Let's Make Chocolate Spice Cookies! Quiz

Flour is a soft, powdery white ingredient that gives cookies and cakes their main structure so they don't just melt away into a flat puddle in the oven. It is made by crushing up millions of tiny wheat grains, which grow as tall, golden stalks on big farm fields, until they turn into a fine powder.

When we mix flour with our other ingredients, it acts like the building blocks that hold everything together.

Vanilla extract is a liquid flavoring made by soaking dark, wrinkled vanilla beans in alcohol for months until all the sweet, flowery flavor is pulled out into the dark brown fluid. Those special beans actually come from the long, green pods of a climbing orchid plant that grows in tropical places near the equator. Just a tiny splash acts like a megaphone for all the other flavors, making the chocolate and spices taste even richer and more delicious in our cookies.

Sugar is a crystal that gives treats their delicious sweetness. Those sweet crystals come from tall sugarcane stalks that look like giant bamboo, or from round, white sugar beets grown in big fields. To get the sugar, farmers crush these plants to squeeze out their sweet juices, which are then boiled down until they turn into the hard, sparkling white crystals.

In this recipe, sugar teams up with the butter to whip up fluffy pockets of air so our cookies bake up with a nice, light texture.

Butter is a creamy dairy treat that makes cookies tender, soft, and melt-in-your-mouth delicious. It is made by churning thick, fresh cream, which comes straight from cows. The liquid then separates and leaves behind a solid, golden block of creamy goodness. For these cookies, beating the butter together with the sugar whips up tiny air bubbles that help our treats bake up fluffy.

Eggs come from chickens that live on farms, where they lay eggs in nests almost every single day. The eggs are like little baking packages that help hold all the cookie ingredients together so they don't crumble apart. When we break open the shell, we will see that there is a clear white substance and a golden-yellow yolk that act like edible glue when the cookies bake in the hot oven.

Powdered sugar is just regular white sugar that has been crushed into a very fine silky powder that looks just like fluffy white snow. To keep it from clumping together into hard lumps, a tiny pinch of cornstarch is usually mixed right in with it. In our baking, it is often dusted over the tops of cookies or used to make sweet, creamy frostings.

Chili powder is a fiery red spice made by drying and crushing up whole, spicy hot peppers grown on garden bushes or on big farms. Even though we only use a tiny pinch of it in these cookies, it packs a fun, little tongue-tingling kick that makes the sweet chocolate taste exciting.

Finely chopped pecans are crunchy, nutty little bites that add a wonderful, buttery crunch to our cookies. Those nuts grow high up on large, leafy trees in orchards, protected inside hard shells that have to be cracked open to get to the tasty kernel inside. When they are baked into cookies, they toast up in the oven and give every single bite a special delicious crunch.

Cinnamon is a warm, sweet spice that smells amazing. Instead of being picked from a bush, this spice actually comes from the peeled-off inner bark of a special tropical tree, which rolls up naturally into hard, woody sticks as it dries in the sun. When we grind those sticks down into a fine powder and mix them into our cookies, they team up with the chocolate to create that wonderful taste.

Cocoa powder is made from special roasted cacao beans that have had all their buttery fat squeezed out and are then crushed into a super fine, dark brown powder. It is the ingredient that gives the cookies their rich, deep chocolate taste without making the dough too wet or heavy. Because it has a strong, bitter chocolate flavor on its own, we mix it together with sweet sugar and warm spices.