Unbaked: The Journey of Cookie Dough

My friend, Gordon, sent me his father's recipe for oatmeal craisin chocolate chip cookies. Naturally I made them, but this time I took a photo of each step. Having made cookies so many times, I realize that some textures come instinctively to me. I know when butter and sugar are "creamed" and when you beat an egg into the batter until "fluffy." But how do you sense all of this from a description without someone showing you what that looks like? Stir until just combined. Well, okay...but what does that even look like?

Cookies baked, I ended up with 8 photos of the process. And while that's helpful, 8 is a lot. I opened them all in photoshop and got an idea: what about a grid?

Voila. Here you have it: a step by step of making this delicious recipe for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Read left to right, top to bottom.

Oatmeal Chocolate Craisin Cookies 

3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup shortening
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp maple syrup
1 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp kosher salt 
2 cups oatmeal
2 cups chocolate chips
1 cup craisins

1. Preheat oven to 375 F.
2. In a large mixing bowl, cream sugars, butter and shortening.
3. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition until fluffy.
4. Stir in vanilla then maple syrup until well incorporated.
5. In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda and salt. Pour dry mix into butter mixture and stir until just combined.
6. Add oatmeal, chocolate chips and craisins. Mix until well dispersed and dollop cookies by the tablespoon onto an ungreased cookie sheet or parchment paper.
7. Bake for 9-11 minutes or until the edges begin to crisp.
8. Devour.

Bake Till You Drop

On Sunday I nearly lost it. I mean sitting in a chair, face flat on hands: I can't bake anymore. I made 20 Biscaitie each for 15 different people, that's 300 Biscaitie all made out of my dinky home oven. On top of that was packaging: wrap them, bag them, tie a bow, label and cushion them, tape them up in boxes and trudge them down to the post office. I'm not ungrateful for the task, because running a baking company I realize is mostly figuring out the logistics. Plus the sense of accomplishment at the end was immense! But the whole "bake till you drop" got me thinking: what is it about starting a new process that can be so frustrating? 

It's the learning curve. I started a new job recently too. I'm a barista at The Queens Kickshaw in Astoria. As with starting my last job, there's a lot of details to remember fast when someone orders a drink. Everything has a place that it's kept, every drink has a cup it's prepared in, every second counts. But when you're learning you make mistakes. You do the wrong thing and it's the only way to seal the idea in your mind that no, an americano is does not go in the small latte cup.

The good news? Every time you repeat a process it gets easier. I now know all the things I need for my shipping including tidbits like "to" and "from." So long as you don't drop, you've learned something. With this in mind, I push on to the next order: this time 100 boxes to ship, followed by a holiday bazaar and a catered office Holiday Party!

Food for Thought and Thoughts on Food

People love to tune out on subways. It's a commute and for many, their only chunk of mental solitude in a bustling day of work and home life. And as I sit here, tuning out and subsequently trying to tune back in, I wonder: what is it that brings us all back together?

Well, food. Yes, we all love food. We love to socialize over food, express our culture and personalities through food. We celebrate with food and mourn with food. We meet over food and part over food. In fact, food interjects in our lives more times a day than most anything else. How much do you think about food? I would love to learn more about the impact that food has on our personalities. I read an article yesterday that claims the aroma of bread makes people friendlier. Think of all the times you've walked into a bakery and instantly felt more at ease. It's no wonder that we associate baking with comfort: it's built into feelings of nostalgia and the presence of good company--at least for those who have the luxury of such plenty. So here's to congregating over food!

Oatmeal or Chocolate Chip?

I saw a Sugar Loco tweet this morning: "Raisin cookies that look like chocolate chip cookies is one of the main reasons I have trust issues." I definitely don't agree, but it does make me wonder, why do people have such strong opinions about food? What do flavors bring out in us that make us so passionate one way or another?

I was never a picky eater growing up. My parents adopted a firm policy of "you don't have to like it, but you have to try it." And there were a selection of desserts that I would not touch: all pies, cooked fruit of any description, and any combination of peanut butter and chocolate. Ha! It's funny now to think how much all that has changed... The trend started with watching my parent's eating habits and ended when I began to experiment with my own tastes and opinions about everything. I remember my first bite of pumpkin pie (after realizing that it must be good if everyone in the family devours it). It was fantastic and I knew I had to try more. Not only that, but I started watching my aunt and grandmother make pie so I could make more myself.

