Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Solar Christmas Cookies

Encouraged by the success of our solar crayons, we decided to try a few sugar cookies in the solar oven today. We haven't had a lot of luck in the past with cookies in the solar oven, so we decided to make them really tiny, in hopes that they would bake. With the help of a pajama clad little one (it's important to get an early start when cooking with the sun), I rolled little balls of sugar cookie dough, and dipped them into Christmas sprinkles.

For the actual baking, we followed the same steps as for the crayons.

  • black pan


  • turkey bag


  • solar oven

I really didn't lay out much hope for the cookies, even with their reduced size, since it was -16 degrees Fahrenheit out when I put them into the cooker. And, it turned out my reservations were justified. After four hours in the cooker, the cookies were still on the doughy side, nothing a few minutes in the electric oven couldn't fix, though. So, it's melted crayons - yes, but Christmas cookies - no.

Just in case you were wondering what we wanted with a batch of miniature Christmas cookies...


...we needed them to go with a tiny cup of cocoa.


It's great to be a homeschooler.

3 comments:

gina said...

ssigh, it's posts like this that make me miss homeschooling. sometimes it's just as good when things don't work out as expected- many of our science experiments taught us that the best laid plans...yada yada. And that there is fun in the process and learn and live! All that good stuff. :)

Ticia said...

Did you ever post about how to make the solar cooker? I've seen these several places and they are definitely intriguing.

An Almost Unschooling Mom said...

Yes, if you look under the solar experiments section in the menu to the right - we started with a pizza box cooker, then a windshield shade variety, and finally the cardboard panel cooker. We've had the most success with the windshield shade, but it doesn't handle wind well, and we get a lot of wind. They are a lot of fun, and they really make you aware of the weather - I thought we had a lot of sunny days, but over the summer, we had clouds almost every day, for part of the day.