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

[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.