The Great Cookie Research Project: The Winner!

Ah, it is the end of the semester. I have finished my teaching, I have completed my marking, I no longer have to get up at 6am on Tuesdays to get to Oxford in time for a 9am lecture. Bliss. I am even facing the prospect of finishing an article I've been working on for months. And the excitement that was the Great Choc Chip Cookie Research Project has come to an end.

So, which cookie was the winner? We had plain and simple, we had double choc, small and crispy, honeyed, gingery, cream cheesey (bit of a low point that one), Kiwi, biscotti, minty, and fruity. I went back through all the scores and can now announce that...[cue drum roll, flashing lights and nervous glances from contestant cookies, trying to compose themselves to look nonchalant and yet in need of your vote]....The Bonfire Night One!! Yes, the gingery treacley oaty moist one based on Den Lepard's Guardian baking column - that I forgot to add the chocolate chips to. The only one which was not actually eligible to be included in the contest has won the whole thing. But I don't care - it was the best and a ginger cookie just doesn't need to have choc chips to be a winner. Even when it's entered in a choc chip cookie contest. Its outstanding average score of 9.4 took it right to the top of the leader board, followed by the Senior Tutor's pick of The Boozy, Blonde and Fruity One, and the early favourite, The Double Choc One. My own personal favourite, The Mint Choc Chip One, came in fourth, but the winner was my close second preference so I'm happy too (as is The Scientist, who got to eat them again when I reprised them this week).


In the spirit of academic enquiry I thought a little bit more about what this project has revealed. Firstly, that my colleagues are very British in their tastes, consistently choosing crisp and crunchy over soft and chewy. On reflection I should really have called this the Choc Chip *Biscuit* Project. I like to think that this tells us something about resistance to the creep of American cultural hegemony. Secondly, everyone likes more chocolate rather than less (unless less means more gingery treacley oatyness). Thirdly that academics cannot leave semantics alone even when it comes to treats. The question of 'what is a 'cookie' seemed to perpetually exercise a few brains, though others were more than happy to let their tastebuds provide the data. I have also genuinely got to know some more people by becoming the self-appointed cookie fairy, and several other colleagues have expressed an interest in bringing in baked goods too. As long as I'm the one that gets to wear the wings and carry the wand :)


The Winner recipe here.

The Great Cookie Research Project: The Italian One

Feedback from previous weeks' cookies has indicated that my colleagues like chocolatey and they like crispy. No messing. So this week I thought I would pick up both of those themes and go in a slightly different direction from what we've had so far: chocolate biscotti. The distinctive thing about biscotti is that they are baked twice - once as a big fat log, and then again in individual slices, traditionally cut on the diagonal. You know - the long biscuits sort you buy in coffee shops to dunk in your coffee - the crunchy nutty chocolatey ones.


There are gazillions of recipes out there for biscotti and I've made some interesting lemon and anise ones before (from Moosewood - where else?), but my only foray into chocolate and nut wasn't so interesting. I settled on a recipe from Cafe Fernando blog in the end, as Cenk, its author, used to bake dozens of them every week and I thought that that was a good sign for a tried and tested recipe. These particular biscotti were hazelnut and chocolate though I did use a bit of a mix of chocolates - I didn't have enough plain dark so I chopped up the rest of the Maya Gold left from the Ecos' chocolate gingerbread and added that as well. You could really taste the orange even thought it was only half a large bar, which I thought was really nice. The dough was quite nice to work with as it wasn't too sticky so it was quite easy to shape into logs. I think I took them out of the oven very slightly too soon, as even after cooling some of the biscotti fell apart a bit as I sliced them. My logs were pretty wide though, so even half-biscotti (biscottini?) were a pretty respectable size.

Nut-studded biscotti dough

Now, I can't comment very extensively on these cookies as I don't like nuts so I didn't eat any. The dough tasted very good prior to the addition of the nuts, but the nutty taste permeated the cooked biscotti too much for me to want to try a bit. As they baked they went through a stage of smelling very nutty indeed but then seemed to move on through into chocolate. Of course all this is only a bad thing if you're a nut-hater like me - in fact if you're a nutophile it's a positive boon.

