Baking, Part II

Okay, so I baked about 200 cookies Sunday night, and tonight I was aiming to complete the tast.

It started well, I baked some amazing, although secret cookies (cause someone will just have to wait to know what sort of cookies I have baked ;)... and then cleaned up and prepared to make shortbread. This ended in me throwing out a bowlful of cookie dough.

I don't even want to talk about it.

But I think I can blog about it.

So, I made a number of mistakes along the way, mistakes that I should know better than to make. Firstly, and probably my biggest mistake, I decided I could be cheap and use the regular whole wheat flour we have instead of expensive specialty cake flour. WRONG. It simply doesn't have the right texture, and ended up making a grainy, chunky dough. Not good for shortbread.

Mistake two, I decided that I could try using (cheaper) margarine instead of butter. Lets just put it this way, butter is better. MUCH better.

Mistake number three, baking 2 dozen cookies before bothering to taste taste them. They tasted okay, but were extremely grainy... really, really, really grainy, and had a horrid texture. They were also flat, cause the margarine just didn't act right. And they just didn't have the rich taste that butter gives a good shortbread.

So, lesson for tonight, cheaping out with the ingredients for shortbread just results in REALLY aweful shortbread. Argh.

So, tomorrow, I am going to the market, and buying REAL unsalted good quality butter, proper cake flour, and then trying this all over again.

And yes, I thought of trying to use the dough, and invent a new cookie, but all the results were horrible, there was no alternative but to abort.

Sigh, such a waste. Meh, C'est la vie. I did learn a good lesson. With shortbread, if you want good stuff, you have to use good stuff.