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another cookie making effort
Sep. 19th, 2006 10:26 pmI tried making chocolate chip cookies again today (with real chocolate chips! Thanks, Jyoti!). I made a number of changes in prepartion and baking, all of which did contribute positively towards making them less flat and hard. I didn't put in the 1/4 tsp. water, I didn't melt the butter (I barely softened it), I had a slightly lower temperature and a slightly longer cooking time, and I put the dough in the fridge while batches were baking - this last I think made the most difference, as the final batch were the least flat.
I think next time I just need to bite the bullet and add more flour. I think that even if I followed all the instructions and relevant fixes perfectly, I'd still end up with a wetter dough than I would if I was making these in the States, and that's because the brown sugar (or bastard suiker!) that we get here is very crumbly and moist. (For example, "6 hard-packed T" isn't really possible; you try to compress it, and the grains just squirm out of the way.) I think the white sugar is also contributing something, though I have no idea what; the grains are substantially larger (2-3x) than what I'm used to, and you can often see whole grains of sugar on the underside of the cookies.
I got struck with the yen to make these around 4:30, so of course between snitching dough and then eating fresh cookies, I managed to pretty much ruin dinner for both of us. Oops. :) Cookies, peccarino, and black olives made my supper tonight - cookies, peccarino, and applesauce made his. This sort of thing happens so infrequently that I can't mind too much.
Earlier today I was on the couch reading when Slinky decided that my lap was the best place in the world to be. First she was wedged in between my body and my arm, mashing her face into my armpit (this has been a favorite curl-up spot for her since pretty much the day I brought her home). Then she discovered the arm-hole of my fleece vest, which I had on and zipped, and there was nothing doing but that she had to shove her face into the armhole, and then crawl into my vest. She ended up fallen asleep on the otherside of me, curled up underneath my vest. What a sweet kitty!
I ended up completely missing my Shire's yearly event last weekend. For some reason I'd gotten it into my head that it was next weekend, not last weekend, and I didn't realize my mistake until Sunday night. Oops. It didn't help that the event wasn't really highly publicized on the shire mailing list - I'm used to groups where it's impossible to forget an event is coming up, or when it is, because in the weeks before there's emails with calls for help, scheduling of pre-event meetings to do stuff (like make banners, cook, paint signs), announcements about when staff will start arriving on site, etc. I have no idea how events get run in this shire because none of this is conducted on the mailing list, and so far as I can tell, there is no regular business meeting. It makes event-running here very much a black-box, meaning that it's hard to volunteer for things when you have no idea what volunteers are needed for. I do feel bad about missing the event, though.
I think next time I just need to bite the bullet and add more flour. I think that even if I followed all the instructions and relevant fixes perfectly, I'd still end up with a wetter dough than I would if I was making these in the States, and that's because the brown sugar (or bastard suiker!) that we get here is very crumbly and moist. (For example, "6 hard-packed T" isn't really possible; you try to compress it, and the grains just squirm out of the way.) I think the white sugar is also contributing something, though I have no idea what; the grains are substantially larger (2-3x) than what I'm used to, and you can often see whole grains of sugar on the underside of the cookies.
I got struck with the yen to make these around 4:30, so of course between snitching dough and then eating fresh cookies, I managed to pretty much ruin dinner for both of us. Oops. :) Cookies, peccarino, and black olives made my supper tonight - cookies, peccarino, and applesauce made his. This sort of thing happens so infrequently that I can't mind too much.
Earlier today I was on the couch reading when Slinky decided that my lap was the best place in the world to be. First she was wedged in between my body and my arm, mashing her face into my armpit (this has been a favorite curl-up spot for her since pretty much the day I brought her home). Then she discovered the arm-hole of my fleece vest, which I had on and zipped, and there was nothing doing but that she had to shove her face into the armhole, and then crawl into my vest. She ended up fallen asleep on the otherside of me, curled up underneath my vest. What a sweet kitty!
I ended up completely missing my Shire's yearly event last weekend. For some reason I'd gotten it into my head that it was next weekend, not last weekend, and I didn't realize my mistake until Sunday night. Oops. It didn't help that the event wasn't really highly publicized on the shire mailing list - I'm used to groups where it's impossible to forget an event is coming up, or when it is, because in the weeks before there's emails with calls for help, scheduling of pre-event meetings to do stuff (like make banners, cook, paint signs), announcements about when staff will start arriving on site, etc. I have no idea how events get run in this shire because none of this is conducted on the mailing list, and so far as I can tell, there is no regular business meeting. It makes event-running here very much a black-box, meaning that it's hard to volunteer for things when you have no idea what volunteers are needed for. I do feel bad about missing the event, though.
