Baking ADD: Confession Friday

Have you every had attention deficit disorder while baking?  Did you start doing one thing in the kitchen and then found yourself distracted by a random thought?  Well last week I did just that and almost made a very expensive mistake while making brownies.

A few months ago, upon recommendation from a chef at the Viking Cooking School, I purchased a book by Shirley Corriher – BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking with Over 200 Magnificent Recipes.  I decided to try her recipe for fudgy brownies.  I also decided to use the Scharffen Berger chocolate that I had in the pantry.  If you’ve ever used that stuff you know it’s not cheap and you don’t want to make a mess of your recipe.

Anyhow, like a good little baker, I read the recipe ahead of time and collected all of the ingredients before I went to work.  When I got back home I started on the recipe but all of a sudden I wanted to understand the difference between the ingredients in fudgy brownies and cakey brownies.  I turned the page to compare ingredients, then I started to measure out the sugars. I quickly read through the rest of the dry ingredients and saw baking powder.  Wait a minute, I didn’t remember baking powder and there wasn’t any on my counter.  You guessed it, I was on the wrong page.

I guess you’re thinking, “Just put the sugars back in their containers,” but I couldn’t.  Since I read the recipe in advance (like the anal Miss Follow Directions that I am) I knew the sugars were supposed to be combined.  So to save on dishes, I measured them into the same mixing bowl.  Oops!

I quickly read through the recipe for cakey brownies and saw that I was missing a few of the ingredients.  Plus, Mr. J and I really like fudgy brownies.  So