Thursday, December 14, 2006

I may be a moron.

I swore I wasn't going to mention the cookies again. (Except to keep the daily running total - and that's more for my own records than for youse guys.) It's a knitting blog, and frankly, I'm getting sick of the subject MYSELF, so we weren't going to have any more cookie talk.

Then I had my Great Revelation this morning. Followed by the Great Head Thunking On The Wall.

I figured out what's PARTLY wrong with the cookies from yesterday. (The oven is still a piece of shit, mind you.) That twenty-five pound bag of flour we bought? It's bread flour. No wonder I got it for cheap - who in hell buys twenty-five pounds of bread flour?? It's not that big a deal, I can tweak the recipes to make it work with this flour - in fact, if I do it right, the cookies might be better - but geez oh pete. Talk about unobservant.

I'm a moron.

11 comments:

Bells said...

LOL! That's hilarious. Sorry, didn't mean to laugh at your moronic behaviour. hehe

We call that shopping blindness in my family. My mother suffers from it chronically. Ask her to buy tomato sauce, she'll get BBQ, that sort of thing.

And you were so proud of your bargain!

What's the difference, BTW, between bread and regular flour?

Julie said...

It's got to do with protein content. You know how when you knead bread, the dough gets really really sticky and gluey? That's from the protein content. Cake flour has the lowest protein, then all-purpose, then bread flour.

Also, the high-protein stuff takes longer to 'set up' in the oven, so it sits there in a puddle while the butter melts and runs out the sides of the cookie instead of grabbing onto the ingredients and turning into a damn cookie like it's supposed to.

In practical terms, this means I jacked up the temperature on the oven to make the cookies 'set' faster, and mixed some cake flour into the bread flour to make, you guessed it, all-purpose flour for the rest of the cookies.

Because, you know, this wasn't complicated enough.

Anonymous said...

yes, I was going to say how the hell does she know that, but I've just seen your new post, so I get it now.

I collect useless information. You, on the other hand, collect very useful information!

(Bells - who now can't post as herself)

Sheepish Annie said...

Ahhh....the infamous bread flour. To be perfectly honest, I've never really liked the bread that I make with it. I'm more of a King Arthur Unbleached kinda baker, be it bread or cookies. (cakes require the cake flour though...) Easy mistake to make. Fortuately, you got the mad baking skills and the knowledge base to fix it all.

Bells said...

yes, I was going to say how the hell does she know that, but I've just seen your new post, so I get it now.

I collect useless information. You, on the other hand, collect very useful information!

Bells said...

yes, I was going to say how the hell does she know that, but I've just seen your new post, so I get it now.

I collect useless information. You, on the other hand, collect very useful information!

Bells said...

will you look at how blogger is fucking everything up today??? I give up!

Bells said...

will you look at how blogger is fucking everything up today??? I give up!

MrsFife said...

I have an odd problem, perhaps you could help me with it? We have a lot of whole wheat flour (Naval rations) and I want a simple formula that converts recipes for all purpose flour into ones for whole wheat flour, so I don't feel wasteful going out and buying "refined wheat flour" just for baking...
I didn't even know there was such a thing as bread flour!

Julie said...

Whole wheat flour is like bread flour with extra fat in it, according to my book. Gory details sent to Mrs F in e-mail.

Amy Lane said...

I spent 20 minutes looking for my keys this morning.

They were in my purse.

I see I'm in good company:-)