Baking is as old as the hills. And so are its legends. Just for fun, here are
some of the more interesting.
Cookies are so much a part of
our culture that it’s difficult to imagine being without them. Around the
world, cookies are the perfect snack. But cookies have not always been in every
kitchen. In fact, cookies only became popular in the 1920s and 30s. Cookie
recipes were not published in cookbooks until then either. A quick look through
the original Fanny Farmer cookbook turns up nothing for a cookie. You can find a
flat bread biscuit, which was the cookie’s predecessor. It wasn’t until
granulated sugar became cheap and readily available that our kitchen included
the sweet aroma of baking cookies.
At Jules, the classic chocolate
chip is our second most popular cookie, just behind the chocolate crinkled
cookie and followed immediately by snickerdoodles. Our male customers tend to
buy oatmeal cookies, while women buy anything with chocolate. Kids love
M&Ms. We love them all and can’t choose a favorite.
Chocolate Chip Cookie
Just how did the chocolate chip
cookie become a classic? The first chocolate chip cookies was invented in
1930 by Ruth Wakefield of Whitman, MA, who ran the Toll House Restaurant (get
it? Toll House?). One day she was experimenting with the recipe of a colonial
cookie called the "butter drop-do." Having a bar of semisweet
chocolate on hand, she chopped it into pieces and stirred the chunks of
chocolate into the cookie dough, thinking the chocolate would melt and she would
have a chocolate cookie. Instead the chocolate bits held their shape and created
a sensation. She called her new creation the Toll House Crunch Cookies.
Word of the cookie spread and
it became so popular that the Nestle Company, seeing the potential, developed a
scored semisweet chocolate bar with a small cutting implement so that making the
chocolate chunks would be easier. Mr. Wakefield's cookie recipe was printed on
the wrapper of each bar. The recipe became a household tradition after being
featured by Betty Crocker’s radio series on Famous Foods From Famous Eating
Places in 1939.
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Contrary to popular legend,
there is no so such thing as a $250 cookie or its recipe for that matter. The
story is often told and retold and has surfaced again with the Internet. A woman
(or man, depending on the version) supposedly asked/wrote Neiman-Marcus for a
copy of its chocolate chip cookie recipe. Much to her surprise, she received a
bill for $250 for the cost of the recipe. This recipe is sent around the world
as “The original Neiman-Marcus $250 Cookie” Stick to the recipe on the back
of the chip bag – it’s the same one we use AND Famous Andy!
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The annual celebration of your
day of birth has been tradition for thousands of years. To ensure happiness and
fortune, people have made the birth day a feast day. The merriment and being
surrounded by close family and friends is believed to help keep evil spirits
away, especially on days that marked a milestone in the life of the person –
the birth day.
While every culture has its own
tradition, the birthday cake is customary around the world. One of the
oldest cake legends comes from Greece, where it is said people placed small
round cakes at the temple of Artemis – round for a full moon, lit with candle
to signify the luminary affects of the full moon.
The sponge cake we associate
with birthdays today is very different from its grandparent, which more
resembled a cracker (biscuit). Think of it very much like a fruit cake.
Tradition often called for the placement of small objects in the cake to bring
happiness (a coin) or sorrow (the thimble).
Candles were a way to light the
heavens and keep evil spirits away on the celebration of your birth. Today we
believe we must blow out all the candles in one breath for our wishes to come
true. Whoever started our tradition did not have the luxury of reaching 90 or
have smoke alarms!
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This is an old southern
tradition that has its root in sugar beets. When you cook the sugar out of
beets, the water turns red – hence the deep red nature of this cocoa-based
sponge cake. Today, we use red food coloring to get the deep hue. Red Velvet
Cake is often referred to as Waldorf Astoria cake. But according to legend, the
Waldorf Astorian archives can’t produce any evidence or records of this. It
doesn’t stop them from taking credit though.
Red Velvet cake is another that
invites recipe legends. In the 1940s people loved to spin the story of a woman
who asked for the recipe and was charged $100. Hmmm, sounds slightly familiar
but a much better bargain than the Chocolate Chip Cookie!
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Sam German is responsible, and
it has nothing to do with the country. Sam was an employee for Baker’s
Chocolate Company and invented a sweet dark baking chocolate. The company had
the foresight to give Sam naming rights. In 1957, a recipe for cake using this
new chocolate was published in a Dallas, Texas newspaper from a homemaker. Thus
began the extraordinary love affair Americans have with German Chocolate Cake.
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Fruitcake? Does anyone really
eat this? Yes! Fruitcake has long roots too, originally made from flour and
water, sweetened with pine nuts and fruit. It was actually a way of preserving
newly harvested sweet fruits. Put into tins or casks along with the cake-base,
kept fruits for eating during the long winter months. Fruits tended to ferment
in the cakes, giving a biting flavor that today we imitate with rum. But, what
good is a fruitcake without being soaked in rum? For that matter, why not skip
the fruitcake and go straight for the rum cake that is so much more inviting?
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Don't Eat The Raw Dough
Mom probably told you not to eat the raw cookie
dough, as did all good moms. Our mom said it gave you worms. She was right about
not eating it but wrong about why. It's not worms, but salmonella poisoning from
raw eggs that appears in raw dough. The act of baking the dough kills the
bacteria and makes it safe for us to eat -- but only after it's baked. If you
insist on eating the dough, make sure it's one that contains no eggs.
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Did you know that recipes
cannot be copyrighted? The context in which they appear can be, but not the
recipe itself. This is why so many people protect their “secret recipes” to
the extreme. The same is true at Jules Bakery. We like to share some recipes and
welcome new ideas, but won’t give you the recipes for our signature goodies.
All we can say is the secret is in the blend of ingredients… and magic!
Images CAN be copyrighted and
this is why we do not do the more popular cartoon characters on cakes. Names CAN
be copyrighted too – Turtles® , Death By Chocolate® are popular names of
candy or dessert but the names are copyrighted. We call them pecan clusters and
Chocolate Ecstasy Cake.
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