Lisa messaged me today to ask if I knew what the cookie recipe she was making was asking her to do, the instructions said to “fold” the doughs together until they began to “marble”. She was looking at a cookbook recipe and didn’t understand what those instructions were telling her to do.

The recipe she was looking at called for using store-bought sugar cookie and peanut butter cookie doughs, crumbling each into a large bowl, then folding the doughs together to make a marble effect. Let’s look at those two cooking terms separately-

Folding means the opposite of stirring until combined. Think of Play Doh in different colors, when it gets all mashed together it becomes one greyish-brown lump. The same would happen if you took two different cookie doughs and just stirred them together, you would lose the individual flavors and colors of each dough.

When you fold beaten egg whites into a batter (like for waffles or cake), you plop the egg whites on top of the batter, then you use a spatula to gently scoop down to the bottom of the bowl and bring some of the batter up and over the egg whites, like folding the batter in half. So I took that instruction in this recipe to mean that one should carefully plop some of one kind of dough onto the other kind and then keep scooping and plopping until the two doughs were almost making a striped pattern in the bowl.

Now, I have to admit, I was a bit stumped by the “Marble” instruction, until I thought about a marble countertop. You know how they are one color with swirls of another color running through? That’s exactly what the pattern would be for these cookies, sugar cookie colored with swirls of peanut butter running throughout.

Fortunately I was able to explain that to Lisa in shorter terms than I’ve used here :) She hasn’t made the cookies yet but I’m eager to find out whether my explanation helps her make the cookies correctly!

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