After the first baking

What with baking, cooling and baking again, the finished biscotti didn't come out of the oven until we were going to bed, so The Scientist didn't do his usual warm from the oven taste test. I left several at home for him though as I had too many to fit in the box to take to work, and he was pretty taken with them. He gave them an 8 out of 10, and wished he had a nice glass of vin santo to dunk them into. They did pretty well at work, too: 'Truly scrumptious!' said one person (possibly one of the Senior Tutors; possibly a character from an Enid Blyton book); 'Thank you. This cheered me up no end' was another rather sweet message. I never thought when I started this that I would be brightening up people's days! 'Very good. not too hard' said another, and 'good combination of nuttiness and chocolateness' came from someone else. One person found them a bit dry (I took the ones that were left to a meeting and it's certainly true that I could hear the crunching from the other side of the room - but that's what biscotti are supposed to do so it's not a bad thing), and another said that they weren't as varied in taste/texture as other weeks'. All in all they polled 7.75 - not reaching the dizzy heights but a perfectly decent biscuit and definitely a good one for dunking. If fact that's not really fair to them - if you're after home-made biscotti they were really very good (for a nut-liker!), and I think that quite a few of my tasters just happened not to have eaten anything like them before. They obviously don't get served up in library cafes!


The Italian One: recipe here

The Great Cookie Research Project: The Mint Choc Chip One

We're nearing the end of the Great Choc Chip Cookie project now - only two more weeks and then the great unveiling of the winner. I had planned a different cookie for this week but by the time I got home after a VERY long day last Tuesday I couldn't face firing up the laptop to get the recipe. So I had a last-minute swerve inspired by a box of mint Matchmakers I had bought and stashed to bring out at Christmas time. Mint and chocolate are a happy marriage, I thought - let's put them together in a cookie.

For the actual cookie base I turned to a book I bought on Johanna's recommendation - The Search for the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie. It features recipes entered for a competition sponsored by a Massachusetts inn of all places, and while many are variations on the same theme others are really quite intriguing (ice cream as a cookie ingredient anyone? I really want to give that one a go). I turned to the double chocolate section and was saved from the usual indecision and procrastinating by one marked 'Grand Prize'. Excellent. The choice was made.


I followed the recipe exactly except that I left out the nuts and chocolate chips and instead stirred in a whole box of broken up mint matchmakers (I don't know if these are peculiarly British - they are crispy minty chocolate sticks and they always make me think of our friend Vet Mum, who loves them. If you're reading, Vet Dad, tell her I will reprise the cookies for her!). For once I managed not to forget some vital ingredient, and was rewarded with the most amazingly moist, chewy, chocolatey cookies. The mint was a superb addition to the taste, and even I, who usually shuns the baked cookies for the batter-y mixing spoon, was smitten. In fact I went through every trick in the baker's book - that one needs trimming, oh dear, a bit fell off that one, etc etc. I would rank them at the top of the tree with the ginger parkin ones from a few weeks back. The Scientist wasn't in that night to do his oven-fresh tasting, but he was very taken with them when he got back the next day. The recipe made a lot of cookies and so I'd left him four or five and they were all dispatched pretty promptly. He gave them a 9 out of 10 (and bear in mind that he feels that 10 represents so nirvana-like a perfection that it can scarcely be contemplated. He is the Craig Revel-Horwood to my new taster in the English department's Bruno Tonioli).


The tasters at work were not quite as rapturous as I was but they did like the cookie and it polled an average of 8.1. One got hung up on the definitional issue again - she said that she liked it very much but that if she wanted an After Eight she'd have an After Eight. The Senior Tutor compared them more favourably with a mint Aero, while someone else said they tasted like toothpaste (which I don't think is a good thing in a cookie). My favourite response was from the aforesaid English lecturer, however: 'yum yum in my scrum'. A hit there, I think.

