cakes vs cookies

[jazzfish]

In my defence, I don't make cookies very often, so four eggs sounded like a reasonable number. And somehow I read the lines "1 egg" and "4 c. flour" as "4 egg." It looked perfectly normal until I kept adding flour and it kept not turning into thick mixer-killing cookie dough.

On the bright side, it seems that the only difference between "cookies" and "cake batter" is the number of eggs you put in, and now we have a tasty maple sheet cake. Needs vanilla icing, but other than that.

Someday soon I will finish my post about maple syrup, about which Canada is unsurprisingly more serious than the US. Also someday soon I will rant about the difficulties of trying to buy food in Canada, with the Block O'Butter being the biggest offender.

Comments

[lurkingcat]

Tasty maple sheet cakes sounds like a pretty good outcome to me :)

Better than my pastry efforts which tend to go:
1) Weigh stuff and mix ingredients as per recipe,
2) keep adding ingredients until it starts behaving like pastry,
3) realise that the kitchen is in danger of being taken over by the monstrous ball of pastry that I have created,
4) raid cupboards for jam and make a lot of unexpected jam tarts as well as the actual pastry thing that I was supposed to be making.

For the record, nutella (or any other chocolate spread that I've tried so far) is not a good jam substitute when making jam tarts ;)

[notyourwendy]

Thanks for the warning re: nutella. I have this idea it can be used in place of either jam or peanut butter for just about anything.

[jazzfish]

Certainly better than "growl a lot and throw it out," which is what I thought it was going to end up being! It's a little off-texture, but still quite good for failed cookies.

I've had reasonably good luck with pastry-chef-ing, where "pastry" is mostly defined as "coffeecake-type-things" with the occasional foray into cookies or whatnot. More jam tarts sound like a fine outcome, though. :)

[rbandrews]

I know about the milk bag thing, supposedly you can get pitchers that have little clips to hold them up. What other food difficulties are there?

[notyourwendy]

They don't sell Simply Limeaid. For this alone, I hate grocery shopping in Canada.

[jazzfish]

I actually haven't encountered the "milk in a bag" thing.

You know how butter comes in sticks so it's easy to slice off 1 Tbsp at a time? Yeah, the Canadians don't. Butter comes in blocks that are the size of four sticks, and good luck getting only 1 or 2 Tbsp off of that sucker.

Also no limeade, and no Jif peanut butter. Most other complaints boil down to "the big-ass Safeway in the middle of downtown kind of sucks, and all other nearby options are more expensive and don't suck any less."

[rbandrews]

Do they still have recipes that call for tablespoons, or does metric extend to cooking, and there's some alternative way of getting like 4 cc's of butter? If the former, then that's just bad design.

I've always bought Reese's peanut butter since I discovered that there was such a thing, but I hear you on the limeade. That sucks. I want to go buy a quart and drink it in your honor. :)

[jazzfish]

If I were to invest in new recipes they'd probably be in metric (and in mL rather than cc, I expect), but since 1 tsp = 5 mL and 1 Tbsp = 15 mL it's not too difficult a conversion.

We're going to be in Seattle in early September and there will probably be a grocery-store run involved. :)

[rbandrews]

cc and mL are the same thing, aren't they? A liter is a volume of something (10 cm)³, and cc is short for "cubic centimeter".

[jazzfish]

... indeed they are. That's thrown me for years now: I keep expecting ccs to be equivalent to centilitres.

[rbandrews]

Oh man, getting 10 cc's of something stat would be like filling a water balloon. Ow.

[notmatt]

You could hack the big block of butter up lengthwise into four "normal" sized sticks, wrap up three of them and then slice the remaining stick as usual.

[jazzfish]

E's going to try that with the next Giant Block O'Butter. I'm skeptical: any time I try to cut butter it flakes and fractures and breaks less cleanly than I want it to. (I expect there are geological terms to describe this.) tulip_tree's suggestion of weighing butter may work, at least for things where I have to melt the butter anyway.

[thanate]

That is slightly worse than the time the Foxes put me in charge of making the pizza dough and I ran out of flour because I'd never encountered a 2-cup measuring cup before. (fortunately I was only at 1.5x the desired amount when the supply gave out...)

Maple sheet cake sounds pretty good, though. As do the cookies. (darnit, we're just getting the heat wave from the midwest here; it's no time to be baking.)

[jazzfish]

I /have/ had to make twice as many pancakes at least once, because I put in twice as much milk and had to go back and double everything else. (And a two-cup measuring scoop sounds both weird and dangerous, for exactly that reason.)

The maple sheet cake is edible but the texture's a little odd... chewier than I'd like. Reasonably tasty, though.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Usually, cakes work better with lower-gluten cake flour, while cookies work well with medium-gluten all-purpose flour, but, yeah, I've always found that baking isn't THAT hard, so long as you are willing to tell everybody that whatever it is that you came out with is what you MEANT to do all along. It usually ends up pretty tasty even if it's not what you expected.

[jazzfish]

I've heard that about cake flour, but since the only cakes I've made to date have been more coffeecake-style than actual-cake-style, I haven't ever used it myself.

And, yeah. I've also heard a lot of people going on about how baking is PRECISE, and you need to weigh flour EXACTLY and so on... but in my experience, it takes effort to really screw up baking. (Effort along the lines of "four times as many eggs," yes.) Or, to quote a Surviving The World comic I'm unable to lay my hands on at the moment, "Of course it tastes good. You put an entire stick of butter in it."

