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Music to bake 1129 cookies to

After baking 1129 cookies, we're a bit of an expert on the best music for each task. These tracks were chosen by Holly who made a whopping 384 cookies herself.

Good Fortune - P J Harvey: Best used for shopping for ingredients. Positive thinking and all that.

UFO Sighting - Sufjan Stevens: Relaxing for sieving flour and weighing ingredients.

My Baby Just Cares For Me - Nina Simone: For stirring melting butter to. You have to bake with love, otherwise the cookies know.

Blue Monday - New Order: This is a good track for mixing the flour into the sugar and butter. You'll need to roll your sleeves up

Under My Thumb - The Rolling Stones: Best track for popping the dough onto baking trays.

Everywhere - Fleetwood Mac: Cookies like to listen to this whilst they cool.

No Cars Go - Arcade Fire: Be gentle as you seal your cookies into airtight bags, they need an uplifting tune as they're put away.

Baking Day: White Chocolate & Cranberry

Fun time was over, work time had begun. The melancholy of Ella Fitzgerald was infusing the room, the oven was on, they were off. After a few minutes of not knowing which road to follow, brick-sized blocks of butter were thrown into stockpots, sugars were mixed, eggs beaten. The first batch went in and came out, thirty more followed. They each had a precise role. One was dolloping, one keeping an eye on the oven, the third one was managing the cooling racks.

They baked and baked until the small hours of the morning, bathed in the light of the moon, only stopping to keep hydrated and wipe their beaten brows. The heat of the kitchen was sending them to places they'd never dared to venture before. The repetitive nature of the task was making them delirious. One lost the gift of speech while the others were forgetting the rules of social decency and swearing like fishmongers from the darkest suburbs of San Jose.

As time went on, the tannins were going to the bakers' heads and they began to discuss the existential musings of the greatest French Thinker, Sartres himself. Caught in the sweet Beaujolais-induced delirium, they commenced a formal Fox trot. Not only was flour going to their heads and minds but also into the bowl with other ingredients.

 

Camille Sift!

Amanda Bang!

Packing Cookies

So all our cookies are baked and packing and delivery has begun. Everyone here at the Factory chipped in. Making tea, uncorking wine, cutting ribbon, stacking cookies and writing labels until hands were sore. They look delicious and not one of them has disappeared, yet. We hope you like them.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. Do you have any of the secret cookies out there?

Live Skype Broadcast

Yes Indeed. One of our kitchens broadcast its day of baking live over Skype. Blimey! Here's a little edit of them at work. And yes they are working that fast. It's not sped up, honest.

Lu lu lu lu

Ha ha ha!

Gosh! Secret Cookies

Surprise!
We have made some secret cookies and hidden them out there for a few lucky people. Who they’ll be going to even we at the factory do not know. How tremendously exciting! You’ll be the envy of all your friends and neighbours. Especially if you find the one and only Happy Accident. Enjoy.

Look out for:

Secret Cookie: Chocolate & Banana

Baking Day: Raisin & Chocolate Chip

 

 

Me lost me cookie at the disco

Download 09_me_lost_me_cookie_at_the_disco.mp3

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/silverstein/1473892606/

found by English Tim & Spanish Bob

Biscuit Tins

They're Coming!

Good Day!

O.K. So we’ve been hard at work becoming cookie baking machines, but finally your cookies are ready and should be on their way to you as you read this. We’ve mixed them up so you’ll all get something different from the five recipes. Scrumptious.

We hope you all enjoy your cookies. Breath them in deeply. Savour the scent. Then scoff the lot and have a very tasty Christmas.

Merry Christmas

Cookie Cuts

Cookie's Fortune

by English Tim & Spanish Bob

Baaaaaad Cookie

It’s here! It’s arrived! It’s the first bake day!

It’s a jolly exciting day for the Albion Cookie Factory. Both Camille and Lucy will be opening up their kitchens today.

Camille’s team have decided to express their excitement through the medium of art…

by Natalie

What’s the way the cookie crumbles?

They say “that’s the way the cookie crumbles”. (‘They’ being people who speak in idioms.)

Apparently it means that ‘that bad things sometimes happen and there is nothing you can do to prevent it, so it is not worth becoming upset about it’.

But I wondered where it comes from. And is it equally bad when any cookie crumbles, or are some worse than others?

So I decided to do an experiment. I took three different cookies and, in controlled conditions, ‘crumbled’ them (using a claw hammer). Well, actually, I tested two of your American cookies – chocolate chip and ginger – and one good old British plain digestive biscuit.

Fig.1 – The three test subjects. L to R, choc chip cookie, ginger cookie, digestive biscuit.

The results

Chocolate chip cookie

The chocolate chip cookie was the first under the hammer. As you can see it exploded violently all over the kitchen of our Manchester office. The cookie splintered into a few shards of brittle biscuit mixture, but most of the volume evaporated into a fine dust. Directly under the impact zone, all that remained was a small compressed mound of compacted crumbs.

