Random Ramblings

Some of you might remember a very old cooking adventure of mine, 5-minute chocolate cake, aka chocolate cake in a mug. It was an experiment using one of those email memes that have been going around forever, telling you that you can make a mini chocolate cake with just a mug and a microwave. It turned out... okay. Not so great that I ever made it again, but not so terrible that I wasn't willing to eat it that first time.

Enter today, and a random article I found online listing 18 microwave snacks you can make in a mug. Friends, I couldn't let this pass. I wanted to make all of them. Every single one. For science. And posterity.

Instead, I settled on the cinnamon roll in a mug. It was ridiculously simple, using only common stuff that any self-respecting baker would have in her house. (Except maybe the cream cheese for the icing and the applesauce, both of which which I did thankfully have). It was quite fast, though not quite the three minutes the article implies, at least not if you have to take down all the ingredients, measure them, and put them back. Still, quite fast, all things considered.

The only deviances I made from the recipe was using regular milk instead of buttermilk, and field-berry applesauce because I had some of the mott's snack cups floating around. (Bonus points: eating the rest of the snack cup while the cinnamon roll "bakes.")

I mixed up the icing inside a plastic sandwich bag (smushing it around with my hands), and snipped off the corner so that I could pipe it into the mug. It was horribly messy, not even close to the beautiful spiral in the picture, but it was tasty, and that's the important thing.

The other important thing is that this recipe was surprisingly tasty! It might not be restaurant-quality cake, it might not even be cinnabon quality cake... but it was very tasty. Especially with the frosting. I would definitely make this again. But not too much, because there are 17 other recipes to try. *grin*

The evening of New Year's Day, I was playing D&D. And since I was at the host's house pretty much all day, I decided it might be nice to have some baked goods for the game. Specifically, chai gingerbread bars, because the host had indicated that he likes them, and I aim to please.

Now, this is a recipe that I've made quite a number of times, am quite comfortable with, and figured it wouldn't be too much of a problem, except for one small thing: my friend isn't a baker.

Among the ingredients he did not have:
- flour (all-purpose or whole wheat)
- any of the spices except cinnamon
- brown sugar
- vanilla extract
- non-stick spray (vital to working with this recipe's very sticky dough)

There was some baking soda in the fridge that my friend was worried was no longer good, but a quick test (put baking soda in a glass with some vinegar and see if it becomes a mini-volcano) revealed that it was still fine, so at least that was one thing we didn't need to worry about.

For the rest, we wound up finding a tiny bag (1 kg) of all-purpose flour and some brown sugar at the convenience store in his building, and -- on a tip from a friend -- I used rum instead of vanilla extract. (Truth be told, I used a bit too much, because I couldn't figure out how the damn bottle poured.) We doubled-up on the chai to counteract the lack of other spices, so things were mostly okay on the ingredient front.

Then I realized we were also missing quite a number of tools I take for granted. There was no kitchen scale, which I'd kind of figured would be the case and didn't mind too much. I brushed off some old knowledge to measure the butter, i.e. using water displacement in a liquid measuring cup. There were measuring spoons, which was good, but (and here's the kicker) no dry measuring cups. Eventually we found one that was 125 ml, which is close enough to a half-cup that I could make it work, but I was flabber-boggled.

There wasn't a stand mixer, which is fine; I'm used to making most of my baked goods by hand anyway. There was one large mixing bowl and one that was just big enough to hold the dry ingredients if I didn't stir too vigorously. I greased the pan with some of the extra butter.

The pan. Oh, yes, I should mention the pan. See, this recipe is meant to be made in a 9x13 pan. My friend didn't have one. What he had instead was an 8x8 casserole dish with high walls. I had no idea how this would affect cooking time or outcome, and it didn't help that we also didn't have an oven thermometer. ("Why would I think the temperature was anything other than what's listed on the dial?" asked my friend.)

So anyway: the dough looked okay. We put it in the casserole dish. We set the dial on the oven to 350, waited a while, and then put it in. I turned it at around 13 minutes, and then checked again at 25 -- not done, but the top was starting to brown quite alarmingly. Brushing off more cobwebbed cooking skills, I took some tin foil and put it over the top of the dish. Put it back in for 5 minutes, then 5 more, then 5 more.

The damn thing refused to be done. It always seemed like it was almost done, and sometimes it seemed that parts of it were done and other parts weren't, but it was never entirely done. I had the casserole dish in the oven for over an hour, and it still refused to be ready.

After a while, I figured out that the tin foil over the top of the dish was causing the crust on top to start turning mushy in the middle, so I took over the foil, let it bake for another five minutes, and then took it out.

It was fine... for about five minutes, when the top collapsed, revealing that the inside was absolutely not done yet. I started to become seriously frustrated and annoyed. My friend, bless him, came up with a solution I wouldn't have: mash the whole thing up and then put it back in the oven for a few minutes until it finishes baking. Which is what I did.