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Well, you DO have to be precise in order to get the precise result you want, but, if you don't care what the result is EXACTLY, then it's easy.

There's a story about a man who was walking through the forest, and he saw targets on all these different trees, and an arrow in the dead center bullseye of each target. He was amazed at the skill of the archer, and, eventually, he met a man in the forest carrying a bow. He asked the man if he was the expert marksman who hit all these bullseyes, and the archer allowed as it was so. The man asked the archer how he'd learned to be so precise, and the archer explained that, actually, he was only a mediocre archer, but he always drew the target AFTER he shot the arrow.

And that's how I bake.

[quixotic-goat.livejournal.com]

"and now we have a tasty maple sheet cake" lol

As for "Also someday soon I will rant about the difficulties of trying to buy food in Canada", well, I guess not all the grass can actually be greener on the other side :P

[jazzfish]

The food thing and the banking thing are the only real problems I've encountered so far. (Where "The banking thing" refers to the refusal of banks to issue debit cards that can be used like credit cards: there's your credit card which works like you expect, and there's your debit card which is tied to your bank account and requires a PIN, but there's no debit/credit card, so you can't use your bank account directly to make online purchases.)

Other than that, it's been pretty much sheer awesome all the way.

[tulip-tree.livejournal.com]

The butter thing still drives me nuts. Get a kitchen scale, if you don't have one, and look up the conversion for tablespoons of butter to grams of butter - it's still less convenient, but it makes following baking recipes doable.

Online shopping is less popular here, in general, and there are a lot of ways in which Canada seems 5-10 years behind the US. I've never wanted to use a debit card in that way, so I don't miss it, but there are other things I've noticed (e.g., in the US you can buy mutual funds online yourself, but here there's no way to invest in mutual funds without going through someone who is licensed to sell them. Cell phones are stupidly expensive for fewer minutes, etc.)

There are quite a few things that aren't available here - some, you learn to live without, and others you stock up on and bring back from US trips. My Canadian friends all have their favorite American things (junk food, variety of breakfast cereal, etc.) The things that annoy me the most are the ones where the packaging looks the same, but they have actually sold the brand to another company, and it's different.

I have yet to find cottage cheese that's not gross, or string cheese that actually strings. The lack of tose things makes me sad, and I have on two occasions this year brought them back from Buffalo (but that's a long way to go for groceries, so that only happens when I'm already in Buffalo, which has only happened twice in four years).

And I miss Trader Joe's. If they ever come to Buffalo, I'll do a lot more cross-border trips.

So that's my rant about food shopping in Canada - I'm curious to hear yours when you get around to it. Things I do like up here are the relative cheapness of a lot of produce, and the fact that there are more restrictions on hormones and antibiotics and crap in dairy and meat, so I don't have to be particularly careful about what I eat since it's all pretty safe, especially now that I've also got a baby to take into consideration.

[jazzfish]

That's an excellent plan for the butter. We have a kitchen scale (got one sometime late last year for flour, with the result that my pancakes have finally been consistently pancake-textured!) but I hadn't thought of using it for butter.

The no debit/credit card thing is mostly annoying because there's no way to make online purchases using our shared account; we have to have one of us do it and reimburse ourselves.

I've been lucky enough not to run into the packaging thing (except for peanut butter, and I noticed that "Kraft" is not "Jif" no matter how similar they look). Thanks for the warning, though!

I expect all trips to Seattle are going to turn into shopping trips. :) Trader Joe's is muchly missed.

I'd thought the cheapness of produce was just a result of being closer to where more of it was grown on the west coast. Nice to hear that it's a nation-wide thing. And I hadn't known about more FDA-type restrictions but I'm not surprised. That's good to hear as well!

[tulip-tree.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure this is how most of the world handles their butter - they don't have sticks of butter in Europe, either. Based on the recipes I've seen from Europe, they do all their measuring by weight. I do a lot more of this than I used to, and it's easier once you get used to it (and have appropriate recipes or notes.) Canada is kind of a strange hybrid, though - some things are metric, others are imperial. People still weigh themselves in pounds, and a generation ago, they used Fahreinheit instead of Celsius. As far as cooking recipes go, in the Canadian magazines I subscribe to, they tend to have two columns of units, one in the familiar (to me) cups, tablespoons, etc., and one in metric. Oddly, they don't usually give weights, so it's different from recipes from England or New Zealand or somewhere else where people are accustomed to weighing everything.

Breyer's ice cream is NOT the same, but the fancier stuff ("double churned" and anything else in black and purple packaging - I forget exactly all the words they use on the labels) is decent. The blue packages are not worth it - there are ingredients in there that have NO business in ice cream.

Nabisco is "Mr Christie" for some reason that I once looked up and don't remember, so it probably didn't make much sense. The products are similar but sometimes a bit different.

Almost all my trips to the US are shopping trips. I like Canada, but it just doesn't compare to the US when it comes to prices and selection on almost everything.

[jameshroberts.livejournal.com]

I've heard that brownies were invented by someone who forgot to put the leavener into a chocolate cake and was brave enough to serve the results. Could be a myth; most food origin stories are.

[jazzfish]

That's... frighteningly plausible.

[pooka798.livejournal.com]

Also as I recall the brownie mix box says use X number eggs more than normal for cake-like brownies.