food, also for thought

[jazzfish]

My ability to make consistently Quite Good cookies is, I think, a direct consequence of a) a good recipe (Betty Crocker, in this case), and b) measuring by weight and not by volume. It's also just easier, at least for me: no digging around to find the right size scoop and hoping it's clean, just leave a 1-cup in the flour and a 1/3-cup in the sugar.

(My mnemonics do annoy me: a cup of flour is 5oz, a cup of sugar (brown or white, I forget for powdered) is 200g. But I'm usually adding flour and sugar at different times, so it's not as bad as it might be.)

Good tools help, too. Stand mixer for creaming the butter and sugar (overkill), a ridiculously overproduced paddle for mixing the flour and then the chips (do not use the mixer for the flour, you'll overwake the gluten), silicone baking mats for my trays so I don't have to deal with parchment paper, a cookie-baller to make them consistently the right size so I don't have to mess around with two spoons or hand-rolling things. I kind of wish I had a full sheet baking tray so I could do them in two batches instead of four, but where would I store it? "In the oven" is absolutely the wrong answer.

Also it appears to take me about twenty minutes to go from "I should make cookies" to having the first batch in.

---

Stupid presentation for stupid Josh's stupid barely-a-class is done, another group member uploaded it an hour ago. Spent today wrestling ArcGIS into submission for a Cartography project. This is using a bunch of stuff I've learned in several classes, which is nice. Feels like I'm actually learning how to do things. It will be messier than I'd like by the deadline tonight but I'll get good feedback from Tony and then the actual final thing will be decent.

Part of why I've liked Tony's classes (Arc1 last term, Cartog this) is because they're project-focused. I'm not just going through exercises-- well, Arc1 mostly was, but the final project was "make this map" and the final exam had a practical "use Arc to solve these problems" component that I quite enjoyed. That's been mostly lacking from my other classes. Feels ... well. Practical. Able to be put into practice.

Comments

[reedrover]

Huzzah for confident cookies.

I’m glad you are getting some kind of practical with this new line of study.

[jazzfish]

Me too! It's nice to believe it will be a) useful and b) doable.

[lee_future]

I'm impressed by your lead time of thought to cookies being only twenty minutes. I generally need to overcome a larger activation energy barrier, which varies depending on how familiar I am with the recipe.

I found myself making sugar cookies last week after I had failed for the two previous weeks to muster enough energy for creating my craving of double chocolate chip cookies(unfamiliar recipe).I was frustrated I wasn't getting desired end product, but some cookies are better than no cookies. Differently wired brains be braining.

om nom cookies!

[jazzfish]

They were pretty tasty. :)

Yeah, I'm impressed myself. I expect it helped that I had been vaguely thinking about cookies or an equivalent snacky something for a couple of days. It also helps that this recipe is a Known Quantity; trying something new would absolutely be much harder.

And yay for Some Cookies at least!