Cookie Baking Unit!

My students have been practically begging me to let them bake cookies. They have been relentless! Since they were so excited, I gave in! Because I haven’t taught this in many years, I had to update my cookie unit. I decided it was the perfect time to share my Cookie Baking unit with you because it fits so well sandwiched between the holiday breaks!

Set

Materials

  • Laptops or iPads
  • Screen & Projector
  • Colored Pencils & Markers
  • Dice (optional & affiliate link)
  • Ugly Sweater Cookie Cutter (affiliate link)
  • Cookie Baking Supplies

Activities

  • To introduce students to the various types of cookies, I set up stations around my room using QR Codes (see attachments). Students circulate the room, scan the codes and add the info to their notes chart (see attachments below). The cookie information came from the article titled “The Six Major Types of Cookies.” I just sectioned it off to make the QR Codes. I encourage my students to “boil it down” (no pun intended) to bulleted notes!
  • From here, students are assigned an informational reading titled “Cookies” to read and utilize as they complete the worksheet “Cookies-True/False Statements” (see attachments).
  • The first cookie lab I do with students is a molded cookie. For variety, each kitchen will make a different molded cookie recipe, but everyone gets to sample. To save money, the recipes are reduced to make just enough to cover the number of students in my class. The molded recipes I plan to make are snickerdoodle, crescent and chocolate peppermint blossoms.
  • If you are going to make drop cookies and wish to make chocolate chip cookies, you could have them make the three different varieties of chocolate chip cookies that Alton Brown discusses in his video
    Alton Brown’s Good Eats “Three Chips for Sister Marsha” (available for a couple of bucks at Amazon). We will be substituting red & green chocolate chips in place of the normal chocolate chips for more festive looking cookies. Again, students get to sample each variety: thin, chewy and puffy.
  • The next lab will require some time and creativity as it will be a cookie decorating contest based on the ugly sweater!
  • First, I will have my students “Roll and Ugly Sweater” to create a design. They must recreate this design as close as possible on their actual cookie. This will take a couple of days in the lab; to make their dough, to bake and to decorate. After the cookies are decorated, students will photograph their ugly sweater cookie and share with me. I will put them in a Google Form and ask faculty members to vote on the “ugliest sweater”. The top 3 winners will recieve a small prize of cookie cutters and recognition on our school announcements. If you didn’t want to do the judging digitally, you could invite some faculty and staff in to judge and have students set up their creations in a gallery walk format.
  • I will demonstrate making Spritz cookie dough and show students how to use the cookie press. I’ll divide the dough 3 ways and let my students practice making, baking and decorating cookie shapes with the cookie press. Don’t have enough cookie presses? Invite students to each take a turn to see how it’s done until all the dough is used.
  • If time permits, I plan to have students make Holiday Swirl Shortbread cookies for their refrigerator cookie as I think they are fun and colorful!
  • The final cookie we will make will be bar cookies, and I may have to finish that one up right after the New Year and tie it to my Plating & Styling Brownies lesson.
  • Cookie Clues (see attachments) can be assigned anytime throughout the unit as a reinforcement activity along with Quizizz game reviews. I didn’t make my own Quizizz game, but searched and used one created by someone else to save reinventing the wheel!

Attachments

Digital Version

Photo by Jessica Fadel on Unsplash

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