I made my first ever batch of cookies last night.It was also the first ever batch I burnt as you can see in the picture.The plan for the day was to bake a cake but I couldn't find vanilla essence anywhere and didn't want to wait another weekend before I baked anything. I looked up an easy cookie recipe on the internet and started! It was a recipe for groundnut cookies. I needed crushed groundnut but didn't have anything to grind it with so I used my knife handle to crush it. I must tell you,it took me more time to crush the groundnut than it took me to make the cookie.
Things were going fine until something on the instructions stumped me.
The list of ingredients asked only for baking soda but the steps asked me to mix the baking powder in the dough. So what is it? Baking soda or baking powder? Yeah, those are two different things and I didn't know about it either until I went shopping yesterday for my cake!I decided to put in a bit of both!? :D Let them take care of each other!
Well so the dough was ready and I put the cookies on the sheet for baking.The baking time given on the recipe was 15-20 minutes.This was for a crunchy cookie.I watched the oven with bated breath.My kitchen was smelling delicious with the smell of baking. After twenty minutes, I went to check on the cookies and was surprised to find them still soft! I decided to increase the temperature by 200 degrees all the time cursing bogus people for writing cookie recipes when they obviously didn't have a clue of what they were doing! I was all set to leave a scathing comment on the website! I kept checking my cookies every five minutes after that but they just wouldn't harden! 20 minutes turned into an hour and I was racking my brains for what I could possibly have done wrong apart from following badly written instructions! It suddenly hit me! After an hour! :(
"Things harden as they cool!"
Okay, I have no excuses for this. It seems like the most obvious thing now!Didn't we learn this when we were in school or something? Ofcourse I vehemently refused to pay attention in Science classes unless my ears fell off or something.
I ran to rescue my cookies,burnt my fingers in the process. Alas! It was too late! Out came my first batch of brutally wronged and burnt cookies. To their credit,they still smelt good!I kept them aside to cool and called a friend for consolation.
After much egging on,I nervously broke a piece of the smallest cookie and tasted it. It was horrible! It tasted like a ship wreck,like a burnt splinters,like burnt papers! errr...I haven't tasted any of those..(just FYI).They tasted good in the middle area where they weren't burnt.I made cookies which only tasted good when you found your way to the middle!(which you wouldn't after you'd tried the edge)
Utterly disappointed,I decided to never bake again!
After some time when I'd recovered from the shock a bit I decided to make another batch of cookies.I had run out of groundnuts so I decided to add raisins to it. This batch was a lot quicker than the last one. It was all ready and in the oven in half an hour. I was quite tired while it baked and sleepily went to switch off the oven after twenty minutes. I didn't even bother tasting it and fell asleep. This is the result I got in the morning.
It tastes all right. Another thing I learnt
"When you add sweet ingredients like raisins to your cookie,decrease the sugar a bit or else the cookie will come out sweeter than you wanted!" :D
I suddenly have a lot of sweetness in my life after baking. I wish everybody reading this as much contentedness as I have this weekend. Cheers to cookies!!!
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