Good things come in small packages

I stumbled across a recipe for root beer float cookies on Reddit yesterday. Now, as a non-American, I am firmly of the opinion that root beer has got to be some trick that the entirety of the US are trying to play on the rest of the world, where they pretend that it's some really nice, wonderful confection in the hope of tricking unsuspecting people into trying it, so that they can then point and laugh. It tastes like Germolene, for crying out loud. But, this recipe had what I think might be one of those strokes of absolute genius that seems so obvious, you wonder why you never thought of it yourself - namely, using root beer concentrate instead of actual root beer for flavouring. So this morning, I went and bought some Sodastream cola syrup, and we'll see how this one turns out!

Cola Cookies
Ingredients

• 115g Butter
• 300g Soft brown sugar
• 1 Egg
• 3tbsp Sodastream cola syrup
• 175g Plain flour
• 1/2tsp Baking powder
• 80g Cola bottles

Method

1. Cream the butter and sugar together.
2. Beat in the egg and cola syrup.
3. Chop up the cola bottles*.
4. Add the cola bottles, flour and baking powder and mix into a soft dough.
5. Spoon blobs onto greased/lined baking trays and bake at 190C for ~8mins.

*Don't be fooled by the fact that this instruction is so short! This is non-trivial. Sharp knives don't work at all - you need a pair of kitchen scissors. Cola bottles are the stickiest things in the world, so they just stick to the side of the knife, and making more than one cut without clearing the blade is utterly impossible. Pro tip: weigh out the flour first and chop into the pile of flour, so the flour kills the stickiness of all the chopped edges.

If, like me, you've never owned or used a Sodastream before, you might be wondering what the syrups are actually like. Well, it turns out that the cola syrup is a fairly runny syrup, and tastes (prepare yourself for this revelation) like very, very strongly flavoured and very, very sweet cola. Duh. It's actually quite pleasant if you just have a few drops on a spoon, though you certainly wouldn't want to drink it neat. I guess that's why you're supposed to water it down... (again, duh!)

It's not looking terribly appetising yet (end of step 2).

Ready for the oven. I'm fully aware that these are likely to spread out and amalgamate into a single giant cookie per tray, but I don't have any more trays! I had intended to bake a half-quantities batch first, especially as this is definitely an experiment, but I only remembered after I started creaming the flour and sugar together and thought "This looks like quite a lot.". Whoops

Yup, they spread out as expected. Actually, more than expected - they've gone incredibly thin.

Mental note, next time let them cool a bit more before trying to get them off the tray.

The finished article!