by ·0 Comments

This is a public service post. I promised I’d make a baked good for a get together tomorrow and got around to it very late. Normally, I’d make a cake or something but with how short a time I had left, I grabbed a box of brownie that I keep on hand for such occasions and got to work. Do I feel bad doing this? Somewhat, I’ve made brownies from scratch, but I try to make them my own.

Making Your Brownies Better

  • Insert Butter – Chances are, if the recipe calls for both oil and water, you can substitute butter in. 10 oz of butter cuts out 8 oz of oil and 2 oz of water. The brownie batter I use calls for a cup of oil (8 oz) and 4 tablespoons (2 oz) of water. I replace this with 2.5 sticks of unsalted butter. Why? Butter tastes better and I think has a superior crumb. The mouth feel isn’t quite the same, though.
  • Make it Mexican – Add a teaspoon of cinnamon and a 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper. Mexican brownies!
  • Jam something else on top – When not quite done, topping with crushed Oreos, pecans, or something else can improve things. People like caramel syrups and can’t generally tell the difference between the stuff from a bottle and the stuff I (rarely) painstakingly make on the stove top.
    Note: Brownies do not take to most fruit toppings well. Stick with a drizzle or the sweetness becomes overbearing.
  • Underbake It – Shave 10-15% off the baking time to make things a spot gooier. Dry brownies are high calorie chocolate saw dust.
  • Vary the egg count – If you replace an egg with 2 whites, you’ll get a chewier brownie. If you replace an egg with 2 yolks, you’ll get a creamier and richer taste. If you replace 2 eggs with 2 yolks and 2 whites, you’re an idiot.

I’ve done all the above to great success.

by ·0 Comments

I tried to make a keto-friendly angel food cake today, figuring that I could substitute the white flour and sugar with almond flour and Splenda, respectively.  The recipe called for the relatively low-carb cocoa powder and I set to getting the foam to rise.  Using just my arm, that took quite a bit of time and my forearms were screaming after a few minutes.  I worked the foam to soft peaks, a bit below what I should have and folded in the appropriate ingredients.  I popped the pan in the oven and 35 minutes later was met with a eggy, chocolatey, failed keto donut.

The result had the density of an omelet and the fluffiness of a devil’s food cake.  The bottom was a gelatinous cloud of sweet eggs and after learning that Splenda wasn’t zero carb, I learned it had eight grams of net carbs per slice, 40% of your daily allowance.

My host loved it.

by ·0 Comments

Coworker: Terry, was there something wrong with that cake?
Me: What do you mean by wrong?
Coworker: Was it what you had planned going into it?
Me: No, not by any means.  What made you think that?
Coworker: Well, the chocolate later over the graham cracker came out of nowhere and the cake bits were too square.  You usually don’t go for presentation so we though maybe you dropped it and made that instead.
Me: Nah, it just cooked oddly so I had to cut it up ahead of time and find something to do with it.
Coworker: And you probably just had some strawberries lying around?  They seemed pretty sweet and that’s a sign that they’re near the end of their life.
Me: That’s pretty astute.  Any thoughts?
Coworker: Ditch the dark chocolate, otherwise everyone in marketing likes what we’ve dubbed your MacGuyver cake.

by ·0 Comments

Every once in a while, I prepare a standard for work like a fudge, or a carrot cake, and for tomorrow I wanted to bring in a simple pound cake.  I prepped my standard double sizing of the recipe and popped it into the oven.  After 55 minutes, I pulled it out and found that only the left half had cooked completely.  I put it back in and after another five minutes pulled it out as the left half was starting to get a little over cooked and the right half wasn’t quite done.  I cut out the done portion, popped the rest back in the oven for another 10 minutes and about half of the half had finished cooking.  I cut this piece out again and was asymptotically approaching a properly cooked cake.  Not quite sure what to do, I cut the pound cake into cubes, mixed in a whipped topping, made a graham cracker crust to put under it and then topped it with strawberries.  I’d say it turned out well and have dubbed it FrankenCake.

I’m not sure why my oven wasn’t, well, obeying the laws of thermodynamics.  Later, I did a back-up batch of brownies that cooked evenly.  Maybe my oven feels unloved.

by ·0 Comments

Sometimes when making something I’ve made before I’ll be reckless.  Yesterday I attempted to make a standard chocolate fudge but either used bum chocolate or allowed it to seize and this resulted in a final fudge with the consistency of sand.  It was devoid of smoothness and had the consistency of Necco wafers and my coworkers none-the-less destroyed it.  Every horrible piece of its four pound bulk was gone by four PM with comments like “it fights back unlike regular fudge” and “it’s so rich you can barely cut it”.

I don’t know if my coworkers are desperate or just being nice but I hope there’s a day after I destroy a baked good that one will raise his or her head above the heard and point to me yelling “defiler of all that is right in the world of baking, repent for ye hath sinned!”  That person will identify the taint within my baking soul and I will go through a ritual involving taking sugar from every level between syrup and caramel and back again.  Thus cleansed, I will again pay attention to what I’m doing in the kitchen and such baking foulness will be behind me.

by ·0 Comments

I approach request to make ethnic food with trepidation.  Not only may the food not match the palette of the others in my office with traditional preferences but a failed dish can become an affront to another culture or a modification I make can be seen as a sign of American cultural imperialism.  This concern went out the window when a pretty lady said she wished someone would make baklava.  I can be that someone.

