Butter Bombs
The main thing I want to say about Playing with Your Food is to please use it. Following on from this please post about using it.* My recipes tend to be full of rather personal asides about my experience of making whatever it is; I would be very happy to see more comments about other people’s experiences about following (or not following) recipes: mine, theirs, and everyone else’s. It is another universal law that cookbooks leave important things out–especially important things about the variability of cooking: barring some acknowledgement of high altitude adjustments, recipes are almost always presented as This Is The Way It Is. Not necessarily. And a corollary to this law is that cookbook writers don’t answer their mail. Well, I can’t blame them, I can’t keep up with my book mail either. But you do sometimes want to know if they meant 1 c of orange juice and 2 c of mashed strawberries in the modest little loaf of quick bread? Or maybe they grow very dry strawberries in their country?
But here we are on a blog or blogs, live, lively, infinitely add-on-able and discussable. And so I hope we will take advantage. How wet are your strawberries? Everybody’s Ingredients Are A Little Bit Different. As I wrote to the Five Heroines a few days ago as we were hustling PWYF the last few tweaks toward opening, when I first moved to England I couldn’t make bread. The flour over here is different and doubtless the yeast and the water are too. I adapted, but it was hellishly unsettling: not being able to make bread was not being me, and there was already too much of that going on with the whole emigration performance. And if what’s in your cookbook doesn’t work, how do you learn to do something you’ve never done before and none of your friends have either? On a blog you can say, help, what did I do wrong? I don’t know if this is practical or not, but one potential new answer to lonely culinary failure out of a book is to ask if anybody out there has a recipe for orange-strawberry bread that works.**
I’m also hoping sooner or later to have a cooking links list–the Five Heroines and I started to discuss this but I think it got lost in the melee–although what the parameters are I haven’t yet decided; there are millions of cooking sites out there and I want a list that will be fun to explore, not that will scare you out of trying.*** But if you have any special, special favourites, either hug them to you for now till we (which is to say I) get a little more organised, or send them along and resign yourself that you’ll probably have to send them again after I lose them. I have started a list, so I do have a place to keep them.
I’m also hoping to have a favourite cookbooks list eventually too. Er, um, have I mentioned that one of the Heroines has also begun to organise Pollyanna’s booklist over on librarything? She is, of course, waiting for my input, but now that PWYF is running maybe I’ll finally get over there to look. The cookbook list may end up there with a link to PWYF . . . or maybe the other way around . . . as Calvin and Hobbes would say, The Days Are Just Packed. Of course Calvin and Hobbes would also say, Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons.†
* * *
I changed my mind. There are pudding/dessert/sweet recipes that do not contain chocolate that you still, if you are The Right Sort of Person, want to have available to cherish your friends and confound your enemies with.†† This is one of those recipes. It’s a fairly hoary classic so all you dedicated bakers out there will already have versions of it yourselves, but it’s a bit like literary clichés: they got to be clichés for a reason, and it’s nice to see them dusted off and properly applied occasionally. These also make a rather elegant plateful and my kind of cooking is short on elegance. My kind of life is short on elegance but again, occasionally, it’s nice to be able to lay it on.
My original recipe was given to me by a wise and kindly older woman††† when I was still fairly early days in the kitchen; indeed I have quite a few fine old classic recipes from her‡, many of which you will eventually see. I don’t know where she got her Butter Bomb‡‡ recipe from from but mine has oozed on anyway, especially in the matter of frosting. I like generosity in frosting. It’s one of the failures of British culture that the average layer cake tends to have a bit of filling and a meagre scrape of frosting over the top and the sides are left entirely bare. However we will address the cake question another day.
Butter Bombs
1 c (slightly salted) butter
1/3 c confectioner’s/icing sugar
Scant ¾ c corn starch/ corn flour
Rounded 1 c sifted white (wheat) flour
Cream butter and sugar vigorously and thoroughly. Then add corn whatever and flour and mix again very thoroughly. If you have time, you can chill it for a couple of hours before you handle it, but in the first place I never have the time and in the second place why? When you first take it out of the refrigerator it’s so stiff you can’t shape it, it breaks. And after you’ve wasted time trying to make it do what you want it to, it comes back to room temperature and you might as well not have bothered anyway.
Shape it into about 50 tiny heaps on a parchment-paper-lined cookie sheet. They don’t spread, so you can crowd them. I get them all on one sheet. Bake 350° F about 15 minutes, till the bottoms are light brown (this is why parchment paper is good. They may brown too quickly on a naked metal cookie sheet although with all that butter in them they certainly don’t stick).
