Cookies
By: Natalia Aulia
Tags: Cookies, Recipe, Baking, Cooking, Product Design

Final Idea

M Shaped Pandan Cookie

The shape M is inspired from the University of Minnesota.

The University of Minnesota’s logo.

The pandan taste is inspired from all the cakes and cookies I grew up eating that had a pandan incorporated in it.

All of my childhood favorite desserts.

Recipe

Ingredients for M Shaped Pandan Cookie:

2 drops of pandan extract

1 ½ cup of all purpose flour

1 cup of granulated sugar

½ cup of salted melted butter

2 egg yolks

1 tsp of baking soda

1 cup of mozzarella cheese

1 tsp of brown sugar

Baking steps :

Put the melted butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar in a bowl and mix them altogether. Once it’s mixed together, add in 2 drops of pandan extract and mix them again until you can see the color turn into green and the texture looks like a paste. Put the granulated sugar and baking soda in a different bowl and mix them together. Combine the first mixture from the other bowl with this mixture and stir them together. Add in your egg yolks once you’ve mix the two bowls together and stir it again. After you have all your ingredients mixed together in one bowl, don’t forget to add your mozzarella cheese to the dough and stir it altogether. Pre heat your oven for 350 °F. While waiting for your oven to be ready, cover your cookie tray with aluminum foil or baking sheets and put your cookies on top of it. Once your oven is ready, put your tray of cookie inside the oven and wait for 18 minutes. After your cookie is done, leave it in room temperature for a few minutes to harden.

Idea Generation

When I arrived home after the first day of my PDes 2701 class, I had a lot of questions in mind: “What is a cookie? Does it have to be sweet? Can it be salty? Can it not be dry?” I came from a country in Asia called Indonesia, where the translation for cookie and the translation for cake are very much alike, which makes it quite confusing for me to understand what cookie is from an American perspective. I started this assignment by writing down my ideas for what cookies I want to bake and innovate. After 30 minutes of writing and scribbling down my ideas while looking at Hoa’s notes on the class presentation, I stopped for a minute and realized that all of my ideas on what cookies I want to innovate look more like cakes.

Traditional “cookies” from Indonesia that I wanted to innovate.

After another 30 minutes of frustration of wanting to create something different and unique to my culture, I went to my roommate’s room next door with an intention of letting my frustration out. Then I realized that my roommate is the biggest fan of cookies that I had ever met. She would stock up Insomnia Cookies in our fridge and order it at 3AM. I knocked on her door and asked her some questions about cookies and why she loved it so much. She said that she loves cookies because it’s her version of “traditional dish” simple yet comforting — just chocolate, sugar, flour, egg, and water. She loves the fact that it’s gewy and sweet and she also mentions how Insomnia Cookies are the best because instead of using chocolate chip for their cookies, they use dark chocolate chunks, which balances the sweetness in the cookie. At that point, my desire to create something unique was gone because I understood that people love cookies because it’s a comfort food and they love the sweetness of cookies.

The next day, I wrote down more ideas on what I thought I wanted to bake for the assignment. I came up with several ideas based on the notes I wrote the day before while thinking of what Thea said about cookies. I also listed all the ingredients I would need to bake all of these cookies. I separated the ones that might only be available in an Asian grocery store and the ones that’s available in every grocery store.

Notes I wrote for my cookie ideas and the ingredients I would need.

Out of all the cookies that I was interested to bake, these three were my most favorites — M Shaped Panda Cookie with Cheese, Spider Cookie, and Blue Spirulina Banana Cloud Cookie since they were all similar to the cookies that I grew up eating. Afterwards, I went to a nearby grocery store to buy the ingredients to make these. It turns out that some of the ingredients I wanted weren’t available and some of them would be harder to be mixed with cookies. Knowing my intermediate baking skills, I decided to buy the ingredients to make cookies that are within my ability.

I went to United Noodles to buy the ingredients.

Out of all the ingredients that I would need to bake the cookies, the ingredients I found at the store were: brown sugar, vanilla, pandan, coconut flakes, mozzarella cheese, chocolate bars, and butter. Therefore, I decided to make the M Shaped Pandan Cookie and the Spider Cookie.

As I mentioned before, these two cookies are heavily influenced by the cookies that I grew up eating. I got the inspiration of adding pandan flavor to my cookie because in Indonesia, we use pandan a lot in our desserts and beverages. On the other hand, a mix of chocolate and cheese is a very natural thing for me to have in my dessert since I grew up loving both sweet and salty food.

