon onto cookie sheets and bake for 15 minutes per batch. These work best if they're small, the dough lumps should be about the size of a fifty cent piece, and running your finger around them in a circle will give you a slightly more round, regular appearance.

To make powdered sugared cookies, take them while they are still warm and roll them in the leftover powdered sugar for a moment.

Makes 2 large platefuls of cookies.

Thanks to oknos for the original sugar cookie recipe I used for this, and Dimview, who's response when I asked to see if this would work in the catbox was "Do it, node it."

There's an unspoken trust that makes it possible to follow a stranger's recipes. I think that's enough philosophizing for one day.

This is a review of savpixie's recipe above.

First of all my initial preparation was different from the original. I was not manic. I'd manage to keep some money in my account throughout the week. And finally my motivation was curiosity and a desire to make something. I appreciate that these are all confounding factors, but I believe, nonetheless, that I can still comment on the reported recipe.

Ingredients:

Flour - I didn't need to buy this because I still had some left over from my last apartment. It was in a green reusable shopping bag under my bed. Unfortunately my new place, although reported as being fully furnished, seems to lack any measuring utensils. Hence the flour, and every other ingredient was measured by eye. In retrospect this was not completely ideal.

Powdered sugar - I did need to buy this. However the nomenclature completely misled me, and I ended up buying some sort of fine sugar instead. I am not claiming that the original information was deceitful, but I would ask that readers consider all the facts and make up their own minds.

Butter - Easy!

Egg - There are way too many options for eggs but that's neither here nor there.

Milk - Ditto.

Lemon Pudding Mix - OK. Now this should probably be explained for people who, like myself until recently, have never purchased pudding mixes. Pudding mixes (or at least the one I purchased) contain two packets in them, both of which are unlabeled. One packet is the actual pudding/flavor stuff, which you can tell by the strong lemony smell. The other packet is flour and stuff I think, but anyway is not needed.

Baking Soda - Was in the same green bag as the flour.

Vanilla Extract - Actually already had this as I have an underutilized but nonetheless impressive collection of spices and other flavoring goods.

Extras? Nothing. What can I say?


Preparation: As I said above, I didn't have any measuring utensils so a lot of estimating was involved. It was mostly straight forward, except that I really wasn't sure how much flour I needed to keep adding, but my impression by the end is that it definitely shouldn't be sticky (i.e. if it is sticky then add more flour) and also that because they're so quick to bake, it's worth doing a trial batch with 2 or 3 cookies just to see if it's fine.

Outcome and conclusions: If I have to be honest then they didn't turn out great. Not to say that they weren't tasty - it be hard to mess up that bad, but still, they were a bit too hard for my taste. (Yes, I know). And again, I'm not sure if it was an issue with volumes, but the vanilla flavour was far more prominent than the lemon flavour from the pudding powder.

Otherwise it was all good. I managed to finally get the rest of my cooking supplies out of my bedroom, and making the cookies public foods is good for breaking in a new house, I think. For the record, there's five of us in the house, and the cookies lasted two and a half days.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.