when a pan of dough is baked to just the right degree of doneness. If you remove it too soon, it

remains doughy in the center and tastes raw. If you leave it in too long, it dries out and loses its

moist, chewy quality. Using your own tested recipe with your notes on baking time is helpful, but

you still need to test with a skewer or a thin-bladed knife for doneness. Start testing a few minutes

before the given baking time, something that can vary a great deal depending on your oven, the size

of your eggs, dryness of the flour or the humidity of your kitchen. Even when making your same

tested recipe a month later those great fig bars may not turn out as good.

How you cut up the finished result makes them squares or bars. There is no reason why

they cannot be diamonds or triangles.

The word cookie came from the Dutch koekje, meaning little cakes. Cookies come in an

endless variety, calling for all sorts of different and unusual doughs.

It takes considerably more effort to make cookies than bars—they must be formed and

plopped individually on a cookie sheet. That is time consuming, particularly when you are baking 6

or 8 dozens. Because they have such tiny volume, it is very easy to overbake or underbake cookies.

Sometimes they spread out on your cookie sheet and bake into a flat, cow-pie-looking object instead

of many neat, plump, individual cookies. At other times, they end up hard as forgotten week-old

dinner rolls with burned bottoms and edges, and a bitter flavor. Do these sound familiar? Still and

all, cookies or bars are your best bet when the occasion calls for a quick-fix dessert.

All baked cookies have a low moisture content of less than 5 percent, and very crisp cookies

only contain 2 to 3 percent. It is the low moisture that keeps cookies from spoiling. There is not

enough moisture left for organisms that could feed on them. The cookies eventually get stale, but

you have never seen one that spoils from bacteria or mold.

Types of cookies

According to the method you make them, cookies may be the following types:

. Rolled cookies are made from a chilled dough that is very low in moisture. Roll out the

dough thin as you can, cut the cookies with a cookie cutter and place them on a baking sheet ready

to bake. You can decorate them either before or after baking. Rolled cookies are time-consuming to

make at home but commercially machines make them by the millions in minutes. An example for

rolled cookie is the traditional holiday cookie.

. Drop cookies are faster to make than rolled cookies. The dough has more moisture to

allow you to drop the dough by the spoonfuls onto a baking sheet. If you are making a lot of drop

cookies at one time, fill a pastry bag with a fairly soft dough. With the pastry bag you can produce

them faster with neat, uniform size and pretty shape. If your dough contains coarse nuts, fruit pieces

or chocolate chips, you need to use a pastry tube with a large opening or the coarse pieces plug it up.

An alternative to pastry tube is tiny professional scoops, like a miniature ice cream scoop, with a

spring-return spoon scraper, available in restaurant supply houses. They are also reasonably fast,

easy to clean up. A set of different sizes in your drawer is an excellent addition to your kitchen

tools.

. Refrigerator (or icebox) cookie dough is a little drier than drop cookie dough. After

mixing, you roll the dough into a cylindrical shape size of a thick summer sausage, wrap and chill it

for several hours until quite firm. If you have French baguette pans, their trough shapes are perfect

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