[garymill]

As the introduction to this forum says, we are holding a macrobiotic healthy recipe competition at CyberMacro. Each month people will submit recipes of their own creation that have undergone a healthy macro makeover, meaning taking a recipe that would not be considered macro because of unhealthy ingredients and converting it into one that is.


This month’s theme is cookies!



Please post your own recipes in this forum, and we will have a poll listing each entry so everyone can vote to decide what they feel is the winning recipe of the month, whose author will receive their choice of a half dozen of Baked By Bita’s cookies. Due to delivery issues for the cookies, for those outside the US we will substitute an Amazon.com gift certificate in the amount of $15.00.

Bita epitomizes what a healthy cookie can and should be, and has shared with us for additional Inspiration her recipe for Strawberry Almond Cookies Note that none of Bita's cookies use baking powder at all, which many commercially sold macrobiotic cookies use. Read more about the dangers of using Baking Powder / Baking Soda here with this article by Dorcas Gerace.

A special thanks goes out to Chris Clark for inspiring the idea for the recipe makeover at CyberMacro, with his fantastic project on creating a macrobiotic carrot cake. In keeping with how Chris traces the history of carrot cake from its earliest origins to the present day, we do with the same now with cookies for you.

The first cookies were thought to have been created by accident. Cooks used a small amount of their cake batter to test their oven’s temperature before baking a large cake. The earliest cookie-style cakes are thought to date back to seventh-century Persia, one of the first countries to cultivate sugar.

The name cookie itself is attributed to the Dutch whose test cookies were called “koekje”, meaning “little cake” in Dutch. In addition, the Dutch first popularized cookies in the United States. The British took a liking to them in the 19th century, incorporating them into their daily tea service and calling them biscuits or sweet buns, as they do in Scotland.
The first American cookie was originally brought to this country by the English, Scots, and Dutch immigrants. Our simple "butter cookies" strongly resemble the English tea cakes and the Scotch shortbread.

In earlier American cookbooks, cookies were given no space of their own but were listed at the end of the cake chapter. They were called by such names as "Jumbles," "Plunkets," and "Cry Babies."

According to legend, sometime in the 1930’s, an innkeeper in Massachusetts ran out of nuts in making her cookies, so took a bar of baking chocolate, breaking it into pieces, and adding it to the cookie mixture, thus creating the American classic, the chocolate chip cookie aka known as the Toll House Cookie, where it was originally created.

Cookies today are consumed by 95.2 percent of US households, and they alone consume over 2 billion cookies a year, or 300 cookies for each person annually.
There are hundreds upon hundreds of cookie recipes in the United States. No one book could hold the recipes for all the various types of cookies.

Special thanks to Stephen Block of the Kitchen Project for providing this source material on the history of cookies. http://www.kitchenproject.com/html/kpabout.html

Have some fun with this month's cookie recipe competition, next month's theme is going to be pizza.