I Love Cooking with mom. Food is a big thing in our family, but my cooking and so much of how I feel about it comes directly from her. She’s a better, more intuitive baker than I am, so when I found a cookie cookbook that combines science and creativity, I timed my assessment test to get in line for a trip home to see her.
I had discovered the book courtesy of Jill Lightner, a food writer neighbor who also runs a small free bakery in front of her Seattle home. Her story made me intrigued by the authors, Chris Taylor and Paul Arguin, a couple who work for the Centers for Disease Control in their day job and also wrote the esteemed cookbook. The new pie.
Cookbook cookie recipes can feel like a tired space: chocolate chips, oatmeal raisins, snickerdoodle, fingerprint, repeat. In the duo’s new book, Fantastic modern biscuits, they mix it up. Here’s an example: Their chocolate chip cookies don’t just use brown butter, it’s also “bronze butter,” a trick they borrowed from Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot, where milk solids are stirred into the melted butter as it browns on the stove, enhancing its characteristic nuttiness and giving the cookie an insanely good, long-lasting flavor.
Mom looked at the future combination of eggs, butter, sugar and vanilla and although the instructions allowed for leeway, she said, “Put that in the stand mixer, it’s going to be horrifying if you mix that by hand.”
We moved on to roll out lemon cheesecake, a kind of creamy cousin to shortbread. I pulled out the scale, hoping it would be a great way to get her, a gal of English sizes, cups, and quarts, to measure by weight.
“I’ve got a big rolling pin,” she said, placing it on the scale as I recalibrated my hopes and dreams. “It weighs 1,236 grams.”
Measuring by weight can give great, consistent results, and since you’re often pouring ingredients directly into the bowl you’re mixing them in, it cuts down on cleaning; for example, there will be no measuring cups for washing up.
The next day I made infinite brownies with my cousin Eli, who loves to cook at age 13 and is especially curious about timing and temperature in a recipe. The “infinite” part of the brownies is that, by cooking in a water bath known as a bain-marie, it keeps crunchy edges from forming so you end up with wall-to-wall fudge.
The first signs of great success with the book came when my father, who is not known for his sweet tooth, kept sauntering into the kitchen as if he were looking for the dog leash or lost keys. It wasn’t until later that we realized that he had scooped out a piece of brownies on each trip.
Next, Mom and I switched to “breakaways,” also known as piña colada oatmeal cookies, with an entry that included a history of the drink in the top notes. Normally, a cookie with a name like this wouldn’t be my bag, but Taylor and Arguin include chunks of roasted pineapple, shredded coconut, and dark rum. (I couldn’t bring myself to go full Malibu, so I got Myers’s.) This was another one where Mom’s cool hand was very helpful. Towards the end of baking I peeked into the oven and got a little unsure of how long they would take, and she looked over my shoulder and said “three more minutes” and was right about the money.
Then we got into a groove and made little coconut cookies that topped guava preserves thickened with Instant ClearJel, a modified starch often used to firm up fruit pie fillings. Maybe it was the brand of canned guava we were using or we could have used more starch, but it still squeezed out the sides, which was a fantastic excuse to open up and double our guava intake. The fruit was a perfect foil for the cream of coconut and coconut flakes, dancing tartness with sweet and crunchy. It wasn’t everyone’s favorite, but those of us who loved it loved it and gave it top marks on the fabulousness scale.