Last night I wandered my way back into baking from scratch. I love everything about cooking, especially the eating part. But baking? It's been more of a miss than a hit for me over the years. Box mixes tend to be my best friend. I don't have a fancy stand mixer and always find myself over mixing something resulting in dense, cardboard-esque baked goods. I do tend to be OK with pies and cobblers, though. And, ovens usually treat me well otherwise when it comes to savory items.
So, despite my failures in that arena, I took a gamble this year. I decided that I wanted to bake a variety of cookies for my coworkers for the holiday season. As the last week of the work year (and world) fast approached, my interest started to wane. I scanned hundreds of cookie recipes on the interwebs, but nothing stood out enough. Then the thought of making dough, chilling it and then dealing with the mess of rolling out, shaping, baking, cooling, icing and packaging tipped the scale to "forget this." Lazy, yes. But these cookies might not even turn out well, so why go to all that trouble. Instead, I decided to bake something that would take far less time and effort: Gingerbread blondies.
I love gingerbread. It's my favorite holiday season cookie, aroma and flavor. I stumbled across many a recipe on pinterest and elsewhere for gingerbread bars. I judged all of the recipes based on the pictures. Some had cream cheese frosting, some had orange frosting, some just powered sugar. But, many of them were flat or very cake-like. I wanted gooey. Ooey gooey. And thus I chose a recipe from a British blogger, who was kind enough to note the gram/cup conversions in her ingredients list.
The recipe was pretty straight forward, but I stumbled a few times along the way. I doubled it, so had to remeasure the flower at one point since I had lost track of how much had been added. Then, I decided 45-55 minutes was far too long of a cooking time. Brownies usually bake in 30ish minutes, so I figured these would as well. And my overriding fear of producing a dry, cake-like blondie prompted me to put 30 minutes on the kitchen timer.
Fifteen minutes in, they looked almost done. They had risen substantially and were a great gingerbready-brown color. At 20 minutes, I took them out of the oven and did the toothpick test. Clean! All done. Except for that 10 minutes later, they had deflated and were noticeably raw inside. Bugger. How did the toothpick fool me? Don't they look done in the photo? I turned the oven back on and threw them in. Another 10 minutes went by and I checked, thought they were done and was fooled AGAIN. Bloody hell. Three times is the charm, right?
Crikey Moses, they were done. I cooled them, dusted them and my knickers with powdered sugar and then packaged them up for work. Some were cakey, some were gooey, so not bad overall.
Lessons learned from this baking experience? Don't bake again.
