Living in Open SpaceThe Wonders of France

Dying Colours

Cookies are most commonly baked until crisp or just long enough that they remain soft, but some kinds of cookies are not baked at all. Cook-ies are made in a wide variety of styles, using an array of ingredients including sugars, spices, chocolate, butter, peanut butter, nuts, or dried fruits. The softness of the cookie may de-

pend on how long it is bakA general theory of cookies may be formulated this way. Despite its de-scent from cakes and other sweet-ened breads, the cookie in almost all its forms has abandoned water as a medium for cohesion.

Water in cakes serves to make the base (in the case of cakes called

“batter”) as thin as possible, which allows the bubbles – responsible for a cake’s fluffiness – to better form. In the cookie, the agent of cohesion has become some form of oil. Oils, whether they be in the form of but-ter, egg yolks.

vegetable oils, or lard, are much more viscous than water and evaporate freely at a much high-er temperature than water. Thus a cake made with butter or eggs instead of water is far denser after removal from the oven. Oils in baked cakes do not behave as soda tends to in the finished result. Rather than evaporating

TheYellowRecluse

shortly after the use of sugar be-came relatively common in the region. They spread to Europe through the Muslim conquest of Spain. By the 14th century, they were common in all levels of soci-ety throughout Europe, from royal cuisine to street vendors.

With global travel becoming wide-spread at that time, cookies made a

and thickening the mixture, they remain, saturating the bubbles of escaped gases from what little wa-ter there might have been in the eggs, if added, and the carbon di-oxide released by heating the bak-ing powder. This saturation produces the most texturally attractive feature of the cookie, and indeed all fried foods: crispness saturated with a moisture

(namely oil) that does not sink into it. Cookie-like hard wafers have existed for as long as baking is documented, in part because they deal with travel very well, but they were usually not sweet enough to be considered cookies by modern standards.

Cookies appear to have their or-igins in 7th century AD Persia,

Lost Architecture

Cookies came to America in the early English settlement (the 17th century), although the name “koekje” arrived with the Dutch. This became Anglicized to “cookie” or cooky. Among the popular early American cookies were the maca-roon, gingerbread cookies, and of course jumbles of various types.

The most common modern

cookie, given its style by the creaming of butter and sugar, was not common until the 18th cen-tury.

In the early 19th century, there were two different uses for the name cup cake or cupcake. In pre-vious centuries, before muffin tins were widely available, the cakes were often baked in individual

pottery cups, ramekins, or molds and took their name from the cups they were baked in. This is the use of the name that has remained, and the name of “cupcake” is now giv-en to any small cake that is about the size of a teacup. While English fairy cakes vary in size more than American cupcakes, they are tra-ditionally smaller and are rarely topped with elaborate icing.

The other kind of “cup cake” re-ferred to a cake whose ingredients were measured by volume, using a standard-sized cup, instead of being weighed. Recipes whose in-gredients were measured using a standard-sized cup could also be baked in cups; however, they were more commonly baked in tins as layers or loaves.

In later years, when the use of vol-ume measurements was firmly es-tablished in home kitchens, these recipes became known as 1234

cakes or quarter cakes, so called because they are made up of four ingredients: one cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, and four eggs. They are plain yellow cakes, somewhat less rich and less expensive than pound cake, due to using about half as much butter and eggs compared to pound cake.

The names of these two major classes of cakes were intended to signal the method to the baker; “cup cake” uses a volume measure-ment, and “pound cake” uses a.

Through the Desert

Lonely Roads

A standard cupcake uses the same basic ingredients as standard-sized cakes: butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. Nearly any recipe that is suitable for a layer cake can be used to bake cupcakes. The cake batter used for cupcakes may be flavored or have other ingredients stirred in, such as raisins, berries, nuts, or chocolate chips.