Made more cookies

[mtbc]

Experimenting a little with the previous recipe, I made more of the mint dark chocolate cookies and the macadamia white chocolate cookies, this time in somewhat larger and adjusted quantity. Both batches got an egg, 360g flour, 240g sugar, 150g finely chopped chocolate, and ½tsp baking soda. With the 85% cocoa dark chocolate I included 4½ half-sticks of butter and the contents of 4 peppermint tisane teabags; whereas the white chocolate got only 3½ half-sticks of butter along with chopped macadamia nuts. I baked each batch for half an hour at 325°F, swapping the trays around at five minutes before the end. They turned out well, maybe a little overbaked, that's easily adjusted for.

Comments

[thewayne]

Those sound pretty good!

My last batch of cookies, chocolate eggnog, were a semi-fail. I'd finished mixing them when my oven baking coil broke. I texted my co-worker, explained my situation, and asked if she'd mind baking them if I brought the dough in to work, and she agreed.

And things got interesting.

I live at 9,000'. The library and the city she's in is at approx 4,500'. The cookies were much different, a bit more dense and cakey. Still tasted good, just different than if baked up here!

My wife's new medical condition is probably going to force us to move to low altitude, which is going to require me to re-evaluate all my baking recipes. That's going to be interesting! But at least it should mean that my 7-Up cake should be viable again! I had no problem making it in Phoenix, approx 1,300', but it doesn't work up here.

[mtbc]

Interesting to know the altitude makes such a difference to baking, I'd been unaware of that, though, while I think I've always lived below 1,000ft, I'd at least read a bit about the stress that living so high puts on one's body. I wonder if you need pressurized ovens up there, I hadn't thought about that aspect! Good luck with helping your wife to feel better, interesting times indeed.

[thewayne]

It's interesting.  Cookies sometimes need a little more leavening agent, sometimes don't.  It really reinforces the concept that 'cooking is art, baking is science.'  Cakes sometimes need adjustment, sometimes don't.  I make a Bush's Black Bean Brownie with zero adjustment and it works just fine.  You basically just make it and if it doesn't rise correctly, consult Pie In The Sky, find a recipe similar to what you were making, and do the altitude adjustments and you'll probably be fine.  The oven is a bog-standard one that you'd get at any appliance store, otherwise you'd probably have an overpressure steam issue, I'd imagine. Apparently Russet's disease is caused by a somatic gene mutation, so she wasn't born with it and none of her sibs should have it.  I don't know if altitude could have caused the gene to go wonky.  It's not unlike my immune system problem: they mapped my entire genome and there are no genes that are bad that are remotely related to the immune system: so no explanation why it collapsed in '09, it just happened.  So they are thinking that the clue may be in the epigenetic level, but I guess they can't map/study it like they can the actual gene layer.

[mtbc]

Ha, I hadn't known of Pie in the Sky, thank you. (-: Yes, with baking, great to keep a detailed log of what one tried and how it turned out, and yeast adds more variables still. Even with my simple cookies, I faced questions like, if to bother separating the batches and add the baking soda just before putting in the oven, or let later batches sit at room temperature with it, or chill them too until their time.

Yes, we still have so very much to learn about microbiology and, the more we learn, the more we find out it's more complicated than we thought.

[thewayne]

Pie In The Sky is a brilliant book.  She took a number of recipes then travelled around the country baking them, adjusting the recipe until it came out the same at every elevation then shows a grid of what adjustments were needed.  It's pretty amazing to see that sometimes it was adding things, on occasion subtracting!  Quite an interesting read.