Teacher Appreciation Week: Day 3

Continuing Teacher Appreciation Week, my next gift is homemade cookies. I'm trying this new recipe that I found on Pinterest. I picked it for a few reasons. One, the photos had me salivating just looking at them. Second, it includes gram measurements for the ingredients. Baking is an art and while I don't claim to be a master, I do understand how important it is for the ingredient amounts to be correct. Three, it's very popular on Pinterest with great comments and reviews. 

The night before I wanted to bake the cookies I prepared the dough so that it would have ample time to chill in the refrigerator overnight. The next morning I turned on the oven and started making the cookie balls. Follow the instructions in the recipe and make them tall so that they don't spread too thin when they bake. My cookies didn't turn out quite as pretty but I'm sure it's because I used about two tablespoons of dough instead of three. The recipe as written yields 16 cookies and I needed 20 to fill the box I was using. Using my cookie scoop that is approximately one tablespoon I scooped out two blobs of dough, rolled it up with my hands tall and flattened the bottom so that it would sit on the baking sheet. Using this measurement I came out with exactly 24 cookies........already down to 22. I can't send cookies to school without tasting them first! These are really good cookies. Very soft and chewy as promised. 

As I pulled my baking sheets out of the oven I stuck two more chocolate chips on top of each cookie and let them just kind of melt into place. It made the cookies prettier and who doesn't love more added chocolate, am I right?

Once they had cooled completely and the chocolate on top had time to firm back up I stacked them in the box. My husband often doubts my reasoning for saving things. This is a prime example of why it's not always a bad thing. The box I used for my cookies is actually a donut box from Wal-Mart. For whatever reason my son thinks donuts are one of the worlds finest creations and has to have one each time we go in there. The last time we bought two donuts so I put them in one of the boxes they offer at the self serve donut area. After we got home and I was cleaning up I noticed that the box was clean with no sticky donut mess inside so I decided to put it up in case I ever needed it. Bingo! Perfect cookie box to deliver to a teacher. 

My label on top was just another quick creation. I Google searched for cookie images and picked the one I liked best. Pasted that into my document and decreased the transparency of it so that it was a little 'faded'. Added the text on top and printed it out. Cut that cookie out and taped it to my box right on top of the clear window leaving enough space so that the actual cookies are visible.