unsalted or salted? or cream cheese?

I am amused that the first thing I think of these days, when I come off the treadmill and head into the kitchen for coffee is What do I need to set out to soften? Salted butter? Unsalted? Cream cheese?

Today is unsalted and the bananas from the freezer. Done.

I also moved my successful recipes to webpages for easy editing, notes adding, access. I repurposed an old chromebook for kitchen duty. I can control font size, etc easily on web pages - my recipes have huge fonts and lots of white space. Now can just load up what I want and leave the chromebook at the far end of the counter safely away from flour, etc, and still easily read instructions.

In other news... I made a change to Biggie's food. A while back, I bought a bag of TikiCat kibble and only just this weekend hit the point in the supply chain where I can start mixing it in. He highly approves. Highly. Maybe even enough to replace his poultry intake?? She says hopefully.

Today's plans include laundry, baseball and cookie making. And whatever else happens to catch my fancy.

Another baking lab report

Today was banana chocolate chip cookies from Serious Eats. It's a nice little small batch recipe.

I added the cinnamon. A typo keeps the amount of chocolate chips kind of a mystery and I didn't want too many anyway so I just punted. Probably ended up tossing in a little more than half a cup.

The result is cookies that are actually perfectly delicious!!! In spite of their appearance, they could have used more bake time but, they were delicious even underbaked. I can't taste a bit of banana but the texture of the cookie is surprisingly delightful and I'm guess the banana played a role there.



I scooped out these two when the batter was all mixed to see. I expected them to spread way more than they did.

The rest of the batter is resting in the fridge.



I think next time I might use bakers ammonia instead of baking powder. The internets suggest this might give me crispier cookies. Amazon is bringing me some to try.

Also I mean to toss in some walnuts and totally forgot. Like ljtourist says 'planning "next time" is half the fun!'

And I washed all the dirty laundry in the house and it's all now put away. I am taking the rest of the day off.

wrapping up the long weekend

* Baking thoughts. I baked some more of these banana chocolate chip cookies. I can kind of taste a hint of banana now. It does not seem to matter how long I bake them, they have cake like middles. Crispy edges but cake middles. I want crispy cookies!

Since preheat time is minimal with my Ninja oven, I can go from 0 to fresh baked still a little warm home made cookies in 15 mins with cookie dough in the fridge. This is pretty excellent.

I've procured the ingredients for cut out ginger cookies. Not snaps. Not gingerbread. Rolled out ginger cookies. I have a recipe. I hope it's as good as I have in my imagination.

I've also been rethinking cake shapes. I'm not in love with two 6" layers. At least not the ones I've made so far. Too tall. The slicing situation is dicey and the icing to cake ratio suffers. I'm thinking next, I'm going to try one 8/9 square bake, then cut it in half and stack for a two layer loaf cake. Maybe. Oh and it will probably be a spice cake with a light whipped cream cheese frosting.

* I expected that our game against Houston tonight would be rough. They are shredding us. In the 7th - 11-2. And TheIdiotICan'tStand is in the TV booth being an idiot. I had the radio on for a while with the TV on mute. But even that is too hard to listen to so now we're just total mute. And to add insult to injury, Wednesday's game is on You Tube only, MLB sucks.

* I have a vaccinated grad student/handyman coming over tomorrow afternoon to do a few little things. He was looking for odd jobs and I had odd jobs. One is my kitchen cabinets. They have this funky hinge that needs tweaking but when I try, I just make it worse. All the doors are crooked. It's been bugging me for several years. He says he can fix it. I sure hope so.

* On the up side, when we, once again, fail to make the playoffs, our final game will be October 3 and I can cancel my $80 a month cable tv surcharge!