The Mint Choc Chip One (adapted from The Search for the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie)
1 3/4 cups flour (I used plain)
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 cup butter or marge, softened (I used marge)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup granulated sugar (usually I bake cookies with caster sugar but I happened to have granulated and so used that. The cookie did have a nice graininess to them but it's hard to say if it was from the sugar or the matchmakers)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar, firmly packed.
1 egg
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa
1 tbsp milk
1 box mint matchmakers broken into small bits (the original recipe had 1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts and 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips)

Combine flour and bicarb, and set aside
Use an electric mixer to cream butter. Add vanilla and sugars, and beat until fluffy. Beat in egg. At a low speed beat in cocoa, then milk. With a wooden spoon mix in dry ingredients until just blended. Stir in broken matchmakers.
Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls onto nonstick or foil-lined baking sheets. Bake at 350F for 12-13 mins. Remove from oven and cool slightly before removing from baking sheets
Yield: 3 dozen

The Great Cookie Research Project: The Kiwi One

Hmm, mid-week is not really happening for this blog at the moment - I blame teaching and commuting commitments. However, the Great Choc Chip Cookie Research Project is continuing, and this week I went Down Under for some inspiration. Since Kiwi Sis and family went off on their antipodean adventure I've started following a few New Zealand blogs to try to get a little insight into the sort of foodie world they're living in. A while back the talented cookie-decorator (oh, and full-time lawyer too) Tammy posted the recipe for her family's favourite choc chip cookies, and I was interested to see that they contain condensed milk. This isn't an ingredient I use much, apart from the odd foray into fudge or caramel making, but it struck a chord as Johanna uses it in baking quite often, and has written a very interesting post about its place in Australian cuisine. Non-perishables in tins formed a vital staple in people's diets in an era before domestic refrigeration and especially since Australian cities were so dependent on rail links for their provisions. Unfortunately it was also used to feed babies on sometimes which is clearly Not a Good Thing. Johanna has posted about several tasty treats which use it as a base ingredient, and so I was particularly struck that it turned up in this New Zealand recipe as well.

I had half a tin of condensed milk left over from making Eco Sis's Millionaire's Shortbread, and so I made up a batch of Tammy's cookie dough the same weekend and put it in the freezer. I *almost* forgot to add the choc chips AGAIN when I defrosted it, but remembered just in time to whip the shaped cookies back out of the oven. But I did totally forget to photograph them - see above excuses which are currently being deployed to explain all incidents of ditsiness and general rubbishness. Luckily Tammy has posted a picture of them on her blog, although I have to admit that mine did not look as good as hers. Mine were flatter, for one thing - because the dough was still quite chilled from the freezer I was able to roll it into balls and flatten them rather than drop them on the tray as I usually would. I hadn't particularly intended to do this - it just seemed like the thing to do at the time. It meant that my cookies were crunchy which was actually very nice, but they also looked a little burnt around the edges. Initially I was cross about that but then we realised that the darker-ringed ones actually had a nicer crunch to them and I even put the more golden ones back in again to crisp them up some more. I think that the flatness of the cookie had a lot to do with this, but also our oven has a tendency to get quite hot, and these cookies are supposed to be baked at a slightly lower temperature than many of the other recipes I've tried.

The slightly burnt look (I prefer to call it 'sun-kissed') made the cookie less popular at work. They didn't rate terribly well although I really think that this is because of the way I baked them. Tammy's looked much thicker and chewier (and frankly quite a bit more appetising!) than mine. A number of people only gave them a 3 though they also racked up an 8 and a 9, but I was really touched by the comments. One person put 'personal preference is for softer cookies - but delicious and very welcome anyway!!', and another wrote 'interesting, but not top of the list. Thanks ever so though!'. It was a nice sign that people are getting quite into the whole thing :) In fact one of my colleagues in the English department has requested that I bring in cookies every day and he doesn't care how crispy they are! Another comment said that they were good because they weren't too sweet but still flavoursome. The Scientist gave his oven-fresh sample a 7.5 - slightly under his average, but he did particularly like the crispiness and asked if I could spare another one. Overall the average was 5.2 but I don't think this reflects the condensed milk cookie's true potential in the hands of a more attentive baker!

