The Beginning

Dear friends, family, and strangers,

I have been married for about 8 months now. I love my husband, and I hate my job. I spent my free time in college baking whatever I craved and then inviting friends over to devour it with me. I always said that if my degree didn't take me anywhere, I'd just start baking. Well, here I am- nearly a year out of college and my degree is sitting utterly useless.

For New Year's my husband had the grand idea of us making just one resolution together that we would actually keep. While becoming better people, doing our laundry more often, and losing weight were all good options, we instead settled on something that might actually happen: bake at least one batch of cookies every week this year. I want to be good at something, and I love baking cookies. Therefore, with his support I have taken on this resolution to bake.

Today is January 11, 2010- so that means that today I am making my second batch of cookies for the year.

Last week I started the year with a tried and true recipe I created in college for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. (I wanted a positive start).

Today I decided to pull out my copy of The Joy of Cooking and attempt the recipe for snickerdoodles.

I set out my butter early this morning to soften, and after taking my husband to work, I began. I mixed together the flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt with exact measurements. (Although I did decide to use half regular flour, half whole wheat flour).

Then, in a separate bowl I creamed together the butter and sugar, then mixed in the eggs. I stirred the flour mixture straight into the creamed mixture.  The dough came out a bit sticky, but still ok for making balls out of the dough.

I rolled the balls of dough in a cinnamon sugar mixture and put them on the pans. That's where I ran into trouble. See, I've never made snickerdoodles before, and I had no idea how much they spread when baking. I also didn't realize that when the recipe said they had to be 2 3/4 inches apart, that the recipe meant it. So I put the balls on the sheet and tried to flatten them a little with my hand, and beyond that, I tried putting them all a little more like 1 1/2 inches apart. BIG mistake! My first batch came out all running into each other and almost as flat as a tortilla. My second sheet I learned my lesson about the spreading and put them far enough apart, but they still came out super thin.  The third one I re-rolled the cookies into balls and I think if I hadn't forgotten to take them out in time, they would have turned out fine, but alas, I have two batches of cookie tortillas, and one batch of burnt cookie.

Perhaps I should try again this week.