Baking Rants

Ah, the smell of baked cookies, wafting through the house (okay, the tiny one bedroom flat in London, where your kitchen is essentially your living room, which is also your dining room because it's the only room you have that's not for sleeping or peeing in). But still, the smell of freshly baked dough infused with cinnamon and raisins and chocolate and oats. Ah, the serenity of it all.........

Hmmmmmmmm.

Butter. A staple of every fridge and a necessity for bakers. There's just something so satisfying about a slab of butter. It comes in those lovely little 250g bricks of yellowness. Or so they say........

In the hope of making two different batches of cookies today, I needed 260g butter between the two recipes. I had a full pat of butter and a tiny bit left over from another pat. Should be about enough, right?

Wrong. I put it on the scales and bam, it's barely 230g. Say what? How can you sell something that clearly states it is 250g, when it's not? Money grabbing liars. Oh, and that was weighed with packaging - not that the packaging of butter weighs anything - so they can't even claim that would have anything to do with it.

So then I started weighing everything else. The raisins. Should be 500g, weighed in at 490g. The porridge oats. Should be 500g, weighed in at 490g.

Just think if you were conned out of 10g of everything you ever bought. Madness!

So, as I was making batches of cookies, I thought I would try out our sexy baking function on the new oven, Sirius. He's done us right so far, what with Dino apple pie with perfect pastry, and countless pizza and calzone on the pizza setting. So I had high hopes of the ability of Sirius to cook several trays of cookies at the same speed.

Yet. After the recommended 12 minutes, my cookies were not only anaemic, but were also soggy on the bottom. This has never happened before in the land of Flat 19's cookies. So I put them in a few minutes longer. And I moved the trays around as Sirius hadn't managed to cook them all at the same speed.

After having about 7 minutes longer than they normally had in the old oven, I gave up and took them out. They had browned on top, so looked less ill, but some of the bottoms were still a little soggy. No one likes a soggy bottom.

But after a few minutes cooling on the tray and then a quick transfer to the rack, they were hardening up, and after a test - come on, that's the beauty of baking right, the testing? - we realised they were actually pretty tasty.

But, I did the next batch of cookies on the normal setting and they cooked much better. No soggy bottoms, and just the usual game of musical trays, swapping the trays around so they all gained that golden brown colour on top.

Don't lie to me Sirius. I trusted you.

This is merely a plea, but Sainsburys Kentish Town please start stocking the dark brown soft sugar again, it makes much nicer cookies and biscuits. The light brown stuff is all golden and pale. I like the dark sugar, it really gives them colour and punch.

And really, some recipes are crazy. As I was making the first batch of oat and raisin cookies, I half the quantities which still makes about 22 cookies, otherwise I have cookies coming out of my ears and I've used up all the ingredients in the house. But when a recipe says 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract before you've even halved the recipe, you know something's gone wrong. 1/4 teaspoon vanilla? In cookies? You might as well not bother putting any in at all. I put in 1/2 a teaspoon. Ha ha ha. I laugh in the face of your rules, recipe book. Oh, and the same with the Cinnamon. I am a purveyor of Cinnamon and again 1/4 teaspoon in 22 cookies is simply not enough. As with blue eyeshadow, you can never have too much cinnamon. I think a whole teaspoon went in. Not sure, but they taste great!

Ah, and now for that moment where you pop in that last tray of cookies for just a couple more minutes, as they just weren't quite done enough, and then you forget, until suddenly you're like, 'Did I leave the oven on?' A second later, 'Did I leave some cookies in there?' Then the burning smell. Then the realisation. Oh Shit.

Luckily they weren't burnt in the traditional sense - blackened - but they were a considerably darker shade than the rest of the batch. Ah well. I'll freeze them and hope that they'll taste better after some time in the cold place.

Needless to say, I've got the baking heat right now, so despite the chill in the air I'm running a temperature, and I'm desperately trying not to snaffle a cookie or two off the cooling rack. This is a real test of will power.

Though I did eat quite a bit of dough earlier. Mmmmmm cookie dough.

Weigh your butter, people. Weigh everything.

Rants