I still had a bit of condensed milk left after all the baking and was very tempted to make Johanna's recipe for grubs (which I had never heard of before but which she talks so highly of that I really want to try them). But they need biscuits and in the end I had to throw the rest of the condensed milk away before I let myself eat it a teeny spoonful at a time whenever I opened the fridge before I could get to the supermarket! I'd like to try Tammy's cookies again with all the proper directions though, so I will earmark the grubs for the same occasion. Oooh, I can see an Antipodean baking night coming on.

The Kiwi One: recipe here

The Great Cookie Research Project: The Bonfire Night One

I think I may give up my Cookie Research Project. I'm not sure I can better the cookie from this week - although the only credit I can take is in selecting a good recipe. I take my cookies in on Wednesdays, and since Wednesday last week was Bonfire Night I thought I'd do a parkin-inspired number. This also enabled me to legitimately use the word 'treacle' a lot, since it is one of the key ingredients of parkins and gingerbreads, and is also one of my most favourite words. Treacle is actually a very old word - it used to mean an antidote to poison, which is why springs with supposedly curative properties were sometimes known as 'treacle wells'. It's amazing what you learn when you have to give a lecture on pre-Reformation popular religion. Treacle is also mentioned in Alice in Wonderland - one of my favourite children's books - when the dormouse at the Mad Hatter's teaparty tells a story about a treacle well.


While treacle is a very good word, it is not a very tasty ingredient on its own, and so the batter for this cookie wasn't at all nice (though I did check, just in case). I'd been looking around for a gingerbread cookie when what should turn up in Dan Lepard's baking column in the Saturday Guardian, but - chocolate parkin biscuits. I haven't made any of his other recipes but I've been saving quite a few of them to try and he said that these cookies were crispy, which is what my colleagues seem to like. They involve a bit of melting, a bit of stirring, a bit of chopping of crystallised ginger, some oats, and then when the batter was cooled I put it in the fridge overnight so that I could bake them on Tuesday night. I was a bit worried this might have an adverse effect on a melted batter, but it seemed to do fine and actually made it very easy to handle.


The smell these cookies produced when they were baking was divine, and The Scientist was already hovering by the oven when they were ready to come out. He said that they were absolutely the best ones so far and rated them a 9. High praise indeed. They also scored amazingly highly with my colleagues - an average of 9.4 with all 9s and 10s. Comments were quite extensive this time - 'Scrummy!', 'gooey & very tasty!' and 'delicious, I liked the oats' were just a few. One of the French lecturers even stopped me in the ladies' to ask if I was the cookie baker and could she have the recipe as they were so good! I think they were so popular because they were very moist and very gingery. However, I do have a confession to make: between the chilling and shaping and chatting to The Scientist at the same time - *I forgot to add the chocolate chips*!! So they're not really choc chip cookies at all and as such I'm not really sure they should legitimately be part of my investigation. However, since they were so popular and blatantly stand alone with no choc chips involved, I am choosing to keep them in anyway. After all, my tasters couldn't care less what cookies I bring in as long as they appear in the kitchen. I really liked them too and I think that adding chocolate would actually detract from the oats and the ginger. I'd be interested to try it with chocolate another time to see. Especially if it gives me another opportunity to talk about treacle.

The Bonfire Night one: recipe here

The Great Cookie Research Project: The Boozy Blonde and Fruity One

This week's cookie was a special request from the Senior Tutor. He is one of my stalwart cookie tasters and when I asked him what he'd like to see in a future week he said that his favourite from the supermarket is white choc and raspberry. I didn't have a white choc chip cookie on my list of possibles so I liked that idea, and it also played into a vague yen I've had for a while to bake raspberries in brownies. In fact, I decided to go for dried fruit since the season has passed on from the fresh ones, and when I found a recipe on allrecipes for a booze-soaked dried cranberry cookie I just couldn't resist the chance to call this week's offering Boozy Blonde and Fruity :)


