Adventures in Cooking: Homemade Oreos

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been baking quite a bit recently. So, I thought I’d start a new feature about my Adventures in Cooking, and share my kitchen creations as often as I whip them up. I’m not nearly smart enough to have come up with my own recipes yet, but I’ll gladly share the ones I’m using with you, as well as any of the tricks (or failures) I’ve made along the way. Hopefully I’ll have something new for you (and me – yum!) every week, but let’s just take it one lick at a time.

This weekend I made a batch of Homemade Oreos, based on this recipe by smittenkitchen.com, which I’ve fallen deeply in love with. The only changes I made to the recipe are that I used Hershey’s unsweetened Cocoa Powder instead of unsweetened Dutch process cocoa, because I live in Fishtown and the grocery store isn’t the world-liest. I also completely forgot to add the two teaspoons of vanilla extract to the icing, which perhaps is why the icing was so hard to beat to the proper fluffiness, but it still tastes exactly like Oreo icing. I’m actually thinking for the holidays it would be just dreamy to add a little bit of mint flavoring to the icing for mint oreos…<3 <3 <3

Next time these lovelies are made (and there WILL be a next time – probably soon), there are a couple of adjustments I’ll be making to my baking process. First, I need to re-evaluate my interpretation of a rounded teaspoon. In hindsight I think I was making cookies a little closer to rounded tablespoons, and my cookies ended up about 3″ across, which is slightly larger than they probably should have been. Because they were larger, the recipe only yielded 18 Oreos instead of the 24-30 that was intended. I also need to invest in another cookie sheet so when the dough expands it doesn’t mush together and become cookie squares, which is so not right for Oreos! I’m a little bit of a perfectionist, so I actually cut off all of the corners on the cookies that came out square-ish to make them circle-ish, don’t laugh. The cookies are a little harder than say, chocolate chip cookies, but softer than store bought Oreos, and great for dunking in milk. Thankfully, Deb over at Smitten Kitchen is right, it’s hard to mess this recipe up, they are magnificent!