What. A. Week.

Youtube Thursday!

First off, I’ve been a bit slow 😦 I’m sorry! School has been hectic.

1. I have a seven-page paper due on Monday based on Frankenstein research (ack!)
2. I’m planning for my birthday next week (yay!)
3. I’m planning for Spring Break in two weeks (NYC woot!)
4. I need to think of something to bake…I’m thinking of participating in the ‘i heart cuppycakes’ challenge for this month, CARAMEL! OMG. YUM. Choco-caramel cupcakes ftw?
5. I presented a speech for class today.

What was that speech’s subject?

COOKIES. YES. I did some research (pretty basic, maybe I’ll post it on here in the next post) on what makes a great cookie. It was a six-minute speech, I ended it on the dot! I also baked cookies for the project! They were tasty…

Oh, they are a bit salty (I personally don’t mind this, because I love salt. A lot.), so you can lower the salt amount a little bit, maybe by half.

I thought that using Alton Brown’s recipes for cookies would be good, because they utilize different chemistries and slight changes to one recipe, making a different cookie! Super duper cool!

Alton Brown’s “The Thin”

These were tasty, but turned out chewy; I think it was my Exopat silicone mat that did this though. Had I used parchment paper, it would have turned out better; since silicone is an insulater, when direct heat was needed. All in all, they were good, I’ll make them crispier next time, since that’s how they should be. My bad!

I deviated from the recipe a bit and used dark chocolate and my own little flavorful fix-ins. I did this with all of the other recipes, upping the flavor profile a bit and making them interesting :].

Alton Brown’s “The Chewy”

Holy heck, these are delicious! The texture is impeccable, I will definitely be utilizing bread flour in my baking more often. It was the perfect type of chewiness. They also had pretty caramelization, which is always a good thing. Chilling here is essential, you will get flat cookies if you don’t.

Alton Brown’s “The Puffy”

Pretty good, they did get a bit puffy, like the recipe said. The secret here is creaming the shortening/sugar mixture for a long time and chilling adequately. I think the flavor could have been a bit off because I didn’t have butter-flavored shortening on hand and just used my regular stick shortening. I am not familiar with butter-flavored shortening, so I will explore it the next time I make these.

So that was today, well, baked yesterday, pictures taken today (sorry they aren’t the greatest of pictures. I tried 🙂 ) I’ll try to do something new tomorrow.

Also: I love The Real Housewives of Orange County. Yay rich-folk fights over nothing!

Happy Baking!
Clara