There was nothing too startling about the recipe so the real difference from other weeks was the white chocolate as opposed to milk or dark, and the dried fruit, which had been sitting in alcohol for a good 24 hours or so by the time I came to mix it all up. The recipe called for brandy but when I looked through our very random collection of alcohol I discovered that we were out. Not a good start. Must stock up before making the seasonal Solstice cake (we're all very non-denominational in this house). In fact the only remotely suitable alcohol was an elderly bottle of Tenerifian rum which The Scientist brought back from a research trip years ago. It's not exactly a top quality tipple and I passed on drinking the discarded soaking alcohol as the recipe cheekily suggests but I don't think it harmed the cookie at all.

Once again the mixture was very tasty (always my own personal test taste) - quite sweet which was probably the result of both sugar and the white chocolate. They didn't spread too much on baking and were delicious when warm. I thought that the dried fruit lent them a very nice juicy little tang although I couldn't particularly taste the alcohol. They were also quite creamy and soft. The Scientist gave his an 8 which is the joint top score he's given to any cookie in this project so far. They were pretty popular at work, too - not many comments but some good scores. The average was 8.4 and all the scores were 8s or 9s, so a good strong contender despite the softer texture and lack of dark chocolate. But the critical response was, of course, from the Senior Tutor himself - and he said he went back for a sneaky second one which I take to be a good stamp of approval.

The Boozy Blonde and Fruity one: recipe here

The Great Cookie Research Project: The Cream Cheese One

This cookie was, I'm sorry to say, not the highlight of the whole Choc Chip Cookie experiment. It was actually the very first one I made (it's been our reading week this week so I saved this one to write up) and I was quite embarrassed to have started with such a blooper. I can't remember quite how I stumbled on the recipe but I had some cream cheese I needed to use up and liked the idea of a cream-cheese-esq cookie. This was not one of my better decisions when starting out as the self-styled baker of the department. It was posted by Minnie on Foodproof, and she says that the original recipe may have come from a well-known brand of cream cheese. It also contains angostura bitters which caused me some headaches to find, and I think were responsible for the orange flavour identified by one taster.


I should really have thought through the implications of introducing such an unknown quantity as cream cheese in a cookie into a taster audience of university academics. They got quite bogged down in the definition of what a cookie was, and thus what their reaction should be. Was I calling it a cookie or something else, they wanted to know? As a cookie it was not popular (my Russianist colleague said it was the first cookie he had ever left unfinished, much to my shame). As another sort of treat (here there was some debate, with my erudite French historian colleague coming up only with 'thing') it did better. See what I mean? Historians can't start to tackle a question until they've defined all their terms. I'm surprised my feedback sheet didn't come back with footnotes and references.


The sticking point, I think, was the texture of the 'thing'. The cream cheese was very noticeable, making it both soft and creamy. This, of course, is no bad thing - it's just not what people were expecting from their cookie experience. I think if I'd baked it in a cake pan and called it a choc chip cheesecake bar it would probably have gone down much better. They also didn't look too attractive as they were sort of flat and pale. Their average score was 6.5, with most people voting 7. The Russianist damned it with a 1, but a colonial history colleague gave it a 10 (I think he was startled at being offered a cookie in the corridor!). Comments varied from 'I'd buy them!' to 'a little chewy', 'not very cookie-like', 'subtle orange flavour' 'perhaps a little waxy on the texture' (I'd agree with that one), and - from the despairing Russianist - 'try frying it like a blini'. Clearly, this was a confused cookie!

The Cream Cheese one: recipe here

The Great Cookie Research Project: The Mini One

Week 4 of the GCRP and I stayed with the popular crunchy theme from last week. I had previously made some nicely crunchy cookies for one of The Scientist's gaming jaunts from verybestbaking.com which also pandered to my quiet satisfaction in rolling and cutting biscuit dough. I was quite busy during the week and so made the dough on Sunday and left it in the fridge until Tuesday evening. This, as anyone who followed the New York Times's investigation into the best way to make a classic choc chip cookie a while back will know, is apparently de rigeur for good flavour and shape. I don't know if it made any difference in this case but it's nice to think that my colleagues were getting the best in cookie research and method :)


After the difficulties in rolling out choc chip studded dough last week I added chips to some of the dough before rolling, and stuck others in after they were rolled and cut. The former had chips more nicely embedded in them while the latter had more noticeable little pools of meltiness especially straight out of the oven. I was quite struck by the difference - I think I preferred the chips more thoroughly integrated, but it's just a matter of personal taste and the taste of the biscuit itself was more noticeable in the topped ones.


