Baking is a lot harder than I thought…

Today I baked sugar cookies with white chocolate and milk chocolate M&Ms. They turned out all right; however, the jury is still out.



I must admit that I cheated a tiny bit. I had a box of cookie mix, which I have had since my sister’s bridal shower, which was almost 2 years ago. I thought it was a baking kit, not a box with the flour, sugar, baking soda, and whatever else goes into it, already mixed.

The first step was to have all ingredients room temperature. Then I had to beat a little more than a stick and a half of butter, with an electric beater, until it was creamy. Well, thank goodness I had butter on hand, however the butter was very frozen. So, I had to microwave the butter until soft. I then beat the butter and pieces of butter flew out of the bowl… Oops! A little messy… I beat the butter until it was, what I thought, to be “creamy”. The recipe then calls for the mix to slowly be added to the creamy butter, but you still have to use the electric beater to mix it. That was a little bit of a challenge. I mean, how slow is slow in baking terms anyway? Then I had to add 2 eggs, one at a time. Ok, simple enough. But no, not really… My cookie dough splattered in every direction as I mixed the eggs into the mix. (I think I may need to invest in a deeper bowl…) After letting the cookie dough sit in the refrigerator for a little over 4 hours, I added the chocolate M&Ms and rolled it all out. I then used a heart shaped and a star shaped cookie cutter to cut out some cookies. The directions say to roll out the dough to ¼ thick. How the hell do you measure dough like that? I am not one of those people who can eye out measurements at all. So I just flattened the dough until I thought it was good enough. Since the cookies were thicker than were supposed to be, I had to bake them a few minutes longer than the recipe called for. No big deal, instead of the baking the cookies for about 12 minutes, it was more like 16-ish minutes.

The recipe made about a million cookies. Now I need to find people who are willing to try my homemade, almost from scratch cookies. I tried one of the cookies, and they weren’t horrible, but I think I can do better next time, when I am more prepared.

What I learned today from this baking experience: baking is hard and takes time. Always be sure to read the instructions and ingredients needed before I start. Make sure that I have ample time to allow room for mistakes and to really enjoy the experience.

　

Time to Wake and Bake!

Hello!

First of all, let me clarify that I will not literally be waking and baking… I will be talking about baking, specifically on the process of baking, what works for me, what does not, and people’s reactions to what I make. I am an inexperienced baker. The only baking I have done in the 23 years of my life, is simply taking the already made, cut into perfect individual squares of Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookies, putting them on the baking sheet and popping them  into the oven. And then BOOM! It is ready in like, 7 minutes! I have also used the mix of Ghirardelli chocolate brownies, which is also very simple to do. I have not made anything from scratch before.

It is time for me to wake up and attempt to bake different foods from scratch (hence the title wake and bake). I will talk about the process I went through to make the food and how it turned out. This will be interesting for me, because as I said before, I have absolutely no experience with this! This will definitely be a learning process.

After years of hearing my Grandma saying “if you know how to read, you can cook anything!” I will test this assumption. My boyfriend’s mom has even told me that I should start cooking and baking. She also claims it is easy to do. I am going to find out if it really is that easy and if people like me can make delicious goods. This will be a process of learn as you go, mixed with trial and error. Hopefully not too much error though…

I will bake something different each week and let you know how it goes. I am not exactly sure what I will be baking. Maybe stick to just desserts, but I would love to try to make a homemade mac n’ cheese. Is that considered baking?

Wish me luck!