A flop and two successes

[vakkotaur]

A few days ago I made beer bread and tried to make it a rye bread. It did not work out. The oven was too hot or the bread was in too long and I must have gotten some of the ingredients in the wrong ratio. The bread was bitter and seemed, to me, oddly salty. The crust reminded me a pretzel. Most got tossed. I can't even blame the Blatz for this one. I do plan to try making a rye beer bread again, and making some changes. A bit less rye flour, keeping an eye on the loaf in the oven, and backing off on the baking soda all seem like Good Ideas.

A day or so later I made "5 minute chocolate mug cake" with a couple changes from the last time. I mixed it in the 2 cup measure and microwaved in a small pyrex mixing bowl. I remembered the salt. I used Merry's Irish Cream rather than milk (the little "airline" sized bottle is the right measure). I added chocolate chips since I had them. Again, I cut the baking time 15 seconds short of the suggested 3 minutes. The result was good. It was not noticeably rubbery. It served two quite well. It's not truly a "5 minute" thing, but it is fairly quick and the result is good.

Today I tried something new and instead of chocolate chip cookies, started with a recipe for a chocolate cookie with chocolate chips and used cherry chips instead. All the things I managed to get wrong before I seem to have finally overcome. The results look like proper cookies (not spread oddly thin) and they don't wilt when I pick them up, but they are still reasonably soft.

What did I do this time? This paragraph is mainly a note to myself, but what I did was this. Following the linked recipe (omitting any nuts and substituting a 10 oz. package of cherry chips for chocolate chips), I sifted the flour, then after adding the other dry ingredients (except for the sugar) I sifted that mix, twice, to mix them. I used "air pan" cookie sheets with parchment paper. I baked only on the top oven rack for 8 minutes and at about the 4 minute mark, I turned the cookie sheet 180 degrees so the cookies would all get about the same heat (I had noticed some unevenness to the cookies in an earlier batch). Before I re-used the cookies sheets, I cooled them with cold water so the cookies always had a cold start.

Comments

[thepita.livejournal.com]

those cookies sound delicious...i love chocolate and cherries.....
hint hint....

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Gee, whatever could someone be hinting about? =<:o)

[thepita.livejournal.com]

gosh, i don't know...ask orvan what he thinks...LOL... ;-)

[malterre.livejournal.com]

The chocolate cherry sound wonderful-where do you find cherry chips?

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

A (or the) local supermarket carries Log House Cherry Flavored Morsels (http://loghousefoods.elsstore.com/view/product/?id=18564&cid=2548) in the are with the chocolate, butterscotch, peanut butter, and some other chips or morsels. I got curious about them a while ago and was initially a bit disappointed as they seemed to taste like chocolate chips without the chocolate, at least until baked. I think that might have been a fluke or a rather old (but not outdated, I checked) pack. Everything since has worked out, and the cookies made with them have all gone over well. In the recipe I linked to, I omit any nuts and use the entire 10 oz. bag of cherry chips.

[sheryl67.livejournal.com]

I also made some nasty beer bread this weekend. Yuck!

As for the cookies, you might chill the dough for an hour or so before baking, and using an ice cream scoop for putting them on the tray makes a nice mound of dough that shouldn't spread out so far and makes all the cookies the same size.

Just my 2 cents. :)

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

This time there was no spreading-too-thin problem and I didn't need to chill the dough. I had tried refrigerating the dough for an earlier batch and it might have helped, but not enough to overcome some real problem.

I can see using an ice cream scoop or something similar but smaller to produce even sized cookies. Maybe I'll go looking for such a thing next time I'm in Sioux Falls or the Twin Cities.