Cookies

One of the greatest things I've learnt is how to solve a problem. I had a problem....I couldn't make orange cream cookies. I wanted to solve the problem myself. Sure I could go look at a recipie from some website but that wouldn't be my cookie. That wouldn't be the cookie I wanted. I took a recipie my grandmother found for macadamia nut cookies and made it my orange cream cookies.

I started out trying orange oil for flavoring...but that didn't give it the proper flavor. I also added an egg and some salt and regular sugar while cutting back on powdered sugar. All of these were educated guesses based on other cookie recipies and research I had done giving me a good starting point. This made some pretty darn good cookies. The only problem was you couldn't taste the orange very much. When you could pick out the flavor it wasn't quite right. I thought about this for a while and decided i needed something like OJ in there. I couldn't use anything liquid though cause that would jack with the consistancy. Suddenly I figured it out. That orange drink mix stuff would work perfectly. So I grabbed some Tang and gave it a try. Only changing the one thing. Despite wanting to change other things about it I stopped myself. The key thing to problem solving is to figure out what changes have what effect. If you change more than one thing at a time you don't know what caused those changes. The Tang was too powerful though. Again without changing anything else I reduced the amount of Tang and made my super yummy cookies.

I guess this was just a really long post about problem solving. Only change one thing at a time. If it doesn't work...undo it and try something different. Eventually you may have to combine effects to see the desired results but at least you know what each thing is doing and you've learned from trial and error.


Orange Cream Cookies

Ingredients:
1 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup tang
2 eggs
1 cup butter
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp backing powder
1 tsp salt
2 1/2 cups flour
1 bag white chocolate chips
1 bag macadamia nuts

Soften the butter then add the eggs. Mix in the sugars and tang then add the vanilla. Mix the dry ingredients seperately then mix them in with the wet ingredients. Mix in the white chocolate chips and nuts. Refrigirate the dough for about 2 hrs. Roll out using a bit of four to make it easier. Cut with cookie cutters. Bake the cookies at 350 degrees for 13 minutes.