A cookie or biscuit is a baked snack or dessert that is typically small, flat, and sweet. It usually contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of oil, fat, or butter. It may include other ingredients such as raisins, oats, chocolate chips, or nuts.
Chocolate chip cookies
Traditional American Christmas cookie tray
A dish of assorted cookies, including sandwich cookies filled with jam
Cookies baking in an oven
Baking is a method of preparing food that uses dry heat, typically in an oven, but can also be done in hot ashes, or on hot stones. The most common baked item is bread, but many other types of foods can be baked. Heat is gradually transferred "from the surface of cakes, cookies, and pieces of bread to their center, typically conducted at elevated temperatures surpassing 300°F. Dry heat cooking imparts a distinctive richness to foods through the processes of caramelization and surface browning. As heat travels through, it transforms batters and doughs into baked goods and more with a firm dry crust and a softer center. Baking can be combined with grilling to produce a hybrid barbecue variant by using both methods simultaneously, or one after the other. Baking is related to barbecuing because the concept of the masonry oven is similar to that of a smoke pit.
Freshly baked bread
Anders Zorn – Bread baking (1889)
A Palestinian woman baking markook bread on tava or Saj oven in Artas, Bethlehem, Palestine
A terracotta baking mould for pastry or bread, representing goats and a lion attacking a cow. Early 2nd millennium BC, Royal palace at Mari, Syria