Baking Meetup #1 - Cookies

Baking Meetup #1 - Cookies - held September 15, 2019

Caramel Apple Bars (left), Reese's Chip Cookies (top left) Almond Crescent (top right), Chocolate Chip Cookies (right middle), No Bake Lentil Bars (bottom)

One of the things I wanted to do after I settled into my new house was to start a baking meetup in order to meet other baking-minded people. I had a lot going on over the summer and leading into fall but I finally made the time to set up the meetup and hosted the first one at my house.The idea of the meetup was for each person to bring a dessert they'd made along with the recipe to share with the other members. My original plan was for the members to make a dozen for sharing and a dozen for giving away to a nonprofit. It was a good idea in concept and I still believe in it but, being new to Reno, I hadn't yet established many contacts in the nonprofit world who I knew well enough to make the offer for homemade baked goods. So we settled on just sharing among the attendees for now, although I would still love to establish contacts with nonprofits who could use the desserts.

I originally thought we could do a "baking circle" that my friend and culinary school classmate, Annie the Baker, told me she did. A baking circle has a baker's dozen of 13 members who met regularly. So I capped the limit of the meetup at 13.  In hindsight, I'm not sure how I thought I could eat 13 desserts. So it was a good thing that for the first meetup, we had only 6 members show up. 5 people brought something and the 6th confessed her planned dessert didn't turn out but we were glad to see her anyway. Not just so we could all meet and make new friends but also because we needed more eaters for the 5 dozen desserts that showed up, lol.

This post is light on pictures. I was so busy chatting with my fellow bakers that I forgot (a first for me) to take pictures of each dessert. The only pic I have is the one I took of my own plate. Erk,

Each month's meetup has a baking theme and this first one was Cookies. I wanted something easy to get things started and figured cookies would be easy enough. For my own, I made the ubiquitous chocolate chip cookies but I offered two different kinds to see if people could taste the difference. One was Gideon's Bakehouse Copycat Chocolate Chip Cookies that had cake flour and bread flour and the butter was creamed. The other one was the Basic, Great Chocolate Chip Cookies I made for Shyla's wedding and had all-purpose flour and melted butter. It was also a chance for me to make both doughs again and note the differences. I've discovered that while I thought the higher altitude in Reno didn't make much difference to cookies, I've realized it does. Even though I baked from frozen dough like I always do, my cookies are spreading more than when I baked at sea level in the Bay Area. Fortunately, they still tasted good, although no one could really tell the difference between the two. Neither could I.

Here are the other recipes everyone else brought - logging them here even though I don't have decent pictures of them so I can share with everyone else in the meetup who couldn't attend. We held our second baking meetup last weekend and I did a better job of taking pictures there so stay tuned for that post shortly.

from Kim

from Vikki

from Rochelle

from Mary