Second Post

I am aware that I am starting my second post when most people haven't even signed up for blogger yet, and that my last post was yesterday, but I will be out of town for a week and so I am stocking up ahead of time. I was also baking again today and I figure I should say something about it before I forget.

I was baking for a purpose today, my friend Mike is having his open house tomorrow and so I decided to bake cookies for him (simply as an excuse to bake cookies, really). For him I chose an Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe which did not fail. In my opinion they were kind of ugly, but drop cookies were never meant for beauty. The first tray that went in the oven I messed up; I was unsure if they were undercooked so kept returning them to the oven until I could no longer remove them from the tray. I don't count this as a failure, the cookies were still edible in their messy cookie chunks, and the other trays provided enough to pack away for my friend. The only question that remains: does he trust me to not try poisoning him? That I won't dare to answer, it is likely he will open it with a meter stick from behind a brick wall to make sure I didn't pack a grenade in there. I hope he does try them and that he is not allergic to walnuts because they actually do taste good. Just for the record, I don' t want him dead.

After Mike's open house I am going to hit the road with my church youth group for camp. this is where I will spend all of next week, so you don't have to worry about me cluttering this blog for a while. For the trip down I made Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookies and Chocolate Mexican Wedding Cookies. I wanted to make ordinary chocolate chip cookies too, but I ran out of flour. Both batches were successful and I am proud of them. The mexican wedding cookies are round and covered with sugary cocoa powder, they have been my favorite recipe so far. Actually, I may have made a mistake, I might have doubled the cocoa powder. One of the ingredients is "1/2 cup Ghirardelli sweet ground chocolate and cocoa." In the first few pages of the book, before it gets to the recipes, it explains that 1 cup of this can be replaced by 1/2 cup of unsweetened cocoa mixed with 1/2 cup white granulated sugar. Instead of putting only half of this mixture in, I think I put in the whole cup. However, I am happy with the way the cookies turned out, so if I ever try this recipe again, I will have to remember to double the sweetened cocoa.

The second batch of cookies I made also turned out well, they are a pale brown color, what you might expect from a chocolate chip cookie. They seem to me to be unusually thin, but they didn't crumble or break, and the chocolate chips and peanuts add bulk. While I was making them I was concerned with the thickness of the dough, but I now understand that this is how it is supposed to be. These three successes push my ratio to 1:4, and I am happy with that.