Always wondered how your Baketime Story cookies taste so good every time? Well, we’re here to take you along with us, in our exclusive Q&A with the baking mastermind behind Baketime Story, Crystal. Tuck into your cookies as we tale you all about our baking process, our quality ingredients and more.
1. Can you describe the baking process that goes into making your cookies from start to finish?
Yes so, the first step of the process is to beat all the wet ingredients together. After that, you have to spend some quality time mixing the dry ingredients in with the wet, to ensure you have a smooth batter with no unwanted lumps or bumps in sight. After that, we place them in the oven for 17 minutes and let them do their thing. Each gooey filling is homemade, but we’ll keep that process a secret for now.
2. What's one baking step that is essential to getting the best results?
Our recipes are all created by my husband, who is a trained chef and myself. The number one baking step that we think is essential to getting the perfect cookie is the ratio. It must be precise, otherwise the cookies will collapse during baking and it could end up tasting like a cake. As much as we love cake, it’s the Baketime Story cookies that we love to bake.
3. How do you source your ingredients and ensure that they’re as good as possible?
Well, having a husband who is a trained chef definitely comes in handy when it comes to sourcing the best ingredients possible for our cookies. We’re very thorough when checking what our ingredients have in them and where they come from. For instance, with our chocolate, we only use what the chocolatiers recommend to us.
4. Why is using the finest quality ingredients in your cookies so important to you?
Admittedly, I am a sceptical foodie mum. I read labels when I go shopping and even bake my own bread, as I can’t find any bread with minimum chemicals in the supermarkets.
Don't get me wrong, we’re not going for zero chemicals. We’re realistic and admittedly, there are some items that do include the odd chemical like Oreos, Buenos and Nutella, but we’ve tried our very best to put as many high quality ingredients in as we can. For instance, extracts tend to be loaded with chemicals, which is why we prefer to use hazelnut paste instead of hazelnut extract and raspberry puree in our raspberry white chocolate cookies instead of raspberry extract.
Baking with as many natural ingredients as possible, without compromising on taste or quality is what we’re passionate about delivering to all those that buy our cookies.
5. How does using these ingredients make the Baketime Story cookies taste better and stand out from others?
Baketime Story cookies are different from any other cookies, whether home baked or mass produced. The recipes are all self-made, and have gone through vigorous taste tests to get them to the level they are at now. The two major components that have a significant impact on the taste of our cookies are; the dough recipe itself, which brings out the crispy outside but chewy inside and the filling (ganache) which creates the gooey melting centre. Personally that's my favourite part!
By using natural, high quality ingredients, our cookies don’t taste overly sweet and you’re able to enjoy their distinct flavours more than you would with a cookie that’s made out of just sugar, butter and flour. Our cookies are also really versatile, and can be eaten anyway you like them. At room temperature with a coffee, dipped into milk, with a healthy serving of ice cream, or enjoy them warm, the choice is yours.
6. Are there any key ingredients you would like to highlight that can be found in all of your cookies?
Yes actually, all of our cookies include high quality butter and chocolate, which makes a huge difference. As well as this, our ganache, although different for each flavour, is made in the same way and is always homemade, ensuring our cookies are gourmet and delicious.
7. How do you decide and come up with the cookie flavour ideas?
To me that’s the fun part, I treat each cookie flavour like a different character in a story. There are kind people, superheroes and villains in any great story, and our characters (cookies) should cover different tastes for our customers. I also get inspiration from the jam and spread aisles in supermarkets as there’s so many new and different flavours to see there. Then I can visualise how they can be turned into their gooey cookie form.
8. Are there any flavours of your cookies that are harder to make than others and if so, why?
Give Me S'more is one of the hardest flavours to make, you want a chocolate flavoured dough, which is easy to mould, but adding too much melted chocolate can end up turning it rock solid, so you can’t mould the dough at all. This then means that the space inside is not enough to hold the marshmallow and the gooey chocolate ganache. You do need a very good technique to have both fillings sitting nicely inside the cookies, which we’ve mastered after a lot of trial and error.
Nutella and Bueno are also both challenging. You can’t simply use a buttery dough with these two flavours and we don't want to add other artificial flavourings to enhance the flavour of Nutella and Bueno. So after hundreds of experiments with these flavours, we finally made our homemade hazelnut paste from scratch, which worked a treat.
9. Sounds incredible, finally, is there anything else you would like to add?
Yes, we’d like to thank everyone who places an order with us and has helped make our story come to life.
Our cookies are a great way to treat yourself, a loved one or a colleague. They’re something different to the standard chocolate and flowers that so many people receive and the great thing about them is that you can freeze them for up to 2 months to enjoy them at your leisure.
Have you enjoyed getting to know more about Crystal and the Baketime Story cookies? Now you know all there is to know about the baking process and the use of high quality, good for you ingredients that have created this tasty tale. All you have to do now is order yourself some!