Baking Week 3

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 alternative, so that's what I used instead. Second, when I melted the butter and corn syrup together, its possible that I let them get too hot. This could have started to turn the corn syrup into candy, which might explain the crumbly dough.

Although the gingernut cookies were a disaster, I learned a simple lesson, which is that when in doubt, stick to the recipe as close as possible. I think I was able to make progress in all three of my goals for this project. I tried a new recipe, I made some tasty goods, and I tried to analyze what could have caused the gingernuts to fail.

As to not end the week on a bad note, I made another treat from England (I have a British baking book) called millionare's shortbread. It consists of a layer of shortbread underneath a layer of caramel underneath a layer of chocolate. Quite simply, it was a success.

image 1 is the millionare's shortbread, image 2 is the unbaked breakfast biscuits.