Baking

Tuesday, March 25, 2014 – The Charity Bake Sale, Spring 2014 Edition just ended. This year, we had 28 volunteer bakers, 16 volunteer sellers, 4 Varzea volunteers, and 1 poster designer. We raised a grand total of $2190, beating our previous record of $2158. The proceeds are being split between Seattle Humane Society and Seattle Children’s Hospital.

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Tuesday, January 14, 2014 – This is one of those rare moments where I have cookies from two batches side by side. I baked cookies on Sunday to bring to work. And then when I baked more cookies on Tuesday for Sizzleworks graduation, I still had leftover cookies from Sunday’s batch. So I took a side-by-side photo to compare.

The cookies in the bag are from Sunday’s batch, where I substituted 100g milk instead of 2 eggs. The cookies on the napkin are a Tuesday’s batch, hybrid recipe where I used 1 egg and 1 Tbsp milk. It’s hard to tell in the photo, but the hybrid recipe cookies are slightly larger with browner edges. (Otherwise, they look almost identical, as you can see in the photo.) As it turns out, counter-intuitively, the less egg or milk (what I call “moisture”) you put in a cookie, the less it holds together, and the more the edges spread out and burn.

So how did the cookies themselves come out? As it turns out, you can definitely swap out eggs for milk in a cookie, as long as it’s at least 100g milk (roughly half a cup). And hybrid recipes of 1 egg and 1 Tbsp milk help you make nice, dense, chewy cookies but still have fine-grain control over the moisture content, so you don’t end up with unworkable dough. But more on that in my upcoming book.

Saturday, August 31, 2013 – In the last 4.5 years, I’ve made a lot of chocolate chip cookies. But this is the first time I’ve made double chocolate cookies. (Or hell, the first time I’ve made chocolate cookies.)

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