Giveaway Winner:
The winner of the Envitote bag is #9, Sarah! I’ll get your mailing address from you and send it your way. I’m not sure how to show you the random number generator widget, but I promise it’s valid from random.org.
If you would like to purchase an Envitote bag, they have offered free shipping to you but entering the code “free shipping on their website. Enjoy!
Baking Experiment:
You can probably tell I enjoy baking from all the loaves, cookies, and muffins on my recipe page. But I actually have no idea how to create my own recipe. I can follow instructions, but not start from scratch.
With some spare time, I decided to have a baking experiment. My refrigerator and pantry are well-stocked with baking ingredients, so I took a look at my inventory and decided to try Mint Chocolate Chip cookies.
Ingredient Experiment:
I pulled out some Andes baking chips, vanilla, flour, brown sugar, baking soda, apple sauce, maple syrup, cinnamon, and salt.
I combined the dry first because that was easy. The wet part got me confused. Maple syrup, vanilla, and apple sauce together smelled bad. Like cough syrup. I nixed it completely.
Then I decided to add chopped pecans. Then I decided the mint didn’t fit with the maple flavor if I were going to mix that in somehow. So now I’m making chocolate chip cookies with nuts. Well, that’s boring.
By now I still have my dry ingredients looking good, but no wet. So I went back to basics and pulled out butter and eggs. I beat those together and then added my wet to dry and had a real dough. It was a little runny, so I added oats and raisins. Now I have oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookies. That sounds a little better! I know it’s been done before, but I created it from scratch. And it tasted good!
And here you have my own recipe for Oatmeal Raisin Chocolate Chip Cookies:
makes 25-30 cookies
Ingredients:
2/3 C whole wheat flour
1/3 C oats
1/2 C brown sugar
less than 1/4 C flax seeds (optional, still trying to use up a bag)
1/4 C chopped pecans (optional, but cookies are better with nuts)
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 C chocolate chips
1/3 C raisins
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1/2 C butter
Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350*
Combine dry ingredients in one bowl, and wet in another. (In retrospect if I were going by a recipe, I would probably do eggs, butter, brown sugar and vanilla in one bowl and the rest of the dry in the other).
Add wet to dry and mix with electric mixer.
Spoon small balls onto cookie sheet, best if lined with silpat.
Bake for about 12 minutes or until golden brown and you can smell it through the house.
Now what did I learn? Why do we always have to learn something?
Well I learned that eggs and butter are probably really important to cookies, and I’m not sure how to sub for them properly.
I probably could have added more raisins and oats.
I’m still not sure of the purpose of baking powder and baking soda but I know it’s important.
Maple syrup + applesauce + vanilla is not a good combo.
Playing around in the kitchen is a fun way to experiment.
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