What Exactly Is A Cookie?

Small Batch Cookies is published TODAY!

Malted Black and White Cookies

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Happy Thursday. Yes, Thursday, a rare but important break from the regular Friday newsletters. Why? Well, today is a huge day! It is finally publication day for my brand new book, Small Batch Cookies. As I write this, today is the morning after the night before, the night before being the launch party, and the minor hangover and the sheer exhaustion after multiple days of preparation may account for any spelling errors that follow (don’t know what I can blame any errors in regular newsletters on).

Today is the big day - what the last year and a bit has been building towards - release day. I am beyond excited to share the book with all of you, and today, as a bit of a publication day special, I thought I would share a recipe from the book, one that really typifies the idea behind the book.

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Edit - As I was getting ready to send out this issue of the newsletter, I got some exciting news. Nigella Lawson has just published this weeks Cookbook Corner, her weekly cookbook review, and I am thrilled that this weeks post is all about Small Batch Cookies and even moree excitingly she loved it! Read the full review here

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If the idea of small batch baking is completely alien to you, let me give you a quick elevator pitch. Baking is so often about the big occasions - the birthdays, the weddings, the office leaving do, but what about the smaller, everyday types of occasions? What if you’ve had a rubbish day and you just want a cookie but don’t want to make 24 or 36? What if you’ve got a couple friends coming over and you’d like to make them a little sweet treat but don’t want to spend hours and hours making something fancy? Small batch baking is for those moments when traditional baking recipes don’t really fit. When it comes to 'Small Batch Cookies' I settled on a framework of 1-6. Some recipes make just one cookie, and none make more than six.

Coconut Milk Chocolate and Cranberry Cookies

The recipes in the book are incredibly varied, and the multiple styles included bring up a major sticking point. What exactly is a cookie? It may sound ridiculous, but trying to pin down a clear definition on which we can all agree is not as easy as you might think. In the UK, a cookie is seen mainly as something that resembles an American chocolate chip cookie (technically classified as a drop cookie), and everything else is a biscuit. In the US, however, cookie is much more all-encompassing: an Oreo is a cookie (a biscuit if you're British), and you can even stretch the definition to include brownies and blondies, categorising them as bar cookies. As the world has become smaller, the term has become muddled, stretched, and transformed. The French did not call anything a cookie until relatively recently; they have biscuits, sablés, and gâteaux secs (dry cakes) but have now also adopted 'le cookie', meaning different things depending on the context. This book will therefore be a broad church and take an international approach. To that end this is my definition of a cookie:

Cookies are individually baked small treats, which are generally flat and sweet. They can be cakey, chewy, crisp, or crunchy, and they can be made like a shortbread or a chocolate chip cookie. For the Brits, I think of it like this: All biscuits are cookies, but not all cookies are biscuits.

To draw the line somewhere, I also decided not to include bar cookies in this book; that was a step too far for my British editor, who couldn’t believe that a brownie could possibly appear in a cookie book.

Panela Shortbread

Hopefully you now understand the idea behind the book, and that idea sounds fun and exciting, but, to push you over the edge, I also have a recipe from the book to share with you. This is a single-serve cookie recipe, and it’s fabulous - a butterscotch and pecan cookie that is delightfully chewy and absolutely delicious. There are a few single-serve cookie recipes in the book, and for these recipes the ingredients only appear with spoon measurements (1 tbsp, 1 tsp etc). This is for a very specific reason. The joy of making a single solitary cookie is just how incredibly quick and simple the process is. To keep that simplicity alive, I liked the idea that you only need a set of measuring spoons, a bowl, and nothing much else. It does go against my strong desire to be done with the imperial system, but in this particular circumstance it works wonders. If that lack of weight measurements offends you, don’t worry; only 3 recipes out of 70 are written this way.

The book is officially out today, in the UK, AUS, and NZ, and I truly hope you love it. You can order a copy from any good bookshop, and it’s available online from all the usual places. Readers in North America will have to wait another month, unfortunately, but to make up for the delay, I am coming stateside for a small book tour. The full details will be announced soon, but this is the rough plan.

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1st Oct - Minneapolis (event tba, but it is in the evening)

2nd Oct - Seattle - Book Larder 6.30pm in conversation with Lauren Ko @lokokitchen (ticket includes copy of the book)

3rd Oct - San Francisco - Omnivore Books 6.30pm in conversation with Liz Prueitt (free event, books available to buy)

5th Oct - Maclean, Virginia (Tysons Galleria) - Sur Le Table - details to be announced.

6th Oct - Washington DC - Bold Fork Books - details to be announced, but the event is in the evening.

8th Oct - NYC - details to be announced but VERY EXCITING and is going to be during the day.

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Single Serve Pecan and Butterscotch Cookie
From ‘Small Batch Cookies’

1 tbsp unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled

2 tbsp light brown sugar

1/2 tbsp whole milk

1 1/2 tbsp plain flour

1 1/2 tbsp strong white bread flour

Pinch of baking powder

Pinch of bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)

Pinch of fine sea salt

2 butterscotch candies (I used Weather’s Originals), roughly chopped

2 tbsp roughly chopped toasted pecans

Preheat the oven to 180ºC (160ºC Fan) and line a small baking tray with parchment paper.

In a small bowl, mix together the butter, sugar, and milk until fully combined and smooth. Add the flours, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, and salt and mix to form a cookie dough. Add the butterscotch candies and pecans and mix briefly to distribute.

Form the dough into a ball and place on the prepared baking tray. Bake for about 16 minutes until the edges are golden but the centre’s still a little pale. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool.

Best enjoyed on the day it is made.

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Notes

If you don’t like the idea of pre-heating your oven to bake one single cookie, a couple of thoughts. One, you can bake the cookie alongside something else you're cooking, and two, you can also bake these in an air fryer, or any cookie for that matter. Baking cookies in an air fryer will yield slightly different results, and timings will need to be adjusted, but it's a good alternative. My general advice is that cookies will bake in a shorter time period and the texture will be slightly different, generally crisper on the outside and gooier in the centre.