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

[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.