These cookies were also popular at work - almost as popular as last week's Double Choc. People commented that they were nice and shortbread-like, and not too sweet. The cutest comment was left by someone who wrote 'had 3 just to make sure' - but the three was written over a '2' where they had evidently gone back just for one more! The Scientist rated them an 8 while warm. The average was also a clear 8 which actually puts them in the front running so far, but the range was greater than last week's - a top of 10 (from a colleague who had dropped a blooper earlier in the day and so I think was feeling guilty) but a low of 6.

So, small and crunchy is still the definite preference among my colleagues. I have a few more big spready ones to try though, so we may be moving out of the comfort zone a while yet!

The Mini One: recipe here

The Great Cookie Research Project: The Double Choc One

Week 3 of the Great Choc Chip Cookie Research Project, and the game has been upped! A couple of people commented last week that they preferred crunchy to chewy, plus there seemed to be a leaning towards dark chocolate. I decided that this meant deviating from most of the standard choc chip recipes, which produce big, chewy, American style cookies. Instead, I hit on the idea of adding dark chocolate chips to a favourite chocolate cut-out cookie I've made several times, and which is both sturdy and crunchy as well as darkly chocolatey. I found the recipe by googling 'chocolate cut out cookie' when looking for birthday biscuits that Junior Bro could take to school with him one year, and it's the top pick - from all recipes and highly rated.


I actually prefer making cut-out cookies to drop ones. I like the rolling and the cutting, plus it gives me an opportunity to use some of my cookie cutter collection. Just dropping the mixture onto a baking sheet isn't quite the same, so I was pretty happy to go down this route. In fact, I made a batch of these cookies sans chocolate chips for The Scientist to take gaming last weekend (they got pigs and feet - an entirely logical combination, I felt). The recipe makes a pretty big batch so I'd frozen half, and mid-week I took the rest out, thawed it, and added some cut-up chocolate. Of course this made it quite hard to roll out, and in retrospect I should perhaps have rolled and cut first, and studded with chocolate afterwards - but no matter. I also sprinkled the leftover shards of chocolate from cutting up a big bar over the top for some extra chocolate crunch. I left them in the oven a tiny bit longer than I would have ideally liked and so was a little nervous about the reaction, but I needn't have worried. These were by FAR the most popular cookies so far. Comments included 'Hurrah - they're crunchy!', 'Crunchy - like a cookie should be!' and 'Yum - like crunchy'. I think I've found my colleagues' preferred consistency :) They scored a whopping average of 8.75, with two people giving them 10s. The Scientist was also a fan, and rated his 9 fresh from the oven.

The cookies in situ in the staff kitchen

So where to go now? With the crunch and dark chocolate a clear winner, should I abandon my plan to try a lot of different flavours and focus on mining the similar vein? I still have a few alternatives I'd like to try, but I think that I'll stick with the crunch for next week at least. I have a feeling that these double chocs may yet be the winners though...

Cookies in their feet and pig incarnation

The Double Choc One
Rating: 8.75/10
Recipe here

The Great Cookie Research Project: The Honey One

The Great Chocolate Chip Cookie Research Project has entered its second week and my colleagues are definitely entering into the spirit of the thing. I have been very tickled by the expressions of astonishment when people stumble on the plate of cookies in the kitchen, and they seem game for anything (luckily, since I don't feel I've hit any heights of cookie-baking yet).