So, I set to combining nuts, honey, and filo dough in alternating layers whose arrangement can induce a form of trance and threw it in the oven for 25 minutes.  What came out looked like baklava based on a Google image search and Max and I both found it palatable.  Pieces disappeared at a reasonable rate at work and I was pulled aside by a coworker.

Her: Terry, that’s pretty good baklava.  I’ve traveled around the middle east, and yours isn’t far off.
Me: Thank you.
Her: Well, it’s not as good as [other coworkers] but you know what they say about Egyptian bakers. *Winks at me*
Me: Yeah…

Looks like my concerns about subtle stereotyping were blown away by the actual kind.

by ·0 Comments

A decree came down from on high that all employees at my firm needed to be present between 9 AM and 3 PM Monday through Thursday.  This destroyed my normal schedule of working “whenever I arrive to whenever I leave as long as it adds up to 40 hours in week”.  I dutifully arrived at 8:58 AM and put out the cheesecake I had made.  It had a homemade graham cracker crust, was fruit-topped, and had a twin.  Normally, such a treat would be gone shortly after lunch, but today I had 1.5 cheesecakes left at the end of the work day.

Screw you, New Years Resolutions.

by ·0 Comments

Yesterday’s victory was quickly followed by a return to earth when I tried to vacuum seal two things, both of which failed:

1) Potato chips – Vacuum sealing is not an effective way to re-use a potato chip bag.  Now if your goal is to create chip dust, you win.  Or, using vacuum rigidity, you can turn a potato chip bag into an very light hammer:

2) I made and vacuum-sealed a toffee peanut butter cracker jack which did not seal as well.  The toffee and peanut butter chip bits undercut the integrity of the cracker jack and the mixture simply crumbled under vacuum force.  I gave this failure to a Scout group who very much enjoyed it:

Me: How did you like the toffee cracker jacks?
Scout Leader: The kids devoured it.
Me: It came out like gravel.
Scout Leader: But the tastiest gravel the kids ever had.

by ·0 Comments

Shipping out cookies in weights of greater than 13 oz is a bit more expensive than one would wish.  Priority mail becomes the best shipping option and generally this will cost between $7.00 and $10.00 for any sort of goodly sized box.  But if one can successfully pack cookies in an envelope which are shipped at a flat rate of $4.95, things suddenly become much more economical.  There is a phenomenon whereby vacuum packed materials become much more firm and resistant to breakage, especially if granular, and this phenomenon was exploited to great success by roboticists earlier this year to create a universal gripper hand:

So, why not try this with cookies?  I bought a vacuum sealer and got to work making cookies.  I vacuum sealed a dozen cookies and pit it against a control group of a dozen cookies in a Zip-Lock freezer bag.  The vacuum cookies won hands down in the drop test where I dropped the bags from a height of about six feet showing no breakage or deformation.  The vacuum sealed cookies also won in the crush test where I put them under a stack of books.  The one case where the Zip-Lock cookies won was in what I call “initial deformation”, the force of the atmosphere is enough to bend a cookie easily if there’s a hint of gooeyness left in the cookie.  As I want my cookies to still be soft, the work around I came up with was freezing the cookies first.  When I failed to do this, and left the cookies in a windowsill, the vacuum package exhibited a behavior I now call “monocookie”.

I’m happy with the increased resiliency of cookies when vacuum-packed and envelope-mailed but I doubt I’ll ever use this process for things that are even a hint of sticky.  If you get molasses cookies from me in a vacuum pack I probably hate you.

by ·0 Comments

I’m meeting a friend of friend tomorrow who’s vegan and I’ve taken making them a presentable chocolate chip cookie as a personal challenge.  Most dietary restrictions don’t affect my baking.  I can easily make a recipe Kosher, or Hilal by avoiding things like jamming pieces of bacon into it (which has only once been a concern).  Vegetarianism is easy if someone’s an ovalactovegetarian which most seem to be.  But vegan, is a problem.  I lose all cream, sour cream, milk, buttermilk, eggs, gelatin (which is rarely called for but near impossible to work around) and many lesser ingredients like many types of chocolate chips as they’re often made with a trace of milk chocolate.

I have two options, either substitute ingredients into a known recipe or go for a tried and true Vegan Approvedâ„¢ recipe.  I boldly Googled the latter and found a recipe that required no crazy ingredients except the slightly rare molasses and made a batch.  What did it substitute for eggs as its binder?  Nothing.  None of the ground flax seed I’d seen used elsewhere or VegaMazing egg substitute (or some other ridiculous name) I recalled seeing on initial searches.  Maybe I’ll extend this tactic of “just don’t include it” and call my stuffing vegan meatloaf or croissants vegan pigs in a blanket.  The cookies weren’t bad and I was glad to find that Ghirardelli’s semi-sweets are animal product-free.  These cookies did come at a cost: Every time I opened the fridge during and after the first batch I could hear the eggs whisper “who do you think you are?” and “traitor”.  Eggs are douchebags.