cookies

Honeycomb Cookies

I started out with a base recipe that I found on the back of a chocolate chip bag. I used this as a reference recipe to base my ratios on for flour, sugar, butter, eggs, etc. 

I modified it to work with the unique ingredients that I was using. I purchased my raw ingredients from the Seward Co-op in their bulk dry goods section. 

Two of the sugars I bought were completely new to me. On the left is a sugar known as "Sucanat", and on the right is Turbinado Sugar. The Sucanat had a very rich, chewy, molasses flavor whereas the Turbinado was more crystal-clear-sweet and crunchy. 

I also bought a small bag of Coconut Flour, which I have never worked with before. It had a sweet aroma in the store and I thought it would go great inside of a cookie. 

My original thought was to put honey on top of the cookie. You can see the original concept below. I thought the comb would remain intact, but it was very delicate and I later started to spread the honeycomb on the cookie fully. 

I gave my roommates a sample of the cookie. I tried adding two types of chocolate to see how it tasted, and also made a few of the untopped cookies to test the honeycomb idea. I did not know if it would work or how it would taste, but ultimately, that was the flavor combination that stuck with me. 

My roommates complained that there was not enough chocolate. I thought there was too much salt, so I modified my original recipe, as can be seen in green highlighter for the final batch. Sorry, no chocolate.

I baked the cookies for seven minutes each time. 

In my first batch, the dough was too runny and it all baked together to form a pan-cookie. I had to cut these apart. I thought, what if I tried cutting each cookie into a hexagon?

Around that time I realized that the green silicone pan holder that I was using to remove the cookies also had a tessellating hexagonal pattern to it. I had the idea to press this into the warm and malleable cookies to impress the pattern. 

I had one other bee-product in my house already, a jar of bee pollen, so i thought that would make a very nice garnish on top of the cookie. I thought that the bee pollen and the Sucanat seemed similar is shape (see below). That was my original inspiration to use bee pollen. 

After the press, the cookie seemed uncooked in the center, so I put it back in the oven for four minutes. 

I was careful to remove the tray as the cookie began to bubble and raise up - I did not want to damage the honeycomb imprint. 

The cookies might have been too sweet. I modified my technique to apply an even layer of honey and honeycomb on each cookie. 

I looked up how to create a perfect hexagon, but it seemed like too much work, so I just guestimated and cut them with a spatula so each had six sides. (Some were uneven, but that's okay)

I went through several different trials and let my roommates sample the cookies with varying amounts of honey and pollen. Too much pollen overpowered the cookie, It was determined that a light sprinkling was sufficient.