Cooking, Eating, and Guitar with Bill Wilkat

Review of Recipes In A Jar may sound odd to you and in a way, it is. LOL! I recently received a jar as a gift that contained all the prime ingredients to make a batch of cookies. The product is called “Recipes In A Jar” and is made by a company in the province of Quebec known under the French name “Recettes En Pot“. Yes, you guessed it, that’s the translation from English to French.

Note: This Montreal, Quebec, Canada based company produces products for fundraising campaigns and 50% of the sales are pledged to the cause. For this, they should be highly commended.

So, today I decided to try out one of their products, (this one for dark chocolate cranberry cookies), and document it in my blog. As consumers, many of us will look for kitchen shortcuts because it’s human nature to be lazy at times. 😄  Upon first glance, having all the ingredients in a single container looks inviting and I’ve seen this done for soups as well. Thus, I was very curious if it was worthwhile buying these and making them?

What’s In The Jar?

The jar contained flour, oatmeal, brown sugar, dried cranberries, chocolate chips, as well as ingredients any home cook would not add: i.e hydrogenated palm kernel oil, and soy lecithin. See photo of the label below.

Note: There was also a notation that the baking powder included in the ingredients did not contain aluminium. I raised an eyebrow at that and found myself questioning “just what the heck is in baking powder anyway?”.

In the link above you’ll find this statement: Sodium aluminium phosphate and sodium aluminium sulfate are also slow reacting acids which generate gas when heated. While these compounds are used, most bakers prefer aluminium-free baking powders due to the unpleasant flavour the aluminium can cause in the baked good.

Wikipedia’s Info.

From my perspective, I was glad to see that the baking powder did not contain aluminium. The jury is still out on whether or not it is safe for human consumption and some studies have suggested a link to Alzheimer’s Disease.

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Was It Easy And Convenient?

Was it easy and convenient? You bet! Only two items to be measured out: the water and the butter. One egg had to be added as well which is also no big deal. They even included a little measuring cup at the top of the jar for your water. The only thing with that was that it holds more than the 45 ml of water (3 tablespoons) needed for the recipe. I could not readily see a “fill to” line anywhere. I carefully measured out 3 tbsp of water to be certain that I had measured correctly.

However, once all the ingredients were mixed in a bowl, I found the batter to be quite dry. The instructions said to use 18 “heaping tablespoons” of batter for each cookie and to space them about an inch (25 mm) apart. I elected to use a small ice cream scoop that was equal to 1 1/2 tablespoons and that resulted in 17 1/2 cookies. I figured that would be fine and proceeded to bake my first batch of 12.

This Is Where Things Did Not Go As Well As I’d Hoped:

Things did not go as well as I’d hoped after baking them at 375 F for the 8 to 10 minutes as directed, they never flattened out, nor were they fully baked. In fact, they still looked raw and only a little dried out. Given the thick batter, the instructions should advise pressing them down with the back of a fork. I  ended up doing just that and baked them for another 4 minutes.

For the remaining cookies, I immediately pressed them down and baked them for 10 minutes. This seemed to do the trick (although they were very pale and unappetizing in appearance). So I baked them for an additional few minutes to give them some colour.

What’s My Final Opinion?

My first impression was positive once I got them baked to what I believed was the proper level of doneness. They looked pretty appealing and inviting but sadly I found them to be a little too dry. Were it not for the fact that they included an ample amount of cranberries and chocolate chips, they would have been far too dry to enjoy.

If you have a “sweet tooth” you might find these cookies lacking sweetness. They are not overloaded with sugar and personally, I don’t mind that. Over-sweetened baked goods can be “sickly sweet” and unpleasant. That’s not the case with this “Recipe In A Jar” product and the flavour is okay.

Are They As Good As Homemade?

In my humble opinion, no. I would rather make cookies from scratch. Will they save you a bit of time in the kitchen? Yes, but the key advantage is having all the ingredients together so you don’t need to shop for them nor store them in your pantry. Given the Philanthropic nature of “Recettes En Pot” I certainly would like to support them and try some of their other products. However, this particular cookie mix won’t be high on my list.

Here are some links to our recipes for homemade cookies. These happen to be Gluten-Free but you’d never know the difference (the first one is a huge favourite of mine:

Gluten-Free, Lactose-Free Oatmeal-Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies

or if you don’t like oatmeal:

Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip & Pecan Cookies

and if you like Maple Syrup:

Gluten-Free Lactose-Free Oatmeal Maple Cookies