Culinary Disasters, 5/3/06

[bjarvis]

I promised the folks running the square dance fly-in this past weekend that I'd contribute some sort of food for the snack table. There is a strong preference for homemade snacks rather than purchased items, so I thought I'd make chocolate chip cookies. Simple, elegant and a crowd-pleaser. What could go wrong?

kent4str & I went shopping Wednesday evening. Per my culinary plans, we acquired sugar, eggs and a five pound bag of Ghiradelli chocolate chips; I was assured we had plenty of flour and other minor ingredients already at home.

When we returned from our hunting & gathering expedition, I set about making the cookies. I couldn't find my preferred recipe card so I thought using the cookie recipe on the back of the bag of chocolate chips would be a good substitute.

Very quickly, I discovered we didn't have anything like as much regular flour on hand as I had been told. In fact, I had barely enough for the recipe. Barely.

After mixing the ingredients per the recipe, the dough looked, well, odd: it didn't seem firm enough although the balls I placed on the cookie sheet held their form well, and there seemed to be a very high chip-to-dough ratio. Still, I didn't give it much thought since chocolate is the purest essence of godliness on the mortal plane and, hey, that's what the recipe said to do.

The first iteration was a disaster. The cookie balls melted down into a single millimeter-thick cookie-like crust across the length & width of the cookie sheet, bonding to the surface like sealant.

With a fresh cookie sheet, considerable additional flour from kent4str's stash of gluten-free flour and two more frustrating iterations, I finally produced something that resembled a chocolate chip cookie. It certainly didn't look like the oh-so-perfectly sculpted cookie supermodels on the packaging, but it was edible and would suffice.

Someone at Ghiradelli is gonna to pay for this indignity.

Comments

[paigemom.livejournal.com]

Um, sweetie, knowing what I do about your, er, culinary skills, why didn't Kent make the cookies?

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Mooooo...

[snowboardjoe.livejournal.com]

You just can't go wrong with the classic Nestle(tm) Toll House(tm) cookies. :)

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Next time, I'll buy the Ghiradelli for the chocolate, and Nestle for the recipe. :-^

[apparentparadox]

Sounds like the first iteration didn't have enough flour.

When I asked the callers for our convention what sweets they would like me to make, Michael Kellogg said that he liked cookies, but warned me that most choc chip recipes have an error in them -- they only list HALF the amount of choc chips that should be in it. Needless to say, I agreed!

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Clearly the first iteration lacked enough flour, although I will swear on a stack of holy books of your choice that I used no less than what the recipe listed, which was clearly at least 1/3 too little. Lesson learned.

[apparentparadox]

Flour is tricky stuff. Unless you weighed it to measure it, it's easy to mess up the amount. The whole dip-and-sweep method of measuring it in a cup measure can be fairly inaccurate.

[jss]

Yes, weighing it is better than measuring it (how compacted was the flour?). Furthermore, what's the water content in the butter you used? What kind of flour ("all purpose" and "cake" and "gluten-free" all have different properties when it comes to absorbing moisture and so on)?

[bikerbearbmw.livejournal.com]

Also please note that if you want thin and crispy cookies, use butter. If you want puffy cookies, use shortening (margarine). Butter has a lower melting point and will cause the cookies to spread out more initially. Adding more flour may make them tough (not the fine delicate crumb we all know and love).

[moofedct.livejournal.com]

You've got mad skills in the kitchen!

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Yeah, where were you when I needed you last Wednesday night? :-)

[allanh.livejournal.com]

You could have asked me. The only decent back-of-bag chocolate chip cookie recipe that I've ever been able to make work consistently, is Nestle's "Toll House" recipe. The Hershey and Ghirardelli recipes, while similar, just don't produce consistently good results.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Noted for future. Good information, like experience, is what you get after you really need it most. :-)