Sugar Drop Cookies or How I Learned to Distrust Joy of Cooking

I used my Kitchenaid mixer for the first time on Saturday (since I received it for Christmas) to make some corn bread using the Joy of Cooking cookbook recipe. I've had the cooking/baking since and decided to try making one of the many cookies in the book. After much deliberation, I settled on "Sugar Drop Cookies", because I didn't have to go out and buy anything on the list of ingredients.

I started by letting Kitchenaid mix the dry ingredients,

then whisked together sugar and canola oil (looked a bit like slush!) in a large bowl.

The recipe told me to add the flour mixture to the sugar, oil, and eggs and mix, and my arm gave out after a few seconds (and after half of the wet mixture was stuck in the center of the whisk), so I offered the concoction back up to Mr. Kitchenaid. The dough looked very loose and was a bit less held together than Play-Doh when it was done mixing.

I moved the dough over to the oven (preheated), where my super large cookie sheet was primed with parchment and ready for dough balls. I then read the words,

"Shape the dough into 1/2-inch balls".

Dear Joy of Cooking, you do know what a 1/2-inch ball looks like, right? Of course you do. I will take this opportunity to shape (press together, not roll) this dough into 60 1/2-inch balls. In time, this task will teach me to be a more patient and reasonable individual (right?). I will actually enjoy shaping 60 small as marble cookies while standing adjacent to a 375 degree stove on a 90 degree day. I will savor it.

So I shaped and I dipped (rolled) into sugar, and I placed the balls. It took a good long while to get 32 of them done and lined up, and I felt like I hadn't put much of a dent in the dough ("It should be half way gone by now..."). At this rate, I wanted to get those babies in to make sure that I wasn't going to be rolling until 10 in the evening just to end up with some crap cookies. I put the 32 cookies in the oven and set the timer to 10 minutes, the low end of the 10-12 minute recommendation.

I continued to roll and dip additional 1/2-inch balls. I watched the cookies and got a little worried when, after 6 minutes, they looked exactly the same as they had when I put them in. I checked the stove, it was definitely still hot. I watched the timer until 10 minutes. There had been no change. I popped one of the round little suckers in my mouth (nothing that small could possibly burn a person, right?) and it tasted quite done (read: the roof of my mouth is a thing of the past). Maybe the cookies were called "drop" cookies because they were meant to be the size of a droplet of dough. Is this what I had signed up for?

After the second round of "I really don't know what's going on anymore, but I already shaped and rolled these around in sugar, so here you go oven"

cookies came out, unchanged but cooked, things got serious. I took my chances and rolled spheres about 1-1/2 inches in width and height and breadth. "Go big or go home", I thought. I then looked at the recipe again and saw the line at the top,

"About sixty 2-1/2 inch cookies"

These completely unchanging, immobile cookies formed from 1/2-inch balls could never, ever reach 2-1/2 inches in width, even if they did do a damn thing in the oven other than look out at me, pointing and sneering in the heat. I think... I think that Joy of Cooking may have fibbed to me about the 1/2-inch shaped ball size (these are cooked):

At the end of it all, I have about 40 (well, now about 25) super tiny cookies (that are sort of like rocks, but they taste of sugar, so I'll forgive them) and 12 normal sized, similarly unchanged, but cooked cookies. I've learned a valuable lesson today about size and how it does matter, and how even 75th Anniversary edition books can sometimes fib.

Oh yes, and something about patience. Right.