16 december
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Too busy getting ready for Christmas. Someday I will organize myself earlier. I am better than last year but...
Dad is complaining about the freezer full of cookies. Most will be gone tomorrow when I take them to the chiropractor. He thinks he need to have 8 boxes of chicken nuggets even though the boys only eat one box per day and the store is only 2 miles down the road. Sometimes I wish we had a separate freezer. I could have started my baking sooner. And I could freeze more soups, stews & chili. As it is, I use ziploc bags for freezing because they take up less room than Pyrex.
Ryan's invention due on Friday. Yep we are working on it at the last minute. I have made it as easy as I can but he still complains. Grr...
Baking chocolate crackles. Hmm... the first batch looks odd. (This picture is from a batch I made in 2008.) Seems like I always do something "wrong" with these cookies. The first time I used regular cocoa powder and unsweetened chocolate. The recipe calls for unsweetened Dutch process cocoa powder and bittersweet chocolate. Then next time I had the Dutch process cocoa but I can only find sweetened instead of unsweetened. I used dark chocolate (72% cocoa) instead of bittersweet.
Today I started making the wrong recipe. I was making the recipe for molasses cookies. Oops! The butter & sugars were already mixed. I looked at the two recipes and determined it was OK. The chocolate crackles call for 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar. The molasses cookies call for for 1 cup of brown sugar and a half cup of granulated sugar. Each recipe uses 1 stick of butter. The difference shouldn't matter.
The first batch is done and something is off. They look wrong. I think about and decide it must be that I used the cookie scoop and did not roll them firm enough. I did two batches this way so I waiting for the third batch to see if I am correct.
Yep. And they do better at 12 minutes than 14. I wonder why I never noted that before? And the "wrong" sugar doesn't make a different. Different chocolates do taste different but all are good. Some are just sweeter than others.