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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.
A few years ago I tried making chocolate chip cookies. "Tried" being the operative word. What I wound up with, repeatedly, was dough that looked good to me but when baked would spread out way thin and just be a mess.
Today I did bit of a web search and found a few hints about what might have caused that and what to do about it. I made chocolate chip cookies this morning and they pretty much turned out. It wasn't a perfect run, but it was much, much better than anything before.
What had been going wrong? Maybe a few things. I probably wasn't beating the egg/sugar/vanilla mix enough and thus not dissolving the sugar(s) properly. I wasn't keeping the cookie sheet(s) well away from the stove until baking time (the stovetop being a convenient flat surface in a small kitchen with a very cluttered table). And I wasn't baking on the top rack in the oven.
What went wrong today? The cookies I didn't bake on the top rack either should have waited for the top rack or had (even) more baking time. It wouldn't have hurt to refrigerate the dough for a few minutes before shaping/making the cookies. Smaller spoonfuls and/or more spacing would be a Good Idea. And I went way overboard on the chocolate chips so in places there's more chocolate chip than cookie.
Still, the cookies came out cookie shaped this time. The rest is down to tweaking, I think. Trying the tweaks won't happen soon as I don't plan on baking cookies all that often.
