Friday, March 09, 2007

hello dears, i hope things went ok for most on fri, and if they didn't, i hope you're ok by now or will be ok soon. (i'm a phone call/sms away.)

Anyway, im here to fulfil my promise to the techie. on to chewy choc cookies! attempted them last sunday, and boy was it a near disaster.

i didn't have icing sugar, so i put white sugar in the blender. It worked, but i didn't put it in to blend long enough, so when i tried to sift the cocoa powder, sugar and flour mixture later i ended up with a whole lot of sugar in the sieve.

thanks to poor planning skills i ran out of walnuts and greaseproof paper, so my mum drove us to the nearest phoon huat to replenish supplies. baking resumed only after lunch, when i felt less stressed out about producing yummy cookies for seven teachers.

the next scare was when, against my better judgement, i whisked the egg whites for too long and they started to stiffen, like when you want to make a chiffon cake. the recipe said 'frothy', which meant that my whites should be liquid, not semi solid. went ahead anyway.

ironically, the following mistake was not beating my cookies mixture (aft adding the sugar mixture to the whites) long enough. so it didn't thicken as it should, and bcos of that spread really thin on my greaseproof paper.

the final challenge was when the paper stuck to the cookies aft coming out of the oven. oil is a really bad lubricant cos it's not oily enough. margarine and butter are far better. and since my cookies contained not one drop of oil, fat, margarine or butter, they took it unto themselves to absorb all the oil i spread on the paper and then glued themselves to it really well. younger sis promptly claimed the maiden tray of cookies as hers, cos 'you can't expect your teachers to eat paper right?' she struggled with it, and finally held up the paper with the cookies stuck on it, glowering and scolding, 'you think funny is it?' i burst into long and loud laughter at that one.

that was the extent of cookie madness in my kitchen on sunday afternoon. luckily i managed to churn out 40 acceptable cookies, half with walnuts and half with white chocolate. wrapped them in pretty blue paper and brought them to rjc on monday. they were appreciated! (:

updates: quit my newsroom internship on wed, and was pleasantly surprised with a phone call offering a job as a relief teacher in rjc on thur. will be taking 1 gp class, starting term 2.