Let cool and then frost:
3T melted butter
1 ½ c icing sugar
1 ½ tsp real vanilla essence
Mix. You may need to add up to about a spoonful (your mixing spoon, approximately) of milk to make it spreadable. Don’t let it get runny, but these cookies are fairly soft, so you need soft frosting or they crumble.
Frost lavishly.
* * *
* Where things get posted I’m sure is going to get messy. The idea is that original recipes still come here, to Days in the Life, first, and are then copied over into Playing with Your Food. This is in the ‘How it Works’ page. The purpose is that I still want to be able to use recipes as entries.^ Comments on individual recipes after comments here have closed down should attach to the recipe over at PWYF. Comment threads on PWYF stay open indefinitely.
^Days in the Life is a lot of work, you know. I can use all the breaks I can contrive.
** Yes.
*** All right, you should know by now, I scare easily. But the day only has twenty four hours, etc.
† Just another approach to Baked Alaska.
†† Be sure to have the tea party in the front room and leave the curtains open so the latter can languish pathetically in full view of what they are denied.
††† Who was, furthermore, a perfectly normal weight. Now I wish I could ask her if she had any Secrets for Surviving Menopause. Did she have chocolate cravings all the time? Did looking at a slice of buttered toast^ make her gain 1.46 pounds?
^ And just forget the marmalade. Lovely, lovely marmalade, Peter used to make it every February, and I used to help chop. He chopped the rind much too coarsely–and short too, like chopping onions. You want long, slender ribbons of peel. Oh, gods, just remembering Peter’s marmalade is making my belt tighter. . . .
‡ Most of them high-value sugar-shock. See previous footnote.
‡‡ Although almost the first thing I did is rename them.
comments
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Oh Robin I perfectly understand about recipes not working when you change country. I had the perfect marble cake recipe. Always came out wonderful, a robust cake with lovely marbleing and great crumb that was never too damp or too dry. The recipe was from a family friend and I grew up making it. Literally. It was one of those things we had regularly and Mum had me making bits of it to teach me how to cook. So it was a recipe that I was very familiar with. I went to the states went to make it and got a dry crumbly mess. The horror of it! I never recovered. Come to think of it I haven’t made a cake since. I make all kinds of other deserts, but haven’t baked a cake in a bundt tin in longer than I care to remember.
Looking at that it looks awfully defeatist, doesn’t it. I don’t think I’ve ever really looked at it from that point of view. I shall have to attempt some cake baking again. Probably it was baking as a metaphor for life. I couldn’t cope with my life in general at that stage and I would rather give up on the cake baking to vent my frustrations than face up to the fact that I was as unhappy as I was. Oooh, recipe talk as psychotherapy. (Oh no, is that where I wanted to take this or is it all the psychology translations talking?)
You take your psychotherapy where you can get it, I feel: why *not* cooking, especially for those of us who love and are *involved* in cooking? –And I’m very *relieved* to hear that another serious foodie has had the experience of a known recipe not working in a strange country. Not defeatist: traumatised. Why on earth should not being able to make bread un-me me? But it did.
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Ooh, thank you for commenting on recipes in another country. I had the same experience, although mine seems backwards. When I moved to Romania I had some cooking experience but not a whole lot (enough to feel confident using a cookbook as long as I followed the recipes pretty exactly, not enough to make something up myself or stray from the recipe). I also had the great experience before I left of living with wonderful housemates who would do things like looking at a bottle of teriyaki sauce and saying, “This is made up of ingredients X, Y, and Z; we could just MAKE this at home!” Before living with them I had never conceived of the notion that certain things could be made outside of the package that they mysteriously appeared in, and had an amazing aha experience when discovering, for example, that honey butter was made of honey and butter mixed together (yes, this was revolutionary for me). This stood me in great stead when I got to Romania. Like any country, they have their cooking shortcuts that you can buy at the store, but they are mostly NOT like American shortcuts. And even when they are, I often didn’t know about them until months after I had been there when I knew enough Romanian to read the labels. Since I had a lot of free time when I first moved there, I ended up just making a lot of stuff from scratch (including things like tortillas, salsa, complicated baking ingredients, and, yes, teriyaki sauce). I also tend to have a hard time with simple recipes; I get bored with them and don’t do as well as something long and complicated (the first thing I made in Romania was pasta with tomato sauce; one of the next things after that was a complicated caramel roll recipe… And I had never baked bread before).
