Sugar, spice, and everything nice: Baking Our First Homemade Cookies!

“Sugar, spice, and everything nice.” These were the ingredients chosen to create the perfect cookies for the business we’re cooking up. Unlike the Powerpuff Girls, we didn’t include any Chemical X that could make our cookies fight evil forces, but we did put in love, dedication, and all things nice to make them special enough to fight off hunger in anyone’s stomach.

Recently, my mother kept talking about starting her own business. She’s tired of reselling other people’s products for a small profit. This time, she wants to create her own product and be her own boss. When I asked what kind of business she had in mind, she confidently said cookies. It was a bold choice, considering neither of us has any real experience in baking. Though we have baking tools and equipment, we usually just rely on instant mixes from the supermarket.

I asked if she was sure, and she said yes. She was inspired by someone who built a cookie business and had been watching easy-to-follow baking tutorials. I supported her idea and asked what her first steps would be. “I’ll buy the ingredients and treat it as a testing phase,” she said. It’s a smart move to figure out the initial costs and understand what we’ll need in the future.

Today, I’ll share how we made our cookies. Enough talking—let’s get started!

Ingredients

• ½ cup of unsalted butter
• ¼ cup of white sugar
• ½ cup of brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
• 1 ½ cup flour
• ¾ teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon of salt
• 1 cup of chocolate chips

Procedure

First, we melted the butter and put it in a large bowl. We added the white and brown sugar, then mixed everything until it became thick and creamy. At first, we weren’t sure if we were doing it right, but we trusted our instincts and followed the steps.

After that, we added the egg and vanilla extract and mixed until we couldn’t tell the egg and vanilla apart from the rest. While mixing, I got curious about why vanilla extract is used, so I looked it up and found out it’s for adding flavor and aroma, plus it helps with moisture.

In a separate bowl, we combined the flour, baking soda, and salt. We mixed these separately so it would be easier to add them to the butter mixture later.

We slowly added the flour mixture to the butter mixture and mixed until it all came together. At this point, it started to look like dough, and I felt confident we were doing it right.

Next, we stirred in the chocolate chips, but I couldn’t resist tasting a few—I’m a chocolate lover, after all!

Then, we shaped the cookie dough into balls, placed them on a baking tray, and refrigerated them for 20-30 minutes. While waiting, we preheated the oven to 175°C.

After 30 minutes, we took the cookie dough out of the fridge and put it in the oven. We baked them for about 10 minutes before taking them out.

We let the cookies cool down before taking our first bite. As soon as we gave in to the tempting aroma, our eyes lit up with delight from the delicious taste of our home-baked cookies. “Not bad for a first try!” my mother said while still enjoying the last bite of her cookie.

In total, we made 20 cookies. My mom and I discussed how much we could potentially earn from selling them. We realized there are many things to consider, like the cost of gas for baking and whether our target customers would find the price affordable. We also talked about experimenting next time since we feel there’s still room to improve our cookies. For now, we simply enjoyed the satisfaction of baking cookies from scratch for the first time—and, of course, savoring the results of that perfect mix of sugar, spice, and everything nice.

Note: All images are mine unless stated otherwise.

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