The start of fall can be a depressing time. The days are getting shorter, the sun shows up less and less, and toques are starting to sound like an increasingly wise investment. But there’s also a strange sort of nostalgia to the fall. School is feeling like a routine again, the leaves are changing colour, and Halloween is lurking just around the corner. The candy displays are towering over store aisles, tempting us as a perfect snack to throw in a backpack at the last minute. But when we do, we feel guilty because that big box of Kit Kats isn’t cheap, and it’s even less healthy. So how’s a poor student supposed to satisfy their sweet tooth, at least until those post-Halloween sales?
A lesser-known holiday on October 1 provides the perfect answer, with Homemade Cookie Day. The event’s origins are unclear, but really, we shouldn’t need an excuse to indulge in a bit of baking. Homemade cookies, in addition to delivering a taste that no mass-produced baking has ever matched, can also be a smart choice for your wallet.
To make my point, I’ll first have to share a recipe with you, directly from the master of homemade cookies: my grandma.
Grandma K’s Delightful Chocolate Chip Cookies of Goodness
1 cup butter or margarine
1½ cup brown sugar
1 tbsp vanilla
2 eggs
2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup chocolate chips
Cream butter, sugar, and vanilla in a large bowl.
Add eggs, beating for 1 minute.
Combine flour, salt, and baking soda; add to creamed mixture.
Stir in chocolate chips.
Drop by spoon onto cookie sheet.
Bake at 350 F for 8 – 10 minutes for chewy or 11 – 13 minutes for crisp cookies.
Cookies will appear moist, do not over bake.
Cool 2 minutes on cookie sheet.
Finish cooling on rack.
Now, taste is a hard thing to measure, but cost certainly is not. I took a look at prices for the ingredients at Superstore, breaking down the costs of the cheapest options to the precise amounts needed for the recipe. If you use margarine instead of butter, the largest expenses are flour and chocolate chips, at around $1.25 each. Obviously your actual costs will vary since it’s hard to buy just two eggs, for example, but there’s also a decent chance you have some of these already. The total cost came out to $4.38 for a batch. On average, that’ll be around 42 cookies, so $0.10 per cookie.
Compare that to $0.15 per cookie for a package of President’s Choice Decadent Chocolate Chip cookies, or around $0.12 per piece for a box of Halloween chocolate bars. It may not sound like much, but over the course of months or years, it can certainly add up. The savings are far more dramatic if you compare them to buying snacks on campus, where a single (admittedly larger) item could cost several dollars.
The obvious concern here is the time required to bake. However, if you can find half an hour to throw together the ingredients, it’s not difficult to put them in the oven and then study while you enjoy the fresh cookie smell. You might even be able to download that book you’ve been putting off reading as an audiobook to listen to while you work.
A few parting tips: it’s not hard to double the ingredients and keep yourself stocked for weeks (or days, if you really like them). Or maybe the big draw is that fresh baking smell. You can get that every day by freezing the dough once it’s been formed into cookies, then baking as many or as few as you want at any time. If that takes too long, bake them all at once, freeze the leftovers, and you can thaw them out almost as good as new.
So on October 1, consider doing something for both your tastebuds and your wallet. I promise, my grandma knows how to make good cookies. They’re worth your time.
Jeff was The Cascade's Editor in Chief for the latter half of 2022, having previously served as Digital Media Manager, Culture & Events Editor, and Opinion Editor. One time he held all three of those positions for a month, and he's not sure how he survived that. He started at The Cascade in 2016.