All of this was great, until I moved back to the States. Although this is my native country, I still have a hard time cooking here because it’s not where I learned to cook. My biggest problem so far (that I’ve noticed) is with yeast. In Romania we had these lovely yeast cakes that worked wonders. Here there’s just the powdered yeast stuff (I’ve sometimes found the cakes, but it’s hard), and it doesn’t rise the same (any suggestions, anyone?). Nothing has totally flopped, but I don’t like flat-ish caramel rolls. And my recipe is AMERICAN. Bah!!
And thank you for desserts without chocolate. I am (everyone avert your eyes) not a huge fan of chocolate (okay, it’s safe to look now), which is just as well because sugary and chocolate-y stuff tends to make me sick. It’s a delicate balance; breadier desserts (but not cake) are okay, as are things with lots of fruit but no white sugar (not so sure about the brown and how it affects me). But sugar, candy, or chocolate is a recipe for a long, miserable night. So other sorts of recipes are most appreciated.
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Have you tried letting the yeast make a sponge overnight? It not only gives better quality (I think) it also lets you know if your yeast is properly lively or not.
?? You’ve mentioned spongy yeast several times (particularly in various books), but I’m not sure what exactly that means. And how can you tell if it’s lively enough?
YOu put your yeast and your water and your sugar/honey/molasses (and your salt and your oil) and enough of your flour to make a kind of thick gruel, and let it sit overnight. It should seethe like mad and rise and fall several times and smell really yeasty the next day. If it doesn’t, you’d better prove a little more yeast and throw it in. (And you’ll have to raise the flour to compensate.)
Hurray for the Recipe Thing! I need new recipes, though I don’t know if I need new recipes for dessert. . . .
“Butter Bombs” (as a name) sounds like something that they’d eat at Hogwarts. It also sounds like something I’d gain weight even reading about. I thought I had hot flashes followed by weight-gain-when-in-the-same-room-with-a-calorie. Unfortunately, I have both.
Perhaps some more vegetables (not including bacon).
I thought I had hot flashes followed by weight-gain-when-in-the-same-room-with-a-calorie. Unfortunately, I have both.
************ Yup. Me too. Okay, more vegetables. . . . :)
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OT: Here’s an amazing (if not disconcerting) dog on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLXHvBFG-CI
Kind of don’t know what to think! Wow.. but ….. wow.
Golly. Yes. Golly.
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What is it with the people that I enjoy and food? I loaned my copy of sunshine to a friend and she now says that it’s hers, and I can visit it.
. The Cornbread Gospels, by Crescent Dragonwagon this review is found on http://ozarque.livejournal.com/518393.html (Suzette Haden Elgin) She has some others that are good. I made her french mother-in-law’s poverty soup this week. and it works well. now should that be capa or not?
I’ve been reading for a few months and finaly got the nerve to comment
THanks
Cath sweltering in Carmel Valley Ca
Sympathy for the sweltering! I didn’t know Dragonwagon was still writing cookbooks–I have one of hers from a million years ago.
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I haven’t made anything from scratch since my grandmother was alive, but this recipe sounds so wonderfully sinful, I might have to give it a shot!
I used to take pride in the fact that I was a terrible cook, who only made cookies out of tubes which were promptly thumped onto a cookie sheet and thrown at the oven. Silly, I know.
As I get older, I begin to remember making praline pecans and bread pudding and other delectables with my grandmother, and the feeling of accomplishment and pride in what I had helped create. I shall have to inquire as to the whereabouts of her cook books…
Cooking is, actually, *fun.* It takes too long and makes too much mess and the best things make you fat, but it’s also FUN. :)
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One in the morning is not the time to be contemplating recipes . . . and I need to bake tomorrow since we are taking the Alpha Bitch to shows in Kansas City and I don’t expect the hotel will offer anything on their breakfast buffet that I will want to eat. But I will second the praise of marmalade. Wonderful on buttered toast, especially if there is a lot of orange peel in it. *Sigh* And now will go to bed thinking about breakfast.
And good luck both with breakfast and bitch. :) We’re WAITING for those SHOW PHOTOS, you know. :)
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Your butter bombs are very close to my mother’s “shortbread”. I pipe them out with a star nozzle and stick a chocolate button in the middle before baking….
