Our batch of homemade Oreos – Why didn’t we think of this before?

Pretty much everyone loves Oreos, and therein lies the problem. Even if you just picked up a pack on your last visit to the grocery store, odds are you, or someone else, has already gone through whatever stock you had in the house.

Case in point: right now we’re completely out of Oreos, and we’re not about to go out to buy more in the downpour that’s drenching Tokyo right now. While some people with less vision (or healthier eating habits) might patiently endure the hardship of no cookies, we decided instead to make our own Oreos from scratch with an incredibly simple recipe.

The credit for reverse-engineering one of the world’s most popular cookies goes to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, in which we found the recipe we used or our Oreo facsimiles. Proving that some of life’s greatest pleasures are also its simplest, odds are if you do any baking at all you’ve already got everything you’ll need, including the cooking skills, to whip up a batch.

An Oreo has two distinct parts, of course, the thin cookie layers and the cream sandwiched between them. Let’s take a look at the ingredients we’ll need for each.

Cookie:
butter: 285 grams (10.1 ounces)
flour: 200 grams (7.1 ounces)
sugar: 250 grams (8.8 ounces)
black cocoa: 120 grams (4.2 ounces)
vanilla extract: 1 teaspoon
salt: 1 pinch

Cream:
butter: 115 grams (4.1 ounces)
sugar: 500 grams (17.6 ounces)
vanilla extract: 1 teaspoon
water: 2 teaspoons

Actually, the amounts listed will produce 40 cookies, and while we’d certainly like to take on the challenge of eating that many, we’ve got to save room for our Final Fantasy parfaits and special Easter Krispy Kreme donuts, so we decided to cut our batch down to just one-third of this size.

In order to get our Oreo fix as quickly as possible, we’ll start with the cookie wafers, since we can use the time while they’re baking to prepare the cream.

1. First, place the butter in a bowl and wait until it reaches room temperature. Add in the sugar, salt, and vanilla extract, mixing everything together with a spatula.

2. Separately mix the flour and black cocoa, then add this combination to the mixture made in Step 1. Combine the two and knead with your hands until the dough takes on a uniform color and consistency.

3. Place the dough in the refrigerator and let it chill for 30 minutes.

4. Take the dough out of the refrigerator and spread it with a rolling pin. Cut into desired shapes, then bake for 10 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius (356 degrees Fahrenheit).

Meanwhile, we’ll have plenty of time to make the cream.

1. Once again, start with the butter at room temperature. Mix with a whisk until it has the consistency of thick mayonnaise.

2. Add the vanilla extract and sugar, and mix well. It works best to put the sugar in a little at a time, rather than dumping it all in at once.

3. Finally, add the water to thin the cream out a little, and mix well.

Now all that’s left is the assembly process. Once the wafers are ready, pull the baking sheet out of the oven, add as much filling to each as you’d like, and, if you’re anything like us, marvel at how you never stopped to imagine how good hot, fresh-baked Oreos would taste.

▼ It’s like the cookie can reveal what’s in our hearts and minds.

Not only that, running your own Oreo production line means you can customize them however you want. For example, we realized we hadn’t quite maximized our cookie’s cuteness potential, so we added a few drops of food coloring to the mix.

▼ Stylish and delicious

Being the busy people we are, sometimes we don’t have time to chow down on a set of nearly a dozen cookies, so we decided to make an ultra-efficient Oreo with 10 times the normal amount of cream.

▼ It’s basically a Western version of the suicide cakes they sell in downtown Tokyo.

You could also take things in the other direction and make less decadent concoctions. You’re pretty much stuck with this amount of butter unless you want the wafers crumbling, but you could easily reduce the amount of sugar used. Not only would this save a few calories, it should also satisfy hard-to-please confectionary connoisseurs who can’t forgive the Oreo for ripping off the older, slightly milder-tasting Hydrox cookie.

Photos: RocketNews24
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