Duluth News-Tribune: Artist spaces | Baking up delicious cookies, stories

If you’re lucky, Beatrice Ojakangas will pull from her freezer a sheet filled with 77 frozen rounds of chocolate chip cookie dough, drop a dozen or so onto a cookie sheet and slide them into the top of her double-decker oven. No timer required.

Ojakangas_Homemade coverIf you’re lucky, Beatrice Ojakangas will pull from her freezer a sheet filled with 77 frozen rounds of chocolate chip cookie dough, drop a dozen or so onto a cookie sheet and slide them into the top of her double-decker oven. No timer required.

It’s a classic chocolate chip cookie recipe, with the addition of pecans or walnuts.

“Do chocolate chip cookies need something special?” she asked rhetorically, wrapped in an apron decorated with colorful fish — the one she wears for First Lutheran Church’s annual lutefisk dinner. Rather than measuring and mixing on demand, she has learned to keep frozen dough in her freezer alongside frozen bread.

“The thing is ... quite often I don’t know when I’m going to need to have cookies,” she said during a recent visit to her home on 50 acres in Gnesen Township.

As for the recipe, it’s no secret. It appears in a section alongside cookie baking tips in the prolific cookbook writer’s memoir “Homemade: Finnish Rye, Feed Sack Fashion, and Other Simple Ingredients from My Life in Food.”

Read the full article.

Published in: Duluth News-Tribune
By: Christa Lawler