It's a luxury to be a picky eater, and there's a foundation that supports our specific tastes (granted some are completely involuntary, so geneticists say). When did you develop your habits?

My Friend Impatience

Have you met impatience? We're much closer than I'd like to admit. Impatience visits me when I open the oven repeatedly to check on the rising status of a bread loaf and while I poke at a block of butter to see if it's room temperature yet. Impatience is there when I burn my finger on molten fresh-out-of-the-oven chocolate, and lingers around for my gluten free experiments as I fail over and over to reproduce the same recipe with new flour.

Baking is about the journey and not the destination. It's hard to expect that you'll produce something good if you don't take time to enjoy the process of getting there. I sample as I go, checking that there is enough banana flavor at the beginning of the muffin batter instead of cringing as I taste the finished product. And still I fail all the time. I've put effort into many things only to have them come out with the wrong texture, the wrong flavor, the wrong...everything. Impatience can dominate if you let it--a true symptom of product seeking.

So how do I deal with it? Well, I haven't figured out how to get rid of impatience entirely. My trick is to not look to the product as the ultimate goal. It seems impossible, I know, cause who bakes when they don't have a serious sugar craving? But if you find joy in the process then you won't feel quite so bad if the product is not what you expected. They say to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, so why not make friends with an enemy? Here's to my friend impatience, thanks for keeping me in the moment.

The Oven's Mark

I used to work in the dining hall at Skidmore College. Correction: I spent most of my time working at the bakery at the dining hall,  traying (and tasting, how could I resist?) cookies whilst talking with the pastry chefs. I vividly remember the warnings from Robin, Chucky and Matt about burns.

"Watch out hun, this rack is fresh from the oven," or "tray these ones first, the rest are much too hot!" I asked Robin once about her burns. They're inevitable. You reach for the wrong rack and OUCH! Or you pull out a hot tray and ZAP, there's a line across your forearm. Their battle scars were heroic--lining their skin like tattoos.

I'm certainly not that epic. I just haven't been baking long enough or to scale to earn my scar cred, but a little sloppy haste yesterday and I have a line and a bandaged hand to show for it. And the sick part, as I'm sure you've already guessed by the tone in this post, is that I revel in my burns. My battle wounds! The evidence that I made ten dozen Biscaitie, three batches of cookies, orange poppyseed muffins and mini cheesecakes all in one day. I'm careful, but enough working in a kitchen and I'm slowly becoming branded a baker.

The Improvised Kitchen

You scrape together the ingredients for dessert, lay them out and realize you're missing one thing: the right pan. Baking in a variety of poorly equipped college kitchens, I've learned a lot about how to simply "make it work."

Inspired by my step dad's innovation for my sister's angel food birthday cake (listed below), I've compiled a list of go to baking tricks when you don't have the right picks:

Bundt Cake Pan (Credit to James Racheff)

 A tin can in the center of a circular cake pan works well when you don't have a bundt pan. Be sure to grease the can well!

Double Boiler

 I like to use two stacked pots although a bowl over a pot works as well. The nice thing about the pots is having a handle to grab as metal bowls get very hot over boiling water.

Rolling Pin

Any bottle works well for rolling out dough although I am a particular fan of wine bottles because they have more weight. Nalgene style bottles work as well. Be sure to take off all labels and rinse well.

Sifter

If a recipe requires sifting, try whisking the flour or sugar in a bowl rigorously instead. This breaks up the chunks for a finer texture. A tea strainer works as well if you have one big enough.

Let me know if you've come up with any of your own and I'll add them to the list!

*All illustrations courtesy of yours truly. 

The Plus Side to Bad Baking

I made the worst breakfast ever yesterday. And I made it twice. Worst of all? It was an attempt to make my sister's birthday breakfast. First attempt: gluten free crepes with banana and mango, a simple recipe from my guru. Result? Salty sweet, thick & eggy omelets.  Second attempt: gluten free pancakes. Result? Soggy chickpea flavored patties. Yuck and yuck. I felt terrible. An hour of work with nothing to show for it.

