Yield

This will make about 30 2-inch cookies.

Ingredients

• ¾ cup butter
• 1 cup white sugar, plus sugar to roll cookie dough in
• 1 pretty-well beaten egg
• ¾ liters Coca-Cola made with sugar [1]
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1½ tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt

Making the Coca-Cola Syrup

This it the trickiest part. If you are experienced at making candy you should have no problem, but those who've never made it are going to find this to be a trial-and-error experience.

Short instructions:

Boil the cola until it reaches just below soft ball stage, a temperature of 232°F. The ¾ liters should by then be reduced to about ¼ cup.

Longer instructions:

Boil the ¾ liters of Coke in a saucepan, preferrably a non-stick one. You will need to reduce it to about ½ cup before it needs your attention again; this will take awhile. (This might be a good time to cream the sugar and butter together.)

You should have a temperature measuring device handy: a candy thermometer, or one of those infrared temperature scanners. If you have a candy thermometer, attach it to the saucepan and leave it there, making sure the ball isn't touching the bottom or sides. The nice thing about boiling water is that it holds a constant temperature of 212°F. Therefore, while the Coke is boiling off you can make some last-minute calibrations to your measuring device. For example, if your device reads 208°F while the Coke is boiling, it's probably reading about 4 degrees too low, so be sure to add 4 degrees to the reading to get the actual temperature [2]. The nature of the syrup can change dramatically even if you're a few degrees off, so it's important to be as close as possible.

Anyway, after 20 or so minutes of boiling, much of the water will have evaporated, leaving a high-enough concentration of sugar to affect the boiling point. At this stage the temperature of the liquid will start to rise again, rather quickly, so it needs your full attention. Turn down the heat a bit to give yourself more time to react.

You need to wait until the temperature reaches 232°F, then immediately remove it from the heat. (If you have an infrared scanner the reading is going to jump around a bit. Don't just remove it from the heat the first time the number 232 appears on the display: wait until it's jumping around in the vicinity of 232, say between 231 and 233.)

Keep in mind that the liquid will not be syrupy when it's hot; you need to let it cool down before you can test its consistency. To expedite the cooling you can place the saucepan into a larger pan with a shallow layer of cool water. Once the liquid cools to below 110°F, try stirring it gently with a spoon. It should be a bit thicker than maple syrup but thinner than molasses. If it's too thin, boil it again until it reaches 232°F. If the liquid is too thick, or if it has a crusty surface, or especially if it forms into solid thin strings when you pull the spoon away, you need to add some water or some more Coke, stir it up until it's dissolved, and boil it again, stopping at a slightly lower temperature.

If everything has gone well, you will end up with about ¼ cup of Coca-Cola syrup.

Warning: Never stir the Coke while it's boiling, and never, ever, ever scrape down the insides of the pan. Avoid jossling the pan too much when you remove it from the heat.

Note: If you use Coke sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) instead of sugar, these instructions will not work exactly. HFCS reaches its candy stages at higher temperatures than sucrose. When I made this recipe with HFCS Coke I found that waiting till the bubbles just begin to pile up is the time to remove it from the heat, but your mileage may vary.

Mixing the ingredients

These cookies use standard mixing, so if you are familiar with baking cookies you can skip this section. My instructions here are for hand mixing.

1. Cream together the butter with the sugar until they are thoroughly and evenly mixed.
2. Add the beaten egg and Coca-Cola syrup to the creamed sugar and mix thoroughly.
3. Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Gently stir this mixture into the batter until all the flour is mixed in.

Advice: Beat the egg before adding; this will help to break up the egg whites. The egg is for texture, not structure.

Advice: Don't overmix the dough after adding the flour. We're not making pancakes here, so it's not the end of the world if you overwork the flour a bit, but it's still a good idea to keep it to a minimum.

Advice: Don't substitute brown sugar. Don't use whole wheat flour. Don't add vanilla or any other spices. Any of these can overwhelm the Coke flavor, and make all the work you did reducing it into a syrup useless. I'd even suggest using a baking power without aluminum.

Baking the cookies

It helps to chill the dough a bit before dropping onto the cookie sheet since this dough is a bit on the sticky side.

1. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
2. Lightly grease a cookie sheet or shallow baking pan. Add a layer of parchment to the pan (the grease will help keep it flat against the pan). Then lightly grease the parchment.
3. Pluck out a tablespoon-sized clump of cookie dough, roll it into a ball between your palms, then roll the ball in some white sugar to give it a coating. Place the ball on the cookie sheet.
4. Cover the cookie sheet with 10-20 little balls depending size. You might want to flatten the balls slightly with a wooden spoon; this will give the cookies a bit more of an even thickness.
5. Place the cookie sheet in the oven and cook for 10 minutes. The cookies are done when the edges are firm. (The tops shouldn't crack.)
6. Remove from the oven, and immediately slide the parchment off the cookie sheet and onto a cool surface. Let cool, then eat, or store in a sealed container in layers separated by a paper towel.

Advice: Use the parchment. If you follow no other advice, follow this one. Baking on parchment is so much more convenient than baking right on the sheet it isn't even funny.

Advice: Sometimes it's really important to wait until the oven has reached full temperature before you start to bake. This is one of those times.

Advice: Use latex gloves when rolling the dough; it makes things much less messy.

Advice: Don't place the cookies in a rectangular grid pattern; instead, stagger the rows. This will give the cookies a bit more room on the pan.

Advice: Don't wait till the cookies look done. When the edges look barely done, they're done. Take them out.

Footnotes