We start the baking with some peanut butter and Crisco. Last time that I worked with sticky stuff, I lined the measuring cup with wax paper. Now, while this was effective, I was too lazy to do that this time. Instead, I just used two spoons: one to scoop and one to scrape. This worked pretty well, with one exception. I almost ran out of peanut butter! Who runs out of peanut butter? It's a staple in every household! And I certainly was not going to go out to the store and buy more. Ludicrous. So, it took a good deal of scraping the sides of the jar but I ended up getting juuuuuuust enough peanut butter. Next, I had to scoop in some Crisco using the same method. Not a problem. Here we run into another small problem though. I had been using the 1/4 cup measure for the peanut butter and the Crisco. The third ingredient to be mixed in was 1/4 cup of brown sugar. I didn't want to clean the 1/4 cup. I know, I know, I'm super lazy. You're right. So what did I do? Why, I filled a 1/2 cup halfway, of course! Specific measurements be damned, I was not cleaning that 1/4 cup.
After that, I had to add in one [extra large] egg. Easy. The book recommends periodically scraping the sides of the bowl during mixing and even specifies when scraping should be performed. And it's good advice. Scraping the bowl revealed all sorts of non-combined stuff. Good call, Cake Boss. My praise of the Cake Boss ends there though. You'll see why in a minute.
But first, a story about opening a can of sweetened, condensed milk. I got out my church key can opener and poked two holes into the can. This caused the condensed milk to ooze aggressively out of those two holes in the process. Ok, not the end of the world. But then I tried pouring. It's like trying to pour honey. It's slow and I'm impatient. So, I got out the real can opener. After carving off the top of the can (and of course, making a mess), I poured the contents into the bowl and scraped it with my spatula. And made a mess. Why am I always making messes out of simple tasks?
After adding the rest of the ingredients (flour, baking powder, chocolate chips and peanut butter chips), I had to divide the dough into cookies. Hmm, I just noticed that there wasn't any salt in this recipe. How unusual. Anyway, I was instructed to flour a work surface (which is never a good sign), divide the dough in half, and roll half the dough into a 20 inch long cylinder with a 1 inch diameter. Sure. Because I'm so good at that. Oh, and did I mention that the dough is sticky? Because, you know, it's peanut butter? Good stuff. To make things even more complicated, these cookies have a very high chip to dough ratio. Meaning, once I started to roll the dough, it would break apart and chocolate or peanut butter chips would come tumbling out of the middle of the cylinder. I legitimately don't know how I could have avoided this. There were just too many chips. I shudder to think what would have happened if I added the optional 1/2 cup of peanuts!
Anyway, eventually, I got a cylinder-like shape that may or may not have been the dimensions specified. As we know, I am not a good judge of lengths. From there, I had to slice the cylinder into 1 inch slices (like slice and bake cookies). Then I had to roll the slices in my hands to make a ball, press down to flatten to half inch thickness and put on the baking pans that had been previously prepared with parchment paper. Wow, tongue twister. Say it three times fast: previously prepared with parchment paper. I wonder if any of you just tried.
Bake cookies for approximately 8 minutes until edges are a light golden brown. I'm sorry but I think the cooktimes in this cookbook are way off. I ended up baking the cookies for 12 minutes and not only did the edges never brown but the bottoms were only slightly brown. Recall, I ran into this same problem with the double chocolate chip cookies. I know that the Cake Boss is used to baking in bulk but I'm starting to suspect that the conversions are not quite working out for home baking. I'll stick with it a little while longer but be it known: I'm wary of these recipes.
On the bright side of life, the cookies ended up tasting pretty good (for peanut butter cookies, which I'm not overly fond of) but they weren't as good as the other peanut butter cookies I made. Also, for once, the recipe made cookies that were not gigantic! Admittedly, I made them a little smaller than the recipe suggested but they're very cute bite-size cookies. See for yourself:
A Disney Moment: Sword in the Stone
Ugh. 5/5, 5/5, 5/5. I wish I could rate it lower. It was awful. I honestly can't find any redeeming qualities. People talk about the battle being a triumph in animation and maybe it was, but by then I felt like I was trapped in some sort of animation torture chamber. Every time the kid turned into another animal, my sister and I audibly groaned. We started inventing new directions the story could have gone in. I think it would've been better if he pulled the sword out of the stone about halfway through the movie and we got to see his attempt to rule a kingdom as a child with Merlin's help. But he didn't. Instead we got an hour of "education is important! You should be educated!" which was a lesson that had sunk in for the kid after the first iteration. This movie is actually in the running for my least favorite Disney film of all time (though, I'm sure that title will be challenged when we get to the more recent stuff). Awful.
No comments:
Post a Comment