Fellow bakery blogger Nicole Weston of Baking Bites shares her technique for baking chocolate chip cookies on the dashboard of a summer-hot car.
by Bakery Boy
Cookies baking on a hot dashboard. Photos: BakingBites.com
It’s August. It’s hot. You park your car in the sun, and when you get in to drive somewhere the heat is unbearable. Maybe you roll down the window and drive fast to flush out your rolling furnace. Maybe you crank up the AC and wait a few minutes in nearby shade. Here’s an idea. When you’re not going anywhere, why not use that hot-as-an-oven car as, well, an oven?
Fellow bakery blogger Nicole Weston of Baking Bites explored this notion and developed what has become one of her most popular posts. First published in 2007, the story frequently earns a button at the top of her home page, even four years later.
These chocolate chip cookies will be ready soon, and the car they're baking in will smell wonderful too.
Nicole includes plenty of tips for car-based baking:
• realizing the advantages of chilled-and-sliced dough over spooned-and-dropped dough for achieving even thickness and even baking
• placing oven mitts or a towel under the cookie sheet to protect the dashboard, which she considers the best spot for baking
• parking in full sun
• placing an oven thermometer where it can be seen from outside
• avoiding opening the car door too often and letting heat out
• testing by touch instead of sight since car-baked cookies won’t caramelize and brown the way regular oven versions do
• doubling up with two batches if you have a large dashboard or two cars or a friend with a car to park next to yours, making it a team project
It’s a fun piece. The reader comments are worth scrolling through both for more car-as-oven tips (an Arizona woman says she cooked a steak to well-done in four hours) and other suggestions (such as using the resulting aroma of fresh-baked cookie to help sell a used car).
Here’s the full URL linking to Nicole’s story, including her cookie recipe: http://bakingbites.com/2007/09/car-baked-chocolate-chip-cookies-step-by-step/. Or just click here.
Thanks, Nicole, for keeping this story prominently displayed at your site. It’s an inspiration to us all!
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Nicole Weston of Baking Bites
When Nicole Weston isn’t baking, photographing, and writing for her Baking Bites blog, which she launched in 2004, she is often riding horses (American Saddlebreds) or dancing (ballet and salsa). Based in Los Angeles, she holds a degree in linguistic from the University of California Berkeley and a certificate in professional pastry from the New School of Cooking in Culver City (across from the historic Helms Bakery complex, which now holds a collection of restaurants and design and furniture shops).
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