Cookie Exchange Class at Willie Wonka's

Okay, it wasn't really at Willie Wonka's, but it was at General Mills, in the Betty Crocker Kitchens, so it was kind of like getting to go inside Willie Wonka's.  And here's what I went home with!  Avert your eyes if you don't want to gain weight just thinking about all the butter on that plate.

Here's the huge mixer we got to use.  We were making double batches of already large yield cookie recipes, so these were fab.  There were about 20 of us in the class and we split into groups of 2 or 3 and each made a different kind of cookie.  Mine was a cinnamon roll cookie, the little circle cookies on the left at 9 o'clock on the platter.  This is my partner scraping the bowl after we mixed in, er, well, twice as much flour as we were supposed to use.  My bad!  But they let us start over and use a whole 'nother pound o' buttah.  Nice!  I wasn't thinking when I was measuring 5 cups that the "cup" I was using was in an industrial kitchen, so it wasn't really a cup, but a 2-cup measure. Oops!

It was kind of fun to mess up, tho, because at first I didn't realize what I'd done but we didn't think the dough looked right, so when we asked for help from the woman who was running the class, a professional caterer, gave us some tips on how to figure out what might be wrong, or even what the recipe is trying to accomplish.  Like our "cinnamon roll" recipe was really trying to be like the leftover pie crust dough mom used to roll up and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon.  At least my mom did that, did yours?  I remember it fondly, even though it was more than 30 years ago.  And as we went along making the cookies, we figured out together how we would change it if we did it again, which I think I will for Christmas this year. 

Here's another group mixing, I think egg whites, with the biggest whisk (attachment for the mondo mixer) I've ever seen in my life. 

Here's the later stages of their cookies.  You can see a finished one on the platter at 3 o'clock peeking out in between one of the huge florentines and a curly palmier.