Okay, so in the ongoing quest for a homemade OCP recipe, maybe it’ll be better to play around with some other parameters to see what’s going on. So far, I haven’t looked much at the oil composition or sugar composition in the cookie, so let’s focus on those. Also, I’m curious to see how much of an impact the corn starch has in the overall cookie.

Before getting into the details of that, I modified the 0.2 recipe a couple different ways as well, in the continued vein of playing with too many variables at once.

1. I’m using 1.5 t. baking soda only, instead of 1 t. baking powder and 1 t. baking soda, to encourage a flatter cookie.
2. At the same time, I raised the temperature back up to 350F to encourage a bit less spreading, since some of these cookies are probably going to want to spread a lot.

So, starting with the recipe with those two modifications, I tried the following options. Broadly, I’m interested in what happens as the dough gets goopier and goopier.

OCP v. 0.3

This corresponds to 24 combinations of options.

An embarassingly tedious amount of single-cookie-portioning later, we have two cupcake tins full of chilled single-cookie portions.

mixed using the tiniest of whisks

In all these pictures, From left to right, you’ll find sugar options in order from 1-4. So the left most cookies have dark brown sugar/molasses and right most cookies have corn syrup/molasses. Similarly, from top to bottom, you’ll find the cookies with more solid oil on top and cookies biased toward liquid oil at the bottom. This particular tray had the “oat and corn starch” dry mixture added in.

Dolloped onto a cookie sheet, the mixtures looked as below:

round —> mound

The oat cookies came out first, so let’s try those! I’m curious to see how they turned out.

Oat Flour Only

As one could have expected, teh more goopy the dough got, teh more spread out the cookies tended to be. Notes about tasting these:

1. These fall apart really easily. I don’t think they’d actually hold up to shipping, or even much handling at all…
2. The brown sugar cookies are tasty, but surprisingly wet - much wetter than the white sugar ones. I’ve heard that brown sugar is “wetter” than white sugar, but I didn’t realize how large the impact was.
3. Aside from that, the cookies are OK, taste-wise. the cookies with more grapeseed oil do in fact feel more oily, and not quite in a good way.

But let’s see how the tried-and-true oat flour and corn starch blend turns out.

Oat Plus Corn Starch

Tasting notes:

1. Ok, these cookies are way more handlable.
2. Also, hm, the spread out cookies are maybe a bit over done. Going back to 350 may not have been the right call for these.
3. The brown sugar cookies were still too wet, though.
4. The cookies with corn syrup substituted, interestingly, weren’t sweet enough! By weight, corn syrup’s less sweet than sugar, but I didn’t realize how much less sweet it ended up being than white sugar.

Takeaways:

For this given test matrix and trial, the winner was the cookie with:

Sugar: Option 1 (75% coconut oil, 25% grapeseed) Sugar: Option 2 (50% sugar, 50% molasses) Flour: Option 1 (75% oat flour, 25% corn starch)

This result is maybe a little underwhelming, since nothing happened that revolutionized the base recipe. But still, we’ll continue tweaking from here. :)

Now, let’s make some normal-sized cookie batches. It’s still not quite where I want an OCP, but it’s a pretty alright cookie, if a bit soft.

For next iterations, I’m actually most interested in taking the brown sugar/molasses cookie and making it have a bit more structure, while still being flatter. I imagine the cookie would still end up plenty flat with egg or another egg substitute, while being able to stay together a bit better.

OCP v. 0.3.1 (winning options)

Variations

I tried some flavor variations with this recipe, to see how they turned out. You’ll find them in your cookie shipment.

1. base recipe
2. honey oat cookies (sub. honey for molasses)
3. ginger molasses cookies (sub 2 t. ground ginger for other spices)

Here they are!

Basic cookie, Honey Oat cookie, and Ginger cookie. Can you tell which is which? If you can, tell me. I forgot what order I put them in when taking this picture.

They’re pretty alright, though some ended up a bit underdone. I may need to up the time on the recipe to ~10 minutes to accommodate, but I don’t have a good explanation for the variability right now. Hopefully the softer ones can firm up a bit over the next day or two.

Update: after sitting a bit, the cookies did firm up a bit more; they’re still very soft though.