Blue Cookies?

Hello everyone. Anyone fancy a treat? How about some home baked cookies?

In any time of life with work, school, study, family life or anything else that can leave us tired, it'll be a pleasure to sit back and with an oven to use to bake the likes of cookies, cakes and slices and so fourth. This'll provide good get togethers in many ways.

Although I'm not much of a baker except for making meals, I came up with a grand opportunity to make my own one-of-a-kind cookies, which by the way will be blue. It was towards the end of June after the Aspergers Victoria Young Adults Zoom meeting as we've been discussing about what foods we want to eat and/or provide for future in-person meetings. Apart from some idea of having dinosaur shaped nuggets, I brought up the idea of providing blue cookies and there has been some keen interest. And so it begins.

My first overall hurdle is the fact I have never made cookies before, but here's a recipe to reference.

And here are the recipes I have assembled so far. I'll give you all the more detailed list of ingredients required.

*    125 g butter

*    1/2 cup of castor sugar

*    1/2 cup of brown sugar

*    1 egg

*    1/2 tsp vanilla essence

*    1 3/4 cup of self-raising flour

*    120 g white chocolate buttons broken up

*    2 drops of blue food colouring

With all these gathered, it's time to make my first batch.

The first stage is creaming the butter and sugar. I'm not sure how long since I've last creamed but I can say it's quite a long time. With my mum assisting, creaming the butter is more of a lengthy process because of the lumps of butter which is a little too cold.

Eventually, we got there.

With the rest of the ingredients added, this is when outcomes don't go as well as I liked. One of them is a lack of blue and therefore, the cookie dough ended up green.

And when they've been baked for 15 minutes with the oven heated up to 180 degrees Celsius (365 degrees Fahrenheit), they tasted alright but at least I can make revisions for later.

So the revisions include

*    5-6 drops of blue food colouring

*    Creaming time to be longer and butter to be more warm and soft enough

*    1 tsp of vanilla essence instead of half

Take two.

With the egg and vanilla essence, we came up with the method of combining them in this small bowl though lightly whisked. That way when the sugar and butter mixture are creamed, the egg mixture can be poured in and mixed into the creamed butter.

And with the amount of blue food colouring upped to 15 drops instead of even 6, these are a better result. Even when they're more enjoyable, both my mum and I concluded the brown sugar makes the intention of the blue colour quite difficult.

But that hasn't spoilt the cookies enough for everyone else. To date, my parents and I enjoyed them as well as both my uncle and aunty. Then comes the bigger test. Another round of people. Even in the arts field.

And so, I have baked my third batch of my blue cookies with 2 more revisions. Up to 20 drops of blue food colouring and a cup of white chocolate chips instead of a half. Yesterday, I've attended this month's SECAN meeting and after that, the opening of this month's Who Are You? art exhibition.

Once my container of the cookies is opened to be put on the place, the surrounding members got an impressive shock. Despite some saying they're on the green side, they enjoyed eating them in the end. It'll be fair to say the colour would be best described as turquois.

In the end, I have less than half left in the container I've carried. During this process, I wanted to add another flavour instead of the vanilla essence as an X factor.

Even with the likes of this blue raspberry flavour or even grape, I wished to take my blue cookies to the next level. However, the cookies have won enough approval so I felt I'll just leave it there. With this accomplished, the next batch I'll reserve for the Asperger's Victoria Young Adults group. That'll be later.

I still haven't ruled out making a lemon tart but once I'll move out again, it'll happen.

See you next time!