2009-10-23

A Tale of Twenty Thousand Cookies...







This week was a blur of baking. Tons of gluten free baking for the buffet at the cafe on Tuesday, followed up by a series of failed cookie attempts. I tried this terrible, awful recipe for baby ruth cookies. The first time due to a personal typographical error, I put in 3x the amount of butter called for. This happened Wednesday. They were less like cookies and more like fatty mush blobs with caramel that stuck to the pan like napalm. My bad.
So tonight I set out to do it right, and I did. Only they SUCKED OUT LOUD. The candy pieces melted before the cookies baked, the taste was like that of a crap store bought generic brand, just bad all around. To the extent where I found myself thinking of the person who bothered posting such a recipe was rather devious and developed a personal grudge. Whoever you are, you are wrong about everything in my book. Three packages of baby ruth bars later, you owe me a refund of time, money, flour, sugar, a ton of butter, and the pleasureless calories I wasted on tasting this stuff.

Anyway, I finally abandoned that lost cause of a crap recipe and resorted to a classic soft chocolate chip cookie one that I found a while back here.
Upon noticing that the recipe didn't call for any salt, I used salted butter and added a few pinches at the end. It made me uncomfortable not adding any, usually it's the salt that gives sweets the kick that makes them stand out (in my opinion). I also added a bit more vanilla than was called for, I have a habit of doing this. Also being anal about chocolate, I used Ghiradelli semi-sweets. It's expensive, but it's worth it.
The result: gorgeous cookies. They were a bit of a project to make, but this is mainly because the recipe yields an impressive 30 lbs of cookie dough. Not really, I'm too lazy to do the math but there was a ton of it.
And that concludes this weeks baking streak. I'm entirely done with ovens, taste testing and sweets in general. All I want out of this weekend is some sleeping in, good tea, a huge chicken caesar salad, and possibly some pinot grigio. I'm looking forward to it with great anticipation. Especially the caesar salad.

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