In preparation for Art’s 1,000,046 Birthday Celebration this Saturday, January 17, 2009 at Phog (starts at 8:30pm, $3 for students and unemployed and Artcite members, $4 for everyone else), we spent Sunday evening making Broken City Lab fortune cookies from scratch. There’s lots of pictures of our adventures in baking after the jump.
The process of making fortune cookies began with everyone submitting some fortunes (ranging from philosophical, to ascii art, to Windsor-focused future-looking) Danielle put them all into a table then proceeded to cut out each one. Maybe we’ll post all the fortunes later, or use the remaining fortunes for another project.
We relied on Josh to try to compute the amount of ingredients we would need to make the target of 70 fortune cookies. Ultimately we ended up somewhere around 40.
Michelle and Leesa hand-warm the eggs, which had to be at room temperature before beating.
Michelle, our resident baking expert, turns these egg whites into meringue.
We were overly cautious with this first cookie… it took three of us to hold the baking sheet, flatten the parchment paper, and gently put some fortune cookie batter onto the sheet.
We collectively held our breath as we put in the very first fortune cookie. We figured we would just try one at first, in case anything went horribly wrong.
After some troubles with the digital oven (we were resetting the temperature, while trying to set the timer, or something), we settled on the reliable old Mercury timer.
The maiden fortune cookie in baking process.
Michelle started on another batch, while we waited for the first cookie to come out of the oven.
The first cookie came out pretty well, though it was thicker than it probably should have been.
While waiting for the first cookie to cool before folding it and putting a fortune inside, we tried to figure out how to make the cookies thinner. Using a rolling pin was not the answer.
We then tried the next recipe, while still waiting for the first to cool.
Immony reasoned that there was likely someone on the Internet who had already made fortune cookies and wisely suggested we look up the process, to see how thick they were. The cookies made by Good Housekeeping were considerably thinner than ours, but also used a different recipe.
Oops, we forgot about one of the test cookies from the second batch.
After waiting for the first cookie to cool (probably for longer than we should have), Michelle rolled the first Broken City Lab fortune cookie.
This is the second fold needed to make a fortune cookie, after folding it in half, you fold it again over the side of a bowl.
Immony documents that first fold.
The first fortune cookie folded and in the muffin tray to finish cooling. We thought there might be too much butter though.
After the first cookie, we decided to bake more than one at a time, but this version of the recipe still had too much butter.
I tried to spread the dough thinner, as we figured that the thinner they were, the easier they would fold.
Immony also starts working on thinner cookies to go into the oven.
Danielle takes over folding after it was found that I have too heavy of a hand (I was breaking the cookies I tried to fold).
The finished plates of fortune cookies—again, not as many as we had planned, but we’re still happy we have a couple solid piles of cookies to give out on Saturday. And a huge thanks to Mary (and Leesa) for use of the kitchen and delicious snacks along the way!!!
Yep, I am devastated that I missed this.
Did the cookies end up hardening into a crispier
form?
Not sure how crisp they got… Leesa has them stored away in some tupperware containers. At the end of the night, they definitely weren’t as crisp as restaurant fortune cookies, not sure how much that will change over the next few days.
You guys look like you have great meetings! I’m jealous as hell.
This is so awesome, I don’t even know what to say…or think. Bravo!