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.