My recipe is:
250 g butter, lightly salted
60 g icing sugar
125 g plain flour
125 self-raising flour
No frosting required. Delicious. Note that the recipe is really just ratios and easily adapts to any weight.
Audrey
ha! nice! love the recipe thing :)
would you like me to post a site I’ve found that is pretty great with conversions? (I’d post it now but I’m at work and don’t have the time to look).
again – love the recipe thing and all the stuff without chocolate (for now). this will be the first place I come to after my recital for extra chocolate recipes to dwell on.
Good. :) And no doubt there will be MORE chocolate recipes by then. :)
Certainly post your conversion site. I’ve got one too and we can compare. I’ve been thinking we should have one on the recipe thing. Not least because I’m going to Betray My Audience at some point by posting an English recipe. Or twelve.
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exactly my reasoning! will post soon.
You don’t have to have a dessert that is a total sugar shock – I mean, what could be nicer than a fresh fruit salad, for instance? Lots of your favourite fruit all cut up and mixed together…. the nicer fruit salads don’t have too much apple in them but do have a lot of things like strawberries and peaches and grapes…
Talking of strawberries and peaches and grapes, this is one of the nicest puds ever:
Either some strawberries, washed, hulled & sliced, or 1 peach per person, or some of each – grapes do work, but not so well. If using peach, put in boiling water for 1 minute and then in cold water to loosen the skins so you can peel them.
Then slice the fruit & put in the bottom of a dish. Cover with one of the following, depending on how calorific you want the pudding to be:
Fat-free fromage frais
Full-fat fromage frais
Whipped cream mixed with 1/3 the amount of natural yogurt
Whipped cream
On top of that you pour some caramel, which you have made by hotting up some sugar in an equal quantity of water until it sets the smoke alarm off and goes golden. Or if you’re a celebrity chef, or want to make an impression, you top it with demerara sugar and then use a blowtorch to caramelise it.
In any event, it’s superb….
I LIKE sugar shock. :)
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Marmalade, mmmm! It’s difficult being the only marmalade lover in the house. It’s such a time consuming thing to make that it always seem better to make a reasonably-sized batch (8 – 10 lbs). But then unless it’s used in barter (which is how about half of mine goes) the stock seems to be around for a while (I don’t want to be more circularly-challenged than I already am. :) )
Love the Butter Bombs – such a descriptive title! How about a nice gentle Chickpea Curry to fill you up first, so not too many of the BBs are ingested in one go?
1 large onion
1 x 14 oz can of good choped tomatoes or same weight fresh
2 T cooking oil
2 x 14 oz cans chickpeas, drained
1 T freshly ground cumin
1 T ditto coriander
1 tsp ground turmeric
2 tsps garam masala (but see * below, also)
1 thumb’s worth of fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped/shredded
juice of a good sized lemon
1/2 – 1 tsp salt
1 small mild green chilli, seeded and finely chopped.
Peel and chop the onion, reserving a good T of it to be chopped more finely and kept aside in a cup or small bowl. In a saucepan, fry the main bulk of the onion gently for 4 – 5 minutes until the pieces start to brown and soften a little then add the can of tomatoes or chopped fresh tomatoes (no need to skin them). Keep stirring and frying over a gentle heat for about 10 minutes, until almost all the liquid has evaporated and the remaining mass starts to look just a bit brownish overall (do not let it burn!). While this is reducing down, peel/chop the ginger and add to the reserved T of finely chopped onion along with the lemon juice, salt, and chopped chili. Stir and set aside for the moment.
Add the cumin, coriander and turmeric to the mixture in the saucepan and stir fry for another minute. Then add the drained chickpeas plus two of the emptied cans’ worth of water (I drain the chickpeas first and use fresh water, rather than using the liquid they were cooked in – cuts down on the, er, windy after-effects that chickpeas and beans generally may give rise to). Give the mixture in the saucepan a good stir and add the garam masala, then bring up to a simmer and cook for 20 – 30 minutes. A couple of minutes before the end of the cooking time, add the lemon/ginger/chilli/salt mixture into the saucepan and stir in. Serve with your choice of rice/nan/ordinary bread. Makes four good portions.
* One time I was making this I found I had used the last of my garam masala and forgotten to make more. Scanning my spice shelves I noticed a pot of sweet mixed spice of the kind one uses in cakes. As there is about a 50% overlap between the ingredients in most garams (including mine) and the aforesaid SMS, I decided to add the SMS rather than just missing out the garam flavours. And it was fine! In fact I now prefer that way and use the sweet spice mixture rather than garam.
