Friday, December 19, 2008
News The Pilllsbury Peanut Butter Cookie Faceoff
Posted by Nicki Wood on Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 10:30 AM
Perhaps you missed this major news event when it happened in the spring, but now that tempers have cooled, the story can be told. Better sit down for this.
A cookie made with premade refrigerated cookie dough won the $1,000,000 Pillsbury Bakeoff grand prize in April, and the dough balls are still hitting the fan.
For Double Delight Peanut Butter Cookies a peanut butter mixture of p.b., peanuts and sugar is formed into balls. Refrigerated peanut butter cookie dough is shaped around the peanut butter centers. They bake up firm and crisp outside with a sweet and salty molten peanut middle. Brilliant and simple, the kind of recipes Pillsbury loves. It didn't just win a million dollars -- it also won $5000 from Jif peanut butter.
The bake-off recipe site is interactive, allowing a star-rating and a comment. Immediately after it won the contest, the recipe began picking up low ratings and negative comments."I think this sends the wrong message," wrote one commentator of the selection of a simple cookie. Here is a selection of other comments:
"A million dollars for making cookies from PREMADE cookie dough?"
"I was always under the impression that the contests were for innovation, creativity and execution."
"I was disappointed the Grand Prize was not a home made from scratch recipe, using Pillsbury flour, of course."
"If that's a million $ recipe, do I have a recipe for you!"
A lot of the year's news events -- roller-coaster oil prices, historic election, tanking of banks, newspapers and the auto industry -- signal some kind of seismic shift whose story won't be finished for decades.
Is the million-dollar premade cookie a signal too? Is it the end of traditional scratch baking? Or is it a paradigm shift in what "baking" means? Or just a good idea that a few grumpy commenters wish they'd thought of first?
Comments (5)
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If ready-made components disqualified recipes, there wouldn't be a church cookbook in the land. The cookie recipe sounds pretty ingenious to me.
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That was m thinking too. It's a different kind of baking than classic from-scratch, but a lot of people prefer it, and the results can be pretty good.
in this day and age, how does anyone draw a line on what is scratch any more? Using chili powder is cheating to some, grinding your own flour is de rigeur for others.
the bigger surprise in this day of panic over all those bizarre peanut allergies is that someone won a million dollars making a cookie that is probably not even allowed in most schools any more.
