i taught a baking class for 12 year olds today and we made your garden variety chocolate chip cookies, but i’m a big believer in Questioning Everything and the who/what/where/why/when/how behind things, so the first part of the class was purposely letting the kids do things the wrong way, to show and explain why we do things the way we do.
“why do we bake cookies at 180 for 9 minutes when we could do 400 for 2 minutes?”
-enter the godawful lump of coal with a still gross wet and uncooked inside
“why do we have to scoop out little cookies instead of doing the whole tray?”
-ok well that one you can technically do if the spread is even. you just end up with one giant, structurally unsound cookie.
“PLEASE CAN WE MAKE GIANT COOKIES”
(we did make 1 giant tray cookie)
we talked a lot about why consistency is important, but i don’t think it really hammered home until i said “okay everyone gets ONE cookie, that’s fair, right?” and then handed out cookies of hugely varying sizes. + baked one fat lump of a cookie that still wasn’t done at the 9 minutes, vs the regular one i put in that came out charred by the time the first was actually done.
we also made a row of cookies where each one had one single differing ingredient omitted, like a cookie with no flour, or a cookie with no butter, and laid them all out on a single tray to bake together to see how each ingredient affects the outcome.
two of the little girls added cocoa to their cookie doughs until it matched the colour of each others skin to make best friend cookies, and that almost made me tear up a bit 🥺
got briefly distracted (…for over half an hour…) talking about how eggs form when someone cracked an egg and it had 2 yolks
expertly tolerated being asked how old i am (just turned 31 the other day) which was immediately followed by asking if i watched the moon landing live on tv
was so focused on keeping track of all the kids that in the end i forgot to make a cookie for myself, but it’s ok because one of the girls gave me this