This recipe has converted even people who don’t ordinarily like chickpeas to eating and enjoying them. It makes a nice easy supper dish and Ray and I have each at various times discovered the other sneaking spoonfools out of the bowl containing two remaining portions ostensibly reserved for another meal…:)
Yum. :) . . . Boiling your own beans is I find the BEST way to prevent windiness. You change the water a couple of times early on and you’re home free. And yes, I agree about the sweet spices–I use them all the time in unsuitable dishes! :)
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Butter Bombs and Susan from Athens’ hummus have been added to PWYF.
I wasn’t sure where to put hummus beyond the hors-d’oeuvres category. It can be eaten as part of a meal, but I wouldn’t consider it a main dish. I almost wanted to put it in with potatoes and pasta as another starchy thing…
Misc unsweet and yes, I’d put it in main without meat. It’s possibly my #1 main dish on nights I’m bell ringing and Peter’s playing bridge.
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Hey, those were in Sunshine! Do you have recipes for all her desserts? Tell me, tell me you’ve invented something for The Death of Marat. I have no idea how you make a pudding that explodes filling when you stick a knife in it.
I’ve got thousands of recipes, and they tend to be chatty. I’ll post them. And if you like chatty, useful cookbooks that actually explain and are interesting I highly recommend both Nigel Slater and Laurie Colwin, Laurie Colwin especially. Her two cookbooks are Perfect. The only problem is that she didn’t live long enough to write more.
I have *most* of Sunshine’s recipes, yes. Marat only bleeds jam, you know!
Please post chatty recipes. :)
Couldn’t agree more about Colwin but I’ve gone off Slater: he’s entirely too pleased with himself and his style, which was why we all loved him to begin with, has to my eye/ear got very self conscious. Oops. Pollyanna is shaking her finger at me.
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How can you possibly have a cake without lots of frosting? Too much buttercream gets overpowering (urgh), but everything ELSE is good.
Well exactly. :)
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If it is dark chocolate ganache then I will say I agree. Anything else no – if I don’t eat the icing I can eat more cake. ;)
Oh no, I LOOOOVE frosting. I want as much frosting as cake!!!!! :)
I don’t like as much frosting as cake, unless it is whipped very light. Otherwise I just feel sick.
Cheesecake should also be whipped. It’s just too heavy if it isn’t. Oh, and chocolate cream pies are amazing.
Now I’m just making myself hungry! I think I may need more good dessert in my life.
I still go through recipe doubts and have learned to treasure my mom’s cookbooks where amidst butterstains and kid finger prints there are annotations such as “make a double batch it goes fast” “too much salt” “messy but worth it” “Would not make again there are better things out there.”
I moved to Brazil and suddenly staple features of every kitchen were turned on their ear. No chocolate Chips (bang chocolate bars to get chocolate chunks instead), No Graham Crackers (and therefore no Graham cracker crumbs for crusts), Kitchen pantries hid more sugar than flour, and the sugar was so much finer than I was accustomed to, but not quite powdered.
Brown Sugar only comes in dark brown varieties, and it does affect the taste of traditional chocolate chip cookies that ask for LIGHT brown sugar. Not to mention the sugar is made from Sugar cane and not beets and I swear it makes a difference but I could be crazy.
Cookies and Biscuits and Crackers are more confusing than keeping British/American differences straight…I still don’t know the real difference between Bolache, Biscuito and Cracker.
I make do, and invent and create and discover. However it seems odd that to solve my kitchen mysteries I have to call my grandmother to get my great grandmother’s recipes and home solutions. Plus my math is always a bit off when trying to determine how many grams of butter I should add for 1 1/2 cups – used to be so easy – 3 sticks…now it is an eyeballed guess. I always wanted to learn to cook like a pro with whatever was in the cabinet – not quite there but I’ve learned to make most comfort food from scratch (and I mean no refridgerator dough, premade pie filling, bisquick, cake mixes or canned soups).
Of course, this is when I want American or international food (who knew stuffed jalepeno poppers would become a holy grail). If I were happy to luxuriate in the Brazilian cuisine I wouldn’t have many problems. They have more flours than I have names in English for. I ate cookies the other day made of cornstarch and before that I had arrowroot, ironically similar in texture. Brazil is not a place of cakes and pies but puddings and fruit compotes and sweetened condensed milk is the answer to any dessert disaster.
