How recipes happen...

A lot of people have been asking me how I come up with the recipes for my cookbook.

They come from a lot of different avenues, but the most common path is the one that I am about to describe for the new cookies that I am planning to develop and test over the coming months.

Yesterday, I made amazing maple glazed cinnamon rolls from the Pioneer Woman cookbook. While they were incredibly tasty, all I could think about was tweaking that glaze into a frosting for a yellow cake consistency cookie.

So...what happens next?

Well, while the frosting was good for a cinnamon roll, it was right neither in consistency or strength of flavor for my cookie. Therefore, I will significantly and unrecognizably tweak the frosting to the flavor that I am looking for, but it will contain both the maple and coffee flavors that she included in the original recipe that made my mouth water. From there, I will work on the formula for the perfect yellow cake cookie. This is something that I have been toying with for the last two years...adding more flour, less sugar, more baking powder, less flour, more sugar...on so on and so forth. I am close to the perfect consistency but not quite there. I will mess with that recipe until it is just right, noting the changes I make each time, so as not to loose the correct measurements for each ingredient in the depths of my mind.

In the meantime, my husband has suggested that maybe the frosting would be better on a thin and crispy cookie. I have a few great recipes that I have found, manipulated, combined and changed over the last few years that I will use to create this version of a cookie for the frosting, and we will see if he is right.

There are only so many ingredients that one can use to bake a cookie, so my greatest fear is always that my cookie will be the same recipe as someone else's. So...the last step (and many would argue that it should be the first) is to use google to search different names that my new cookie could be called and make sure that I am not duplicating someone else's efforts. This is not to say that I would not publish a recipe for maple glazed cookies if there is another recipe for them out there, it is just that the recipe cannot be the same as mine. You would think that this never happens, but it does! I made apple turnovers from the top of my head the other day, and found a recipe with almost the exact same ingredients and measurements two days later.

So why do this step last instead of first then?

If I did it first I might not get the joy of developing MY perfect cookie, by myself...

When I come up with recipes for cooking instead of baking it tends to be a little more haphazard...picture me in the kitchen tossing a little of this and a pinch of that in the pot, pan or bowl...but all in all it is a similar process...

Inspiration, creating, testing, searching, publishing.

Yum!