This week I opted for a honey cookie, in honour of the Jewish New Year. I had read on Baking bites blog how honey is a good ingredient for keeping cookies fresh for longer, incidentally making it especially good for baked goods which are going to be shipped elsewhere. I tried out the recipe Nicole featured on her blog a few months ago using maple-flavoured syrup, which gave the cookies a lovely underlying taste. This time I used regular honey and got the same texture if not the same flavour. If I make them again I'll use the mapley syrup again, but I imagine that any strong-flavoured honey would be good too.


The cookies are quite cake-like - they stay quite thick as they bake, but don't have the spreading issue of some others I've tried. My Russianist colleague said that he wasn't so keen on the cakeiness, although he liked the flavour, and someone else said they weren't as good as last week's Classic. Another commentator (I let people comment unattended this time :) ) said that they held together nicely, and our hero administrator thought they were better than the ones from the canteen. On the whole they were popular but didn't rate as highly as last week - an average of 6.3. The Scientist again gave them an 8 straight from the oven. I asked him what would make them rate higher, and he said making them oatmeal and raisin instead :) I made some vegan ones of those last weekend when we had a lovely visit from Dogophile Vegan Nurse, so I don't feel bad for keeping on with the choc chip theme for now. I did like these cookies but they're definitely not in the crisp cookie camp. I think I might try going down that route next week - see if that hits the heights with the hard to please Russianist!

The Honey One - recipe here

An exciting prize, and the Great Choc Chip Cookie Research Project

I had such a nice surprise this morning: our fridge won Wendy's competition! It was picked out by her adorable dog Marco as the winner - I must send that spaniel a bonio :) Thanks Wendy - you made my day!

I'm also pretty excited to announce the launch of a new tack in my research career: the Great Chocolate Chip Cookie Research Project. I felt that the new academic year deserved a new venture, and so I have determined to find the best choc chip cookie I can, as voted for by my colleagues. So far, after one week, they have risen to the challenge admirably, and in the best possible spirit of peer feedback have commented extensively and thoughtfully on my efforts. I've asked them to rate each week's cookie out of ten, and add any other comments they would like. I am trying not to be actually present watching over their ruminations, though some people did fall foul of me leaping out of my office brandishing baked goods in their faces. In future I will leave them quietly in the kitchen and hope that it catches on (and maybe just lurk behind the door to gauge their faces...).


Anyway, I started with The Classic One. I turned to the King Arthur Flour company for a recipe - not a brand we get here, but since choc chip cookies are quintessentially American an American trademark name seemed like the best way to go. It was very highly rated by readers and I stuck with the recipe exactly as it was written. Actually I was probably a bit light on the choc chips as I used up all the chocolate I had, and I omitted the optional almond flavouring for fear of moving too far from the classic, but it went down well anyway.


Cookie number 1 was quite a hit at work. It rated an average of 7.7, drawn down by one critic who only gave it a 5. The modal value (apologies - I am a quantitative historian!) was 8, which was pretty good. Of course only time will tell whether my colleagues are just extremely easy to please. We don't have a culture of bringing in home-baked goods, so I think that any cookie may elicit cries of pleasure, especially when stumbled upon unexpectedly on the way to the post room. I had a few simple and appreciative comments ('good stuff' and 'Yum!', and one cryptic one from a twentieth-century colleague 'Bit of slight vegetable taste?'. He has recently moved in with his vegetarian girlfriend I can only conclude that he is suspiciously seeing veggies everywhere! A colleague in the English department said they were nice and soft, someone else voted for dark choc chips another time. One person (the 5 rater, perhaps?) said that the flavour was not particularly pronounced. I have to admit that I actually agreed with them on that. I thought that they were nice, but that I would have been a bit disappointed if I'd ordered one in a cafe. Perhaps the almond essence would have been a good addition after all. The Scientist rated them an 8, with the benefit of getting them warm out of the oven :)

It's taken me a while to post about the first round, but it's going to be a regular Wednesday thing (I hope). Tomorrow's batch is already cooling in the kitchen and I'm keen to see what my rigorously-appraising colleagues say!

The Classic One: average rating 7.7
King Arthur Flour recipe here