Join me in the kitchen for a fun session of making peanut butter cookies while practicing your English conversation skills along the way.
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In this English lesson, we’re going to study real English conversation as I bake cookies with my friend Laura.
Wow, must be good guys!
I’m Rachel, and I’ve been teaching English and the American accent on YouTube for over 15 years. Get my free course, the Top 3 Ways to Master the American Accent, at RachelsEnglish.com/free or follow the link in the video description.
The first thing we do is gather and prep, that’s short for prepare. Prep our ingredients.
So here, yes. I wrote out double out for everything because otherwise,
We forget.
Yes.
So we’re doubling the recipe and I wrote out ‘double the amount of ingredients that we would need.
If we were going to make less cookies, we might want to halve the recipe. That is, cut it in half. Even though that word is spelled with an L, halve, it’s pronounced just like the word ‘have’. I’m going to double the recipe, I’m going to halve the recipe.
Oh also, it says that we want to sift.
Do you have a sifter?
No.
Okay, do you have one of those..
I use a call a very fine,
Fine mesh seeve. Sift, seeve, I don’t even know. Sift, seeve, could be either one.
I don’t say it enough to bother with figuring it out.
You know what? Let’s look it up, let’s get the official pronunciation.
So I looked this up, I only found one pronunciation, it’s IH like SIT. So it’s a SIV, not a SEEVE. Sieve.
Okay, flour. Two and three quarters cup plus one tablespoon.
Flour. Just like halve sounds like have, flour sounds like flower. The two words have the same exact pronunciation even though they are two different words with different spellings and different meanings. Words like this in English are called homophones. I have a long video that goes over a list of many, many common homophones in English, I will link that in the video description.
Okay, I said two and three-quarter cups. Do you guys buy your flour in bulk?
No. We could at the co-op but we don’t.
I buy these 50-pound bags from webrestaurantstore.com.
50 pounds?
Yeah. And even though I keep it in the garage in a bin, even though it’s like sort of pricey to have it shipped, the overall cost is like half buying 5-pound bags at the grocery store.
Pricey is another way to say “kind of expensive” or “a little expensive”.
Okay, I did two cups, now I’m doing a three-quarter cup and then I’m going to do one tablespoon.
I’m going to go ahead and say, let’s skip the sifting because it’s not even flour. It’s just the baking soda and the baking powder.
We’re going to skip the sifting. We’re going to not do it. Leave that step out. Do you ever get a little lazy like this when baking or cooking? If you love to bake as much as I do, put your favorite thing to bake in the comments.
Okay, soda. We need so many different sizes.
So, one, wait this is powder. So powder I need one and a half.
Ooh, good thing I caught that.
Oooh!
Almost messed that up.
Okay, soda.
Since we’ve measured all our dry ingredients, now we need to get the wet ingredients. Butter, peanut butter, vanilla.
Peanut butter is my favorite food.
Oh my God, that’s so good. That’s a good brand too.
That’s not that full Laura.
It’s two-thirds cup, you want it like bulging over?
I’m just, I’m seeing that rim there.
So this is me being very particular about the measurements. I said, I see that rim there, which to me says, it’s not full enough. Laura asks if I want it bulging. Bulging is when something is too big for its container. I don’t really want it to be bulging over, I just want it to be perfectly lined up with the top.
Right.
Bulging over. So many good vocab words.
How’s that? Does that meet your standards.
Yeah, I feel better about that. I mean, we just said it’s our favorite food like,
True.
Let’s not skimp.
Skimp means the same thing as scrimp, which means to use sparingly. To be restrictive. Not to use much. If you love peanut butter, you don’t want to skimp on peanut butter.
Seventy-five grams of egg white.
I think I’m going to crack one egg white for like five grams and then we’ll just put it in with the other egg and we’ll fry it up for a kid.
Fry up is a phrasal verb that just means the same thing as fry. Let’s fry up some potatoes for dinner, that’s the same thing as let’s fry some potatoes for dinner. Fry up.
Seventy-five exactly.
Did you notice how I said ‘exactly’? You’ll almost always hear that word with no T sound. Exac—-ly. Exactly.
Seventy-five exactly.
Are you kidding me?
No. This is perfect!
That never happens.
Okay, then it actually went up to seventy-six right after I said that.
Are your parents big bakers slash cookers slash.
Totally not. Neither of them likes to do either of those things.
Neither and either, these words have two different pronunciations in American English. Neither, neither and either, either. Both pronunciations are common.
Totally not. Neither of them likes to do either of those things.
So they eat a lot of like take out or.
Yeah. They also eat a lot of um, cheese and crackers and hummus and veggies like snacky meals.
Now, we’re working on the buttercream filling.
And then we’re going to sprinkle it with three tablespoons of water so yeah, it’ll be a cup total of content.
Ughh, one over. Forty-three.
This is something that just happens when I’m with Laura. Random rhythms, made up songs, dancing: they just happen.
Spontaneous, dance party. Hmm-hmmhmm, Hmm-hmmhmm, Hmm-hmmhmm.
We measure the dough to make sure we’ve rolled it out at the exact right thickness. We cut our circles. Then it’s time to pipe.
What are you doing?
No, I just meant like,
What’s that?
Oh, we’re filling the bag with the frosting. I just meant like give me a yeah, give me a something.
Oh, just got on your shirt.
No, just use your finger and get a little flip off.
Good, right?
Peanut butter frosting.
Let’s fill these babies. Let’s use the piping bag and pipe in our frosting.
Pipe is a noun: something you smoke out of, or a cylinder for moving water, gas, steam. As a verb, it has lots of meanings, one of them is what we’re doing here, forcing dough or frosting through a pastry bag.
Ooh, that’s satisfying.
Putting them on.
Okay. David, please try it and tell me what you think.
Wow. That’s special.
So special right?
I’m doing mine after Stoney.
Okay Sawyer, have a bite.
This is my first bite of the cookie. Now, Laura,
I already had a little nibble.
She started.
Oops.
Wow. It must be good guys.
It’s really peanut butter.
The cookie is less crispy than I thought it would be.
It’s a little crumbly.
Hmmhm.
The frosting though. And the flavor of the cookie.
Yeah. And like the peanut pieces in there.
Yeah.
That’s nice.
Yum.
Hmm.
Wow. What fun it is to get together with Laura every year and try new recipes. We’ve been doing this for 10 years, and we’ve made a bunch of videos that we turned into English lessons here on my channel. Check out this video from a couple of years ago where we made a delicious apple pie. Keep your learning going now with this video, and don’t forget to subscribe with notifications on, I love being your English teacher. That’s it, and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.
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