Ben Bockmann's Senior Project: Baking

Overall, I think this project has been a great success, and I've really enjoyed it! One of the things I'm most proud of is how the difficulty of my baked goods increased over the weeks. During the first week, I baked a few easy loafs of bread and a very easy cake, but this last week I baked angel food cake, creme brulee, and challah bread. The angel food cake was by far the hardest, and it combined many different techniques that I had been working on over the course of the project.  Yes, I would totally recommend this project to another student, for a number of reasons. For one, it is flexible. You can spend a ton of time baking one day, and do less baking the next. Second, baking is a great skill to have! Last but not least, you get delicious rewards along the way.  Finally, by popular request, here are plenty of photos from the week. 

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...