Fig. 2 & Fig. 3 – The violent aftermath of the choc chip cookie test.

Ginger cookie

The ginger cookie went next. Again, remnants were dispersed over a large radius around the impact site. However the ginger cookie retained its integrity, with large pieces holding their shape. In figure 5 below you can observe larger crumbs around ground zero, and the strange skin-like artefact left directly under the hammer head. A much cleaner result than the chocolate chip, but still quite theatrically crumbled.

Fig. 4 & Fig. 5 – The even explosion of the ginger cookie.

Digestive biscuit

Last in the test came the plain Digestive biscuit. Physically having a larger dimension, the Digestive was thinner than both cookies tested, and so seemed to gain little advantage. *

An amazing result! The digestive barley flinched, keeping all its component parts inside the test area. Five large chunks of the biscuit remained unmarked and fit for consumption. Only the direct target area sustained real damage, and even the crumbs there constrained themselves to a well-mannered pile.

* The digestive was also observed to have a slightly wetter, denser texture. Good on you.

Fig. 6 & Fig. 7 – The tidy unfussy result of the digestive test.

Conclusions

1.The cliché ‘that’s the way the cookie crumbles’ does seem rather appropriate. Rapidly crumbling cookies is a messy business, requiring a lengthy clean-up operation.

2.We recommend that the cliché be modified, to suggest a scale of impeding badness (so you can more adequately prepare yourself to not get too upset about it):
‘That’s how the ginger cookie crumbles’ to suggest a mildly alarming event.
‘That’s how the chocolate chip cookie crumbles’ for a heinous disaster.

3.If you’re made of sterner stuff, use the phrase ‘that’s how the digestive biscuit crumbles’. Which means that not much will ruffle your feathers, so there’ll be very little to resist getting upset about.

by Glyn

Cookie addict

Don't fall victim guys.  Let this be a lesson to us all.

by Natalie

It's all about the dough

by Natalie

We Heart The Cookie Monster

Enjoy!

Posted by Natalie.

It all kicks off tomorrow..

Yes, the first two teams are getting ready for their bake-off tomorrow.  We have the Crafty Camille and co baking White Chocolate and Cranberry cookies and the Lovely Lucy and team baking Raisin and Hazelnut.  There’s already competition in the air with whose team will wear the best apron.  So far Amanda who is in Camille’s kitchen is in the lead with this beauty.  That gal, she got class!

Posted by Natalie.

Recipe for computer cookies

By Spanish Bob

Five Days Left

Only five days until the pinnies are on, sleeves rolled up, flour is sifted and eager fingers finish off the mix in the bowl. Our final recipes are as follows:

Chocolate Chip
Gingerbread
Tangerine Shortbread
White Chocolate & Cranberry
Raisin & Hazelnut

You can almost taste them and you can definitely read more about them on the right over there (as well as the teams who'll be making in due time). We'll be sending out a melangé of all our cookies so you can let us know which one's were your favourites.

Five more days. Need to start getting the kitchen in order. Scrub those surfaces boys!

By Aaron

Cookie Man

There are many things to say about this cookie costume.  Most interesting is the chap inside it.  What’s that thing on his head?  Why does he look so bored?!  Why’s he holding his hand up like that?!  Look at his moustache!  Look how short his legs are!!!

By Lucy

The Cookie Blues

By Andy

10 Reasons why you wouldn't want to live in a gingerbread house

1. Bathtubs made of gingerbread
2. It would be very drafty
3. Your furniture would get eaten
4. You would have to be very small (because a big gingerbread house would be silly)
5. Gingerbread for dinner again
6. Non stop gingerbread men on TV
7. Your walls would have currants in them - currents are evil
8. Gingerbread tastes stale even when it's fresh
9. Too many wrong number calls for Hansel and Gretel
10. Rain

By Nick D

They want me to write about ‘cookies’.

My kids are addicted to McDonalds Burgers with a Side-Order of Fries and Coca Cola, and my Significant Other to a Skinny Decaf Frappucino ‘To Go’ from Starbucks. There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts in every Mall and a Gap on every Main Drag. When I get home in the evening the kids are watching the Simpsons and South Park, and then my wife turns over to CSI, Desperate Housewives and Law and Order. The New York Giants and Miami Dolphins have destroyed the sacred turf of Wembley and you can’t walk through Hyde Park on a Summer’s evening without being brained by a ‘soft’ ball. In a rare example of corporate irony, my local railway company has altered the name of its latest timetable from Autumn to Leaf Fall.

To cap it all, the other day a London cabbie suggested that I ‘have a nice day’.

And they want me to write about Cookies?

Well, Enough Already.

I hope you enjoy your Christmas Biscuits.

Oh, okay then, if you really, really must.

Your Holiday Cookies.

By Disgusted of St Albans.