Ben Bockmann's Senior Project: Baking

The week began with a very successful batch of breakfast biscuits, which are just a fluffy combination of butter, flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar. However, things went steeply downhill when I attempted to make gingernut cookies, which are a thin, crispy cookie (or biscuit) from England. What is supposed to happen is as follows: you make the dough with lots of butter, form it into small balls, and bake. When it goes in the oven, the butter melts, the cookies spread out very thinly, and then become crisp. Unfortunately, I came out with a very different result. To begin with, my dough was crumbly, and I had trouble forming it into cohesive balls. When I baked the the cookies, they didn't spread out at all. They stayed as spheres, and were crumbly and dry. I could only come up with two reasons why this might have happened. First, the recipe called for something called golden syrup, which I didn't have in my house. According to a google search, light corn syrup is a viable alt...

I'd say that one of the more challenging moments from this past week came when I was making pita bread. Even though pita is technically not a "baked" good, since it is cooked in a stove top, I chose to make it anyway since it's similar to regular bread. The challenge that comes with pita making is that you have to form the pita and cook it at the same time. Each pita cooks in about 2-3 minutes, and during that time you form the next pita. As I was getting used to the process, I accidentally burned a few pitas, resulting in some rather unpleasant looking pieces.  One of the main things that I have learned this week, besides some new baking techniques, is the importance of prepping before starting to bake. Whether thats laying out the eggs or butter towarm up, or making sure I had the correct size pan for the recipe, prep always made the baking process smoother.  Finally, I think I'm well on my way to meeting my goals which I set last week. Even though I burned some...

Friday, May 21 Ben Bockmann      Originally, I wanted to do general cooking for this project, but I decided to narrow the scope of the project and focus just on baking. I chose this project because baking has always seemed like a fun activity with tasty rewards, but its something that I have never excelled at doing. I hope that over the course of the next few weeks, I can grow both my knowledge and skillset surrounding baking. Another reason that I chose this project was because I wanted to make something tangible, and baking does just that.     Although I'm doing this project solo, I've taken some inspiration from the Great British Baking Show, which is a baking contest show on Netflix. I started off this week with baking bread and a cake, and over the next few weeks I will move on to more complex recipes, such as biscuits, flavored breads, pretzels, and maybe even danishes or tarts.            This project has been fairly ea...