In the end, it turned out very tasty, though it was more of a crumble than bars. We served it over ice cream, and it was well received, so I'll count this one as a net win. It certainly was a test of my kitchen improvisation skills, and I take it as a mark of my increasing comfort as a baker that I was able to improvise so much with what I had on hand. It also made me appreciate all the more my own very well-stocked kitchen. Next time I do baking, I'll just bring it over. :)

Today while browsing my various feeds, I stumbled across the welfare food challenge. It's a campaign run by Raise the Rates, a BC-based community organization trying to get welfare rates increased. The idea behind the challenge is to spend no more than $26 on food for one week, as this is the amount allocated for food by the BC government.

I've always been a fan of lifestyle experiments (reading about them, not conducting them), so I'll be very interested in seeing how the participants on this one turn out. It's all the more interesting because I've seen this type of experiment done before. Twice. With vastly different results.

( More on that behind here. Somewhat long. )

Trial #2 with the freezer/crock pot cooking was sausage and peppers (recipe here). Sadly, unlike trial #1 (coconut curry chicken), I probably won't keep this one in my recipe book. It was... okay. Ish. Quite acidic, and the consistency isn't the crisp, dry sausage that you like to get in sausage-and-peppers, but more, well, crock pot-y. Moist.

Also, unlike the coconut curry chicken, this one looks like it might only make 4 or so servings, even with rice. (Maybe only 3 Marc-sized servings.) We had enough for dinner for both of us with Marc taking seconds, and I'll have enough for lunch tomorrow, and then there's probably enough left for Marc's lunch, and that's it.

*shrugs* Can't win 'em all. I'll keep "sausage and peppers" on my list of things to make when I've got time to actually cook the sausage properly in the frying pan, but it won't be on my list of crock pot meals. Oh, well. Tomorrow: cranberry chicken.

Okay, I may have just stumbled across the world's greatest biscuit recipe. Since trying to make biscuits for the first time last month, I've been playing around with the recipe. I wasn't 100% happy with it. It was pleasant enough, but it was a bit tough and a bit lacking in sweetness.

After a number of different experiments, I think I just hit the home run. Unlike the first time, they're very fluffy, decently sweet, and absolutely divine hot. I haven't tried them at room temperature yet, and I suspect if Marc were here, they wouldn't last that long. (I've got guests coming over at some point, so the biscuits may not make it that long anyway.)

In any case, here's the new and updated recipe. Because I love you and want you to be happy like I am. (And, yes, I convert all my recipes to weight values. It means I only have one spoon and one bowl to clean up at the end of my baking.)

( The recipe )

Okay, I admit it. I made these cookies purely based off the picture on the website. They look SO GOOD! And, as a bonus, all the measurements are already in grams, which is the way I like them. (I pretty much convert all my baking recipes to weight instead of volume the first time I make them. Saves a ton of hassle when you can do everything in one bowl without measuring cups.)

The one hiccup I had was that I didn't have any "golden syrup," which is apparently very common in the UK but much less so in North America. Nor did I have corn syrup to use as a replacement. In the end, I substituted an equal amount (1/3 cup, or 105 g) of maple syrup, because that's what I had.

This recipe makes a lot of very small cookies, about 15-17 g / 1 level tbsp each. For me, it made four dozen exactly. Thankfully, they also don't spread too much, so I was able to put two dozen on a single baking sheet and finish the whole thing in two batches. My powdered sugar coating came out blotchier than in the picture, probably because I just whisked the powdered sugar and didn't actually sift it. Still, it looked nice enough, even if it did leave my counter covered in icing sugar.

Final verdict: tasty! A bit odd if you're not expecting the spice, which hits at the back of the mouth, but tasty! And addictive! Because they're so little, you can go through quite a lot in one sitting. I'd make these again, for sure.

Man, was I a klutz tonight. If a thing could be dropped, spilled, knocked into something else, or used to cut my hand open, it was. (Don't ask about that last one. Just trust me.) Thankfully, that didn't seem to affect the outcome of the cookies, which all turned out fine.

On tonight's agenda was supposed to be one batch of spritz cookies (out of two), but Marc was around and willing to help, and they actually went pretty fast because you can fit a whole lot of spritz cookies on a baking sheet at once. (They don't spread; I think we were able to fit about three dozen per sheet.) So, as per last year, I made up the batch and manipulated the cookie press, and Marc put the sprinkles. Working at a moderate pace, we were able to get everything done (including cooling and putting away) in about two and a half hours, which I think is pretty darn good. I think in the end we have 12-15 dozen. I didn't count precisely. (Too much happening too fast.)

It's good that Marc was home too, because I needed his manly hand strength to open the cookie press a few times. I don't know why it sealed so tightly, but it did. (And before anyone asks, yes, I did use the "wrap a towel around it" trick. No dice.)

