Edition 4. Cooking with Kids, the Second Story - AMORE STORIES - ENGLISH
#Kang Yoosun
2018.07.06
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Edition 4. Cooking with Kids, the Second Story

ColumnistKang Yoosun
Amorepacific Design Center


 This column introduces two recipes for you to cook with your children at home during the hot summer days – cookies made with brown sugar and caramel ice cream. Cookies and ice cream are always children's favorite food, but sweet desserts are good pick-me-ups for adults too.

 I'm sure we all had that experience of being surprised to see just how much butter and sugar are used in baking if you read any recipe. The two recipes I'd like to share today also contain quite an amount of butter and sugar. But don't use a smaller amount. Baking requires a response between ingredients, meaning if you change the amount of ingredients you might not get the shape, texture or taste you hoped for. Sugar not only adds sweetness to your cookies, but also makes them soft. Butter helps create the shape and makes the cookies crunchy yet soft. For ice cream, sugar lowers the freezing point of water and prevents ice crystals from becoming bigger, thus making the ice cream softer.

Caramel ice cream

 I learned by chance that you can make delicious ice cream at home even without an ice cream machine. I had made strawberry cake frosting using a water bath and had to put it in the freezer to cool it off. After some time, I took the frosting out of the freezer and opened the container to find that the frosting had hardened. I thought to myself, "oh no!" but tried it and it tasted very good. It tasted like Häagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream. It was then I realized maybe I can make ice cream at home, so I looked for recipes. To my surprise, it was quite simple. You only need three ingredients – sugar, milk and fresh cream.

 We all have that memory of making or getting Korean sugar candy, Dalgona, when we were kids. Put sugar in stainless deep ladle, melt it over heat while slowly stirring with chopsticks, add a pinch of baking soda at the end, and voilà, a puffy sugar candy. Today's ice cream also goes through a caramelize process, much like the Dalgona. One difference is that when you are melting sugar to make ice cream, you don't stir it. The caramel added to the ice cream must be in liquid form, but if you stir the sugar in the process this creates sugar crystals. To make the caramel, use a pot with thick bottom, put a little bit of water and sugar in the pot, and place the lid on to boil it down over low heat. You must shake the pot occasionally to help the sugar melt evenly. When you heat sugar in this way, you create pyrolysis reaction, not just simply melting sugar, which creates something completely different. This is exactly why Dalgona tasted so good – because the caramelized sugar added complex taste on top of the sweetness of the white sugar along with different smells like butter and rum.

 You can enjoy the ice cream on its own or place it over a pie to make a delicious apple pie a la mode.

Ingredients
(8 servings, can be served twice for a four-member family)

✓ 200ml fresh cream ✓ 200ml milk ✓ 80g sugar ✓ 1 t + 1T of water

1. First, let's make caramel. Pour sugar in a pot with thick bottom together with 1t of water. Place the lid on and boil it down over very low heat. Occasionally shake the pot to allow the sugar to melt evenly.

2. Open the lid and pour 1Ts of water when the sugar is all melted and has turned dark brown.

3. Turn the heat off and add fresh cream slowly while stirring it well. If crystals form in the process, turn the heat back on slightly to melt them. Once fresh cream and caramel have completely mixed, add milk.

4. Cool the mixture by putting the pot in a big bowl filled with ice or ice pack.

5. Pour the mixture in a sealed container and leave it in the freezer to harden.

6. Once the mixture is half-hardened, take the container out and stir with a fork. This should be done once every 6-8 hours. Home refrigerator temperatures are around 20 degrees below zero, which is not too low, so it takes a few days for the ice cream to harden. You will get the shape and texture of an ice cream in about 3 days.

Sugar drop cookies

 This cookie is easy to bake with a few simple ingredients. Before, when I baked cookies with my children, I used to make cut-out cookies using cookie cutters. Since baking with children takes some time, the dough always became watery, making it difficult to keep the cookies to hold their shapes. Drop cookies, on the other hand, are easier for my 3- and 5-year-old children to make, because you can decorate the cookies after baking them in their shapes.

 One important thing to remember when baking is to pre-heat the oven. It takes time for the oven to heat evenly because the inside of an oven is quite large. Don't turn the oven on right before you start to bake the cookies, but rather turn it on before you start the recipe.

 Another point to cover – did you know that different countries measure a cup (1C) differently? The measurements of the larger tablespoon (1T) and the smaller teaspoon (1t) are universal, while the unit of cup differs in different countries. In Korea and Japan, a cup is equivalent to 200ml, while typically in English-speaking countries, that number is 240ml or up to 250~280ml. As mentioned before, it is difficult to bake the shapes you want if you don't use the exact measurements because you won't be able to create the desired chemical reaction. The recipe introduced in this column is based on the American recipe, so one cup equals 250ml, unlike previous recipes. Please remember this when you are baking.

Ingredients
(for around 30 cookies)

✓ 2C of medium wheat flour ✓ 1C (≒225g) of room-temperature unsalted butter ✓ 1 + 1/4 C of brown sugar ✓ 1 egg ✓ 1/2t baking soda ✓ 1/4t salt ✓ Suitable amount of chocolate for decoration (I recommend M&M's)
* Unit of measurement 1cup = 250ml / 1Ts = 15ml / 1ts = 5ml

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C.

2. Mix room-temperature unsalted butter and brown sugar together. When the mixture becomes creamy, add egg and mix again. I used a stand mixer, but you can also use a whisk if you don't have a mixer.

3. Add medium wheat flour, salt and baking soda in a bowl. I used a mixing bowl for a good picture, but you can also put the three ingredients into a clean cooking bag, seal the opening and shake to mix them together.

4. Add mixture from step number 3 to the mixture from step number 2 and mix. The cookie won't be crispy enough if you mix the dough for too long, so mix them only until you can't see the flour. You now have cookie dough.

5. Use two spoons or a cookie scoop to make round scoops. Place them on a baking pan one by one. The dough spreads sideways in the oven, so place your cookies half a cookie scoop apart.

6. 12 minutes in the preheated oven, and you are done.

7. Take the baked cookies out of the oven and put chocolates in them before the cookies harden completely. I placed a sheet of parchment paper, instead of the baking pan, on the table and fixed it with paper tape for my children to put the chocolates in because the pan is hot.

8. Place the finished cookies in a wire cooling rack for them to cool off before putting them in a container to store. Cookies have a low moisture content with high sugar content, so they don't go bad easily. They can be stored at room temperature.


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