Baking is an art. The preparation, presentation and aroma, the taste, texture and scale: they all contribute to the same basic elements of design. I studied art for 8 years, so it's hard for me to think in other terms, and I've learned that the creative process cycles. I saw a great Ted Talk from Elizabeth Gilbert (check it out here) where she discusses how the Greeks and Romans viewed creative genius as a separate being from oneself. Instead of taking all the credit for your successes, and punishment for your failures, the muse is the culprit of all things and comes and goes as they please. And my muse has not been with me...I have bakers block.

Of course I've been baking. I made 5 more loaves of cornbread, cooked more peaches in the residual basil sauce and even had the birthday breakfast bust. But sparks of genius are far from your control and the rest is discipline. Keep at it. Don't give up. Bake crap, throw things away--it's the bitter process of learning. The easy part is to practice with what you already know, and the hard part? To take a risk, fail, and continue forward.

Your Eye-ppetite

As I edited the photo of my peanut butter brownie sandwiches, I played around with hue saturation. It's a lovely tool I discovered while photo editing in college. Move one little tab and the color scheme of the entire image changes from "normal" to pop-art. My housemate stared in disbelief, "it looks so gross in other colors" he observed, "only peanut butter can have that texture and be appetizing." It's true. Not only that, but the honey spilling onto the plate turned into a ghoulish drool in other colors. The angle, the texture, the shapes...they all play into our visual food vocabulary, or eye-ppetite, and wrong combinations disgust our mental taste buds.

We recognize texture and color and associate them with flavors, how we portray and consume visual food is a science. It makes me wonder, knowing the iffy flavors that are inevitable through experimentation, how many of the visually stunning photos of food that we look at are actually crappy tasting? Well, I've certainly had my share of exquisite yet flavorless birthday cakes.

I visited Perugia in the week I had off from my Florence abroad experience and my friends brought me to a bar that is famous for their tiramisu. When the platter was set in front of me I was surprised. Accustomed to square blocks of painstaking pastry layers, this tiramisu was a blob of freshly whipped cream with shavings of chocolate atop sloppy lady fingers soaked in rum and espresso . It looked decent, but presentation compared negligibly to the rich flavors that engulfed my taste buds. Whenever I see tiramisu in bakeries I wonder if they are all show and no flavor. I haven't found any that compare.

I am a strong believer in the power of presentation, but how we read something as good and know it, relies on two different senses. Although great looking food is not always great and vice versa, perking people's visual cravings is a skill just as finessed as fulfilling those cravings. There's no denying that eye candy is an easy addiction. So, here's to a growing eye-ppetite.

An Important Addition

I puzzled some more over my invisible ingredients and realized I forgot a very important one (now added to the list). Who are you baking with? I find the company I keep in the kitchen is half the fun. Be it a housemate or two passing through, or an assistant baker with lots of catching up to do, some good conversation (while dangerously distracting) has wonderful side-effects on your baking. Many of my best baking memories have great conversations attached.

So while you're out shopping for butter, eggs and chocolate chips, be sure to send in the order for a friend's company too.

Invisible Ingredients

I want to figure out the ingredients I add through intention. What are they? How can they be measured? "They" have no physical mass, but I know that intention pours from my mental measuring cup every time I bake. Part of it is experience, like "I remember learning how to make this from grandma" pie or "my childhood favorite" almond birthday cake; part is your mood, like "Today was shit I  need chocolate" cookies or "I just had a marvelous date" muffins; and of course the person/people you think about who are going to eat your creation. (Personally, that last ingredient is my favorite extract!)

Here's a break down of the factors that affect my intentions:

1. Nostalgia (memories attached to smell & taste)
2. Mood (love, frustration, excitement, etc.)
3. Recipient (who are you baking for? "Yourself" is not a bad answer)
4. Confidence (whether you know a recipe or not, a tentative baker yields tentative flavor)
5. Company (who are you baking with?)

So next time you bake, try analyzing what you're adding to your list of ingredients. I mix intention in with the dry and wet, and dust my hands with it before rolling out the dough. It's not a matter of controlling what you do, but recognizing what leads to the best baked goods and how to mimic those mental environments.