Of all the cookie doughs I've made so far, these were probably the easiest, and aside from putting on the sprinkles, the fastest to prep. They were also fastest to cook, though this was a bit trickier. For some reason, all the batches took different amounts of time. Some were overbaked at six and a quarter minutes, others were underbaked at seven and a half. Still, they all came out fine, and none were burnt, so all's well.

And that, I think, is that. Unless I want to do my super-secret special project, I'm pretty much done until I have to package everything up. I've got twenty or so recipients, who should be receiving about 30-32 cookies each. Which is pretty good for a Christmas present, I think.

Excuse me while I collapse now.

Yet again, another day without a major catastrophe. The plan today was to bake the four batches of snickerdoodles I prepped yesterday. I had a suspicion, though, that it would take me longer to roll out a dozen balls, coat them in cinnamon-sugar, and squish them down than I'd have available to me if I were going full-tilt in baking. I did a timed test run around 10:30, and, indeed, it took too long. (About 3-4 minutes, when I've only got two and a half.) So I spent an hour rolling seventeen dozen dough balls, all ready to go. The dough softened up quite a bit over the course of this, so I put all the dough balls into the fridge to cool down for a while.

It took me a while to figure out the right timing for these cookies. Eight minutes was clearly too long, seven just a touch too short. I wound up settling on 7 minutes and 15 seconds, which worked out okay. I think the sugar on the bottom of the cookie was throwing me off a bit, but I sampled two (for science!) and they taste great, so I'm not too worried.

In any case, the first batch went into the oven around 11:30 the last came out around 2:00. Given another 15-20 minutes to cool off the last batches, and I figure I've been in the hot kitchen about four and a half hours today. I have no idea how Marc's mom manages her 9-hour baking marathons. I'm pooped!

Thankfully, no prep to do now. I'm off tomorrow -- I've got D&D, and one must have priorities in life -- and then Tuesday and Wednesday I'll be making spritz cookies, which don't need a long chill time.

My mom will be over shortly to pick up all the cookies I've made so far to store them at her house. She's got a large freezer and I've got a teeny-tiny one. Thanks, Mom! (And I'm sorry I'm putting temptation in your way!) So that's it for now. I think it's time to head out to the local cafe for lunch and typing up yesterday's lines of the night from Game of Thrones.

Today's game plan (slightly modified from originally intended): prepare chocolate chip cookies batch #2 and #3, roll all chocolate chip cookies into dough balls.

The first part of this plan was quite simple, actually. Learning from Wednesday's minor inefficiencies, I made sure I had the eggs at room temperature, the butter nice and soft, and the big bowls out and ready to go. I had to refill the flour container and open a new bag of chocolate chips, but everything went pretty swimmingly.

My original plan had been to bake a batch of the chocolate chip cookies tonight, but since I have a few hours more tomorrow than anticipated, I decided to put it off. Instead, I chose to roll all the dough into balls so that I could just put them on the baking sheets tomorrow and go. (Because of the relatively short baking time, the need to turn them midway through, and the fact that I only have two good baking sheets and am constantly in motion while baking, I like to have the dough in ready-to-go balls beforehand.)

This, my friends, took time. A lot of time.

The dough that had been sitting in the fridge since Wednesday (batch #1) was quite hard and required a bit of force to pry apart with a spoon in order to roll. Batches #2 and #3 went smoother, having only been in the fridge an hour or so when I took them out to roll them.

The good news is it's all done. The bad news is I think I may have messed up the sizes. I was anticipating (based on past results) that this dough would give me 5-6 dozen per batch. The first batch I rolled out gave me 10 dozen. (!) Deliberately rolling larger balls for the other two batches, I got slightly more than 7 dozen for each of them. So this means that instead of the intended 15-18 dozen cookies, I'll actually have about 25 dozen. Which is great in that my cookie recipients get more cookies each, and bad in that I have to sit around and bake them all tomorrow.

As I recall, these cookies don't spread too much. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to fit more than a dozen of the smaller ones on the tray at a time. Oh, well. We'll see what happens.

The plan for tomorrow (round two): Bake all 25 dozen chocolate chip cookies, prep 3-4 batches of snickerdoodles. Also: send Marc out for more sugar, because I think I'm going to run out. For now: sleep, glorious sleep.

After last week's batch cooking success, I decided to try again. The plan for this week: some sort of tagine, some sort of chili or meat sauce, and some sort of baked good. My plan was to have everything done by Sunday afternoon. But we all know how it goes with plans...

( Tagine, meat sauce, apple pudding, and a few gray hairs behind here )

And that's it. I've got two big containers of tagine, one and a half big containers of meat sauce, two big containers of rice, and about 3/4 of the apple pudding left to keep me for the week. Which is good, because so far I'm booked every evening from Monday to Thursday this week and have absolutely no idea when I'd cook otherwise.

I just hope that next week is less stressful. I'm not sure I can go through that again.