During an oppressive heat wave, my cooking ranges from iced tea pops to cold pasta salads. But the fine folks at ThinkGeek and the Cedar Rapids Gazette are not me, and they combined heat and deliciousness in the pursuit of culinary science. They decided to find out whether you really can bake cookies by leaving them on the dashboard of a car. Verdict: Yes. And they are delicious.

The temperature inside the car ThinkGeek staffers used was at least 160 degrees (their thermometer failed) and cookies took five hours to become, as they put it, “tasty and scary.”

The Gazette provided hourly progress photos, and cooked a sheet of cookies from packaged dough in four hours. They did not measure the interior temperature of the car. What was the end result? “Chewy, nicely crisp on the top and bottom and gooey inside,” features editor Carly Weber wrote. “The perfect chocolate chip cookie.”

Take note, struggling newspaper industry: this is the kind of news we can actually use.

Let this experiment also serve as a reminder: if you can actually cook food in a hot car, you shouldn’t be leaving your pets or your kids unattended in one. Go ahead and leave your blobs of cookie dough, though. They’ll be more than fine.

Heatwave Experiment #42: Dashboard cookies. [Google+]
It’s hot. Why not bake? [The Gazette]

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