The Beginning
On December 29, I posted a photo of my readable Christmas gift haul on Instagram. “Should I Julia-and-Julia my way through all 100 recipes in that top book?” I asked. “Y/N.”
The post garnered a respectable six Ys — all of which I planned to summarily ignore. Yet as the world continued its march through a series of hells of its own design, the promise of a 100 Cookies challenge beckoned. What if I actually did it?
After all, I could use the practice. I made the brilliant choice to blow my life savings on grad school six months before COVID struck, and the plan for once I’d finished was to work in travel or food journalism, writing about all the fun stuff in life. (Remember fun?) With the job market in lifestyle journalism thoroughly destroyed, I found a temporary job tracking COVID data. I thank my lucky sun, moon, and asteroids daily for that gig, but I still harbor hopes of shifting back to the lighter side of journalism someday. And if I can’t do it now, I thought, a baking blog could prove I’m at least keeping my lifestyle chops intact.
Plus — don’t know if you’ve noticed — it is Big Sad out there, y’all! Thousands of people are dying daily of a disease we more or less know how to prevent. In the U.S., a flat-out civil war seems kind of possible. And, thanks to my front-row access to America’s terrifying COVID numbers, I, for one, have left my house about ten times total in the last ten months. If there were ever a time to add a hundred kinds of mood-boosting baked goods to our lives, IT’S NOW.
So I decided I would Julie-and-Julia that book. I could have called this the Sarah/Sarah Project, since, just like Julie Powell and Julia Child before me, I share a name with my baking beacon of choice. But I thought I’d go a slightly more honest route.
Sarah Kieffer is a professional baker, one who literally invented an entire cookie-cooking technique. I am a person who likes Milanos a lot. I anticipate some tasty successes in this quest to bake through Kieffer’s opus, but there may be a few fails — and, more importantly, there will likely be some entries I just don’t try. (Oatmeal raisin cookies? People, a pandemic is torture enough.)
In this endeavor, you’ll find blog posts and pictures documenting my trials and cookielations. You’ll find a newsletter delivering fresh-baked cookie content straight to your inbox, for those times when Facebook buries my “New Post!” announcements deep in the recesses of its algorithm. If you’re lucky, you may even find the occasional video bringing my exploits to you live in living color. You just might not find quite as many recipes as my foundational text suggests.
Welcome to Roughly 100 Cookies. Let’s get baking.