A lot of this sounds very familiar! But I’m glad you’re having such a good time! :)
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Those sound delicious!
And speaking of playing with food (well, you weren’t really, not in this sense but it made this article spring to my mind), here is an article recently published in the NY Times about fruit and vegetable carving:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/dining/14carve.html?ref=dining
Really gorgeous stuff. I wish I could play with my food like that. There’s a picture of a watermelon carved like a rose. Not quite as pretty as the real thing, but close. And more delicious.
Yes but you spend all that TIME and it’s eaten in an instant!!!! I barely do ordinary presentation–cooking takes ENOUGH time!!!!
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The Alpine strawberries I grow (started with seed as fine as dust) are very dry, but as they are about the size of the eraser on a pencil I can’t imagine having two cups at one time. My experience with wild strawberries is about the same. Which is why I broke down and planted “real strawberries” this year.
I moved from Canada to England, then to France, then back to Canada, so I have about 3 versions of my favourite recipes – four, if they were American recipes. So I’m glad to know I’m not the only one! (I have just discovered King Arthur’s Flour site, which I spent many happy hours on:
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2007/11/15/tip-1/#more-1, although they use too many additives, which I ignore). On top of that, my mother and grandmother, who taught me to bake, were from England, so most of the family recipes and many of my mother’s cookbooks were English. One thing I don’t understand (maybe someone has an answer?) is why the Americans don’t use self-raising flour. I find it quite difficult to get the right combination of raising ingredients, without the horrible taste of too much baking soda, using plain flour for, say, cakes.
American flour is slightly different from Canadian flour, which is totally different from English and French flour. Having read through Elizabeth David one winter when I was sick and on the sofa for most of the time, I now understand why, five years later. The recipes didn’t work at all in England, not only for flour and, most important for chocolate chip cookies, brown sugar, which is a different species altogether from what we have here (no, you’re not crazy, Visolela, it’s really different, and really important!) but I even ended up experimenting with the number of eggs. Basically, I used less flour and eggs in England. Some of my recipes are so scribbled over that I don’t really know what the original, or even modified, amounts are. And anyway, mostly due to clumsiness (and now to two helpers, aged three and five- talk about mess in the kitchen from baking!) I’ve pretty much given up on any notion of exactness in measurements. (One’s own cavalier attitude to, say, a bit more or less than a teaspoon of cinnamon is nothing compared to “my turn now to put in a spoonful! oops…”, or “no fair! she put in two eggs and I only got one”, not to mention the amount that doesn’t make it into the bowl and is spilled down the side.) Amazingly, things pretty much always turn out, or at least get eaten, even the apple tart pastry which my then-two year old dumped half the flour container over (“I really love helping you, Mummy! Look, I put lots and lots of flour for you!”), which I then had to try and shake out, ending up with not the slightest clue how much flour was actually in there. I can’t even dignify this with the notion of experimentation, since half the time I don’t even know what the quantities are that have eventually made it into the mix. But most recipes seem pretty robust, as long as you don’t mess too much with the eggs.
Here’s my trans-atlantic chocolate chip cookies recipe:
1 C butter (1 & 1/4 C in England. Actually, I just wrote “+ some extra”)
3/4 C brown sugar (1C demarra in England)
3/4 C regular sugar (1/2 C caster sugar)
2 eggs (1 egg in England)
2 1/4 C plain flour (1 3/4 C in England. Again, I just wrote a little less than 2C)
1/2 tsp salt (modifiable depending on the type of butter used)
1C chocolate chips
vanilla, cinnamon (I can’t even read the amounts anymore! Probably 1 tsp of each).
Mix ingredients in order of listing, one at a time (except the vanilla and cinnamon should go in with the eggs). I find my sweet tooth has actually decreased a bit lately, compared to my teenage years when I first used this recipe, and tend to skimp on the sugar now.
Bake at 375 F, 190C, for 8-10 minutes. And always, always use parchment paper, it’s a life (or at least, a cookie) saver!
*Thrilled* to hear more people talking about the INexactness of recipes, and of crossing national boundaries!!!! Thank you very much! –You can get self rising flour in America but I never liked it myself because I found it gave very erratic results. And yes, the most important thing is to develop a hand/eye for what something should feel/look like, because recipes are of VERY LIMITED USE.
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