ApproximationCookies

Also known as, SarahFletcher likes to bake cookies and is not going to let the fact that the only measuring implements to be found are funnels labeled as 4oz and 8oz, or that ovens are labeled weirdly, or any other such trivial problem caused by being Budapest keep her from doing so. This tends to make 20 or so cookies

Basic Recipe:

Start with a hunk of butter that looks roughly equal 3/4 of a stick (this is what was available the first time, and it worked out well) and put it in a decent sized mixing bowl (a soup pot works reasonably well too). Cream the butter and add sugar until the butter looks reasonably saturated - ie, until it looks about like the butter sugar mixture does at the beginning of most cookie recipes. Add an egg and a small splash of vanilla and mix well. Add a relatively large scoop of flour to the bowl and add a pinch of salt and a few pinches of baking soda to the pile. Attempt to stir the salt and baking soda into just the flour that is in the bowl (the purpose of this is to help keep the baking soda and salt from ending up clumped together). Mix the contents of the bowl well. The dough is probably still quite sticky. Mix in more flour. Continue mixing in more flour until the cookie dough is roughly the consistency of PlayDough?. Pinch off chunks of the dough and roll them into slightly-smaller than ping-pong ball sized balls. Set them on some sort of baking sheet - it need not be an actual cookie sheet as long as its clean - an flatten them slightly so they will cook more nicely. Assuming you added enough flour they should not spread *too* much, so if you leave 1/2 inch or so between them you should be fine. Now, study the oven. Figure out how to turn it on. If the temperature dial is in Celsius set it to around 180, if it has temperature settings corresponding to the numbers 1-8, setting it to about 5.5 seems to work well enough. Wait until it seems hot. Put the cookies in the oven. Wait about 5 minutes and check on them to see if they look done. If they look nicely browned, they are probably done. Try gently poking one, if it doesn't feel squishy, you can call them done. When they are done, take them out of the oven and let them cool for a minute or two (or longer if you have that kind of patience). Remove them from the cookie sheet and try one :-).

Variations:

Chocolate:

• 1) Discover you have some kind of cocoa powder, but are not sure whether it is intended for hot cocoa or as baking chocolate. Decide it does not matter and stir a couple heaping spoonfuls into the wet mixture before starting to add flour.

• 2) Decide you want chocolate chip cookies. Discover they do not seem to sell chocolate chips in Budapest. Buy a chocolate bar and break it up instead to approximate chocolate chips. Stir the chocolate chunks in after the flour has been added.

SpiceCookies?:

• Realize that there is a packet in the box of random spices that you have identified as cinnamon, a bottle that contains what has been concluded to be nutmeg and that there is a large piece of ginger root left from the stir fry that was made for dinner. Grate up some of the ginger root so that you have a good sized mound of it. Mix the ginger into the cookie batter before you start adding flour. Dump a large quantity of the cinnamon into the batter and add some of the nutmeg. Mix it well and then add the flour as above.
• If you discover that you do not have a grater that grates the ginger as fine as you would like you can just chop it up tiny. Also, cloves are amazing.