I Failed The Dreamwidth Litmus Test

[jpegghost]

One funeral later, I have the rest of today and tomorrow off. Yay! Time to devote it all to school or Animal Crossing.

Unlike the rest of Dreamwidth's userbase, I am terrible at baking. I can cook just about anything and do it well, but baking is too exact a science for me. Candy-making even more so.
I have been gleefully collecting recipe cards from my family for a while now because I enjoy the antiquity of recipe boxes, and a few days ago my cousin from the Austrian side of the family had unearthed some ancient cookie, kolachy, and stöllen recipes from my grandparent's basement. Alex immediately got excited for the spice cookies, and I warily accepted the task of ruining relations with my deceased grandmother.

Let me explain myself. The archaic card said I should roll those bastards into 'walnut sized balls' and put on a baking sheet. I don't eat a lot of walnuts. I don't know how big walnuts are. I never crack open a cold walnut with the boys. I put some circles on the sheet and when I pulled them out of the oven ten minutes later, they were all merging and i had to quickly divide them. They became square.
Beforehand, Alex grabbed a maybe-walnut-sized ball of raw dough, shoved it in his mouth, then proclaimed "It tastes like the old country!"

Thank you for your input, sir.

Regardless of my boyfriend's antics and my inability to foresee cookies spreading and morphing together like one large brick, they are extremely delicious and Alex and I have been shoveling them into our faces.

Comments

[annofowlshire]

I think taste is more important than appearance ^_^

I’m with you on baking. I’m not actually that much of a baker because it can be so exacting and I tend to like to wing it in the kitchen. I’ve, frankly, been very lucky with my sourdough experiments turning out. I think it’s because I’ve gone into it with the perspective that people have been using this method to make their “daily bread” for thousands of years and were more focused on making a good eating bread that didn’t take up all of their time rather than worrying about how Instagrammable it was. So I found a serviceable low maintenance recipe and have just done little tweaks from there for our needs.

[jpegghost]

The sourdough you post looks so good though! Simultaneously, I heard that sourdough is not the fussiest bread and can be forgiving, so maybe it's worth a shot for me.

If you want to make the spice cookies I posted the recipe card in a comment below mine, but I do use egg in the batter and I'm not sure if that would upset Rowan's allergies? Either way, thanks for the reassurance pal!