From Soot's oven · Soft brown-sugar cookies
Soot's Hearth Cookies
The ones cooling in the bakery window on Lantern Lane. Soft in the middle, crackled on top, best eaten warm with the door open to the cold.
Makes about 20 · 30 minutes
You'll need
- •1 cup soft butter
- •1 cup packed brown sugar
- •1 egg
- •1 teaspoon vanilla
- •2 cups flour
- •1 teaspoon baking soda
- •A pinch of salt
How to make it
- 1
Warm the oven to 350°F (175°C) and line two trays with baking paper.
- 2
Beat the butter and brown sugar together until it looks like wet sand turning to cloud.
- 3
Mix in the egg and the vanilla.
- 4
Stir in the flour, baking soda and salt until no dry streaks are left.
- 5
Drop spoonfuls onto the trays, a good hand's width apart — they spread like a rumour.
- 6
Bake 9–11 minutes, until the edges are set and the middles still look a little soft. Cool on the tray.
Pip's job: rolling the spoonfuls into little moons and counting them onto the tray.
Grown-up job: everything to do with the hot oven and the hot tray.
"A cookie is only half done when it leaves the oven. The other half is who you hand it to." — Soot
Soot Bakes It All
The book this kitchen came from — Soot bakes her way through the first snow, and the whole hill turns up hungry.
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