A couple days ago, my boyfriend and I went to an event called Cookie Lab which was part of the Philadelphia Science Festival. We baked cookies (and ate cookies…lots of cookies), but the idea behind it was to compare how different adjustments to a regular cookie recipe would effect the final product. Delicious science!

We were in groups of 4 (we teamed up with another couple) and our variation was to use shortening instead of butter. Before starting, we had to guess how our cookies would be different than the control group’s (which were the standard Toll House chocolate chip recipe). I’m not a baker so I honestly didn’t have any idea.

Ingredients and my clueless guesses…

Some of the other variations included using gluten-free flour, more flour, baking powder, bread flour, chilled dough, hand mixed, a different type of sugar…that’s all I can remember haha.

The groups had to take turns since there were only 4 mixers.

Ready for the oven!…

While waiting for the cookies to bake, we learned a bit more about what the different recipe variations would do and the “Chemistry of Cookies” 😉 Check out this Ted Ed video…

 

And then they were done! Behold the deliciousness…

There were 9 cookies total to try (with milk of course!). It was difficult to keep track of which cookie matched which variation (and some of the variations were kind of subtle). The ones we made with the shortening turned out really good. Least favorite were probably the gluten free ones since they were super flat and crunchy (but still not too bad). Our favorite was probably the chilled dough. They were pretty much all delicious though, and we were in a cookie coma afterwards. 🍪