Sugar Cookie Taste Test

I owed a friend of mine a big thank-you for a favor he'd done, and I asked what he would like for me to bake for him as a gift. He said he wanted some of my mother's sugar cookies. My mom's sugar cookies are delicious, but since I had just made a large batch for Christmas and still had some in the freezer, I thought I would make this batch more interesting by turning it into a taste test.

The basic recipe calls for vanilla extract and orange peel as the key ingredients. I decided to make three different bathes of the base recipe:

1. vanilla extract + orange peel
2. orange extract + orange peel
3. lemon extract + lemon peel

Again, I am a fan of mis en place preparation -- lay everything out on the counter so that you know you have all your ingredients, and, so that they are ready to go when you need them. Plus, it makes clean-up a snap.

When doing a taste test like this, it's also important to keep your samples labeled. You don't know if they actually will taste any different in the end, so, you need to keep the organized until you know the verdict.

Here, the dough is wrapped in saran wrap, ready to go into the fridge for one hour.

Of course, the down side of doing a taste test like this is that you have an army of cookies after the fact that you have to ice and store. Rather than mess with that, I took them around to neighbors, brought them into the office, and presented several to my friend who had requested them in the first place.

Comments

Holly Tompkins said…

What was the verdict? Which was your favorite?

February 23, 2010 at 1:48 PM

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