For dessert, I planned on molten lava cakes. It was my very first foray into the world of baking (unless you count Toll House out-of-a-bag cookies. I don't). Anyway, the recipe was probably nothing out of the ordinary. Some flour. Some sugar. Some other stuff. Some eggs. And being the virgin baker, and being someone who doesn't actually eat eggs, when i saw "add 2 eggs", I had to actually go and ask Angela whether that meant the yellow part, the non-yellow part, or all of it. Alas, I am an idiot. Though I guess I knew enough to at least not add the shells. That's something, right? . . . .Right?
Well, the lava cakes came out and . . . well, they came out. I guess the word would be "adequate"? But they were edible, and they didn't make anyone throw from uncooked batter, so I'm calling it a win.
Round 2 took place this past weekend, as I attempted to make homemade cookies for the first time. And this time, I at least knew to put the whole damn shell-less egg into mix.
Being the nerdy engineer I am, I couldn't just make 1 batch of cookies. No, I decided to go the design-of-experiment route, and make 3 different batches in the hopes of actually learning something about what makes a good cookie.
If you'd like to see the actual recipe, you can find it here. It's your basic chocolate chip cookie. Nothing fancy, but that's what I probably needed based on the previous baking endeavor. Though the one key factor in this recipe was that it didn't need a mixer. Instead, my guns got a workout.
And now, some exciting pictures of the baking process.
Ingredients. Probably the 3rd time in my life I've actually bought eggs. Remember, I'm the freak eater. I don't eat eggs.
My "whisk"
The cookie dough, post-arm workout
The point at which I actually though this might work
The 3 design-of-experiment varieties
So you can probably see there's a difference between the 3 cookies. Cookie A is the original recipe, done with a 14 minute bake time. Cookie B is the same recipe, done at 12 minutes. And this being America, Cookie C is the original recipe, baked at 12 minutes, but with double the vanilla and 50% more butter. U-S-A! U-S-A! Seriously, how could more butter NOT be better.
I brought the cookies to my friend Jim's for some NFL playoff action, because nothing says manly football night like an afternoon baking in the kitchen. Damn the Mad Men and their gender stereotypes. If I want to drink beer, change my oil and ovulate at the same time, I will (when science first figures out how to make that happen). And I let the masses, aka, the 7 or so friends there, rank the cookies, judging them by both taste and texture.
The loser . . . Cookie A. Not that A was a bad cookie. I mean, for me, it was like having to choose between my favorite illegitimate children. I love them all in their own special ways. But the masses and I were in agreement - just a little too firm on the bottom (that's what he said?)
2nd place went to Cookie C, which surprised the hell out of me. Again . . . 50% more butter! But, apparently that made the cookie just a little more "cake-y" than Cookie B, which turned out to be a bad thing (except for Jim, who was happy to take care of them).
The winner was cookie B. Lower cook time. Less butter, and apparently, thus more dense. So if you want a quality chocolate chip cookie recipe, I'll let you steal it from me . . . since I stole it from another blogger . . . . who took it from Alton Brown's cookbook.
- If you're interested in wine tasting, the trapeze or rock-climbing, let me know. I'd had a few people already say they'd be up for some.
Man Men = Mad Men? Manly Men?
ReplyDeleteCongrats,either way. For Christmas my dad's wife got me supplies to make souffles. You know, because every girl needs to know how to make a damned souffle.