I believe that the M Shaped Pandan Cookie I created is creative. Here are some of my reasons:

The incorporation of pandan flavor as well as the cheese to have a hint of bitterness and saltiness to the taste of the cookie. The pandan flavor also adds a hint of crispiness to the cookie, which makes it taste better. I believe that pandan is extremely rare to use in desserts here in the United States, which makes the cookie unique in its own way. The shape of the cookie, M, offers a playful look which I think will make the customers more interested to buy the cookie.

Some examples of desserts and beverages that I grew up eating with pandan and chocolate cheese mix.

Idea Test 1

On the next day, I gathered all the ingredients I need to make both the M Shaped Pandan Cookie and the Spider Cookie.

Ingredients for Spider Cookie:

1 cup of brown sugar

¾ cup of granulated sugar

½ cup of salted butter

½ cup of chocolate chunks (preferably dark chocolate)

1 tsp of baking soda

1 ¼ of all purpose flour

½ cup of salted butter

½ cup of mozzarella cheese

Process of making the Spider Cookie

After the mixture was mixed and combined well together, I preheated the oven for 350 °F and baked the cookies for 15 minutes.

After I took the cookie tray out of the oven, I was immediately shocked with the result. The shape of the cookie was nothing like a spider and ended up with a shape of a circle. I forgot that once I put the ingredients in the oven, it would expand. Not only that, I was also disappointed with the taste of the cookie. When I ate the spider cookie, it turned out to be very bitter and tasted very similar to a dark chocolate chunk cookie, which was not what I wanted. It also didn’t have both the sweet and salty flavor because the bitterness was too overpowering.

Idea Test 2

Ingredients for M Shaped Pandan Cookie:

1 tsp of pandan

1 ½ cup of all purpose flour

1 cup of granulated sugar

½ cup of salted butter

1 tsp of vanilla extract

2 egg yolks

¼ cup of coconut flakes

1 tsp of baking soda

1 cup of mozzarella cheese

1 tsp of brown sugar

For the M Shaped Pandan Cookie, I added more cheese because I wanted the taste to be a mix of salty and sweet. I also didn’t add any dark chocolate chunks because I didn’t want it to have a bitter taste.

The mixture of M Shaped Pandan Cookie.

The result of M Shaped Pandan Cookie.

I was very happy that the pandan cookie looked exactly like how I wanted it to be but the taste of it was a bit more bitter than sweet or salty. When I asked my roommate, Thea, on her opinion about the cookie, she told me that the M Shaped Pandan Cookie didn’t quite show the cheese flavor and that the bitterness came from the pandan flavoring. However, it was still very tasty and looks a lot like a cookie. Therefore, I decided to go with the M Shaped Pandan Cookie and try to change some ingredients to get the cookie that I wanted.

Iteration

This time, I decided to add only two drops of pandan, add another ½ cup of granulated sugar, changed the cheese from mozzarella to cheddar, add 1 tsp of brown sugar, took out the vanilla extract because I don’t want it to be too sweet, and left the mix overnight in my refrigerator in hopes that it would give the taste I wanted. I also didn’t add any coconut flakes because it didn’t give any effect to the taste of the cookie. Also, instead of making an M, I made a circle shape because I wanted to focus more on the taste rather than the shape of the cookie.

I left the mixture that I had shaped overnight.

The following day, I preheat the oven for 350 °F and bake the cookies for 18 minutes instead of 15 minutes. It looked very different because of the lesser amount of pandan I put into the ingredient but it tasted so much better. However, it was very worth it because the taste is very different. It has no bitterness to it and the flavor is a mix of salty and sweet. It was exactly what I wanted.

In the end, I didn’t have the perfect M shape like my initial idea but the taste was so much better. It was a combination of salty and sweet and the taste of bitterness was very minimal, which was what I wanted.

TIMELINE

09/03/2019 — Create a Medium account and start to list different ideas on what cookies I want to make.

09/05/2019 — List different ingredients each cookies need, where to buy it, and write down steps on how to make the cookies.

09/06/2019 — Buying ingredients I will need to bake the cookies in the grocery store. I will also document the process of doing research (a taste test) on what cookie taste and looks the best.

09/07/2019 — Baking test! Spend most of the day to try different cookie recipes that I have collected, let my roommates try the cookies that I have baked, and ask for inputs regarding the cookies. I will also document the process of baking the cookies and the end product.

09/08/2019 — Update my Medium blog on the process that I have done so far to achieve the cookie recipe that I want.

09/09/2019 — Based on the inputs from my roommates, I will try to bake the cookies again (I might use a different ingredient or add some more to it).

09/10/2019 — Finalizing my Medium post (edit some stuff and add more to the post) about the Cookie creating process.

09/11/2019 — Bake my cookies that I will bring to the class on the following day.