Take The Stinkin' Things Away!

I normally love cookies. All sorts of cookies: oatmeal chocolate chip, gingerbread, biscotti, ossi, Danish butter cookies, I mean all sorts of cookies. Yum. So I naturally look forward to the annual newspaper cookie recipe contest. Readers submit their recipes and the students of the restaurant program at a local community college bake them and then the food writers, food editors, and food photographers get together for a day of cookie tasting.

It is a fun event. For one thing, this is the one day that I get to hang out with all the food department. I work out of my home and NEVER have to go to the office for meetings or whatnot. They call, I eat, write and email, and they send a check. A weekly phone call with my editor is about all the contact I have with the department. However, food writers are fun, so it is a blast to hang out with them and nitpick on cookies.

Amalia gets to go to these, too, and having a three year old at a cookie judging is fun. She picks the cookies that have faces on them, the cookies that are bright pink and eats with gusto. She has the advantage over us. When she has had her fill (and then some, as toddlers are not known for regulating their cookie consumption, and that cookie regulating fascist father of hers is busy tasting and does not always say, "Amalia, don't you think that two merengue balls is enough?") she can run around the kitchen identifying the equipment and pointing out things that the rest of us fail to notice (or at least fail to comment on). The professional Wolf range, for instance, has blue fire! Pretty nifty.

So, while Amalia gets to take a respite from cookie consumption, we professionals have to keep tasting away. It takes about two bites to fairly judge a cookie, but there were 82 entries. We broke the entries into groups and teamed up, which brought it down to 20 cookies for round one, and then 10 for the final round. Needless to say, the 50 (some cookies, well, at first bite you really don't need to give them a second try to know that they are out of the running) bites of cookies add up to a lot of sweet dough sloshing around in the gut. Next year we need to bring more tasters.

Needless to say, I will probably not be craving a cookie any time soon!

Anyway, if you are going to enter a cookie contest remember that the judges will have been gnawing on an awful lot of cookies. That sweetness just builds and builds, so if you have a less sweet cookie, you will stand a much better chance of winning.

Also, adult tastes are a welcome relief from the gobs of chocolate (not to mention candies - although a few cookies with M and M's did make the final cut) that the judges will be tasting. If you are going to enter a chocolate cookie you will win points by: 1. Using dark chocolate and 2. Adding some other subtle flavor to the mix (subtle, mind you. Chocolate is a powerful blast of flavor. It does not need even stronger flavors to confuse things).

Another thing to keep in mind is that judges who have been eating too much like lighter textures. That super dense shortbread with frosting might be the perfect thing on a cold winter night, but when it is entry number 78 it probably will lose some of its charm. We are professionals, but we are also human and have human bodies. We can imagine eating a cookie in the correct setting, but the fact remains that we will have to actually eat and savor the cookie in the setting of the judging, so if you are intent on winning, keep that in mind.

The other thing to remember is that you might make your fantastic holiday cookies with candied citrus that you made yourself to exacting specifications, Remy Martin XO, Organic Unsalted Cultured Butter and Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla, but the chances are that the semi-commercial kitchen will use what they have, so it will be store bought candied orange peels, Christian Brothers brandy, cheap sweat cream butter (or shortening, if that is what the budget allows), and possibly vanillin. Our kitchen did a great job, but there were a few recipes that they had to use some substitutions in. They want their craftsmanship to shine, so they will do their best, but don't expect them to buy a bottle of Nardini Grappa just to perfectly recreate your recipe. So be simple. Use the commonest of ingredients and adjust your recipe to make them work.

Finally, the judges in a newspaper cookie contest are going to be foodies. We are a tribe that eats butter and foie gras and lots of wine. Your hippy coven might find the idea of cookies made out of birdseed and boiled linen a great way to connect with Mother Earth. We won't. So, if your recipe even hints at bran as an edible commodity, forget it. It doesn't stand a chance. Save it for the Whole Earth Christmas bakeoff. Likewise, cookies that substitute apple sauce for butter, cookies that use carob instead of chocolate, cookies that use grape juice instead of sugar. Forget about it. The closest to counting food that any of us will tolerate is perhaps Adkins, because foie gras and butter are allowed. We do tend to eat organic, but that is because organic produce outtastes the factory junk about seven to one. If we shop at hippy markets it is because they sell some great goat cheese that we cannot get elsewhere. Don't be fooled. Submit real cookies for real people.

However, anyone who bothered to send in a recipe wins points in my book, even if the recipe does basically mix KoolAid with merengue or call for wheat chaff or whatever those bits were that I had to floss out of my teeth. So, if you sent in a recipe, Bravo!

Anyway, it is now several hours after the tasting and I still would like to find a warm, sunny rock to lie down on to let the cookies digest. Since it is a late autumn night, a warm bed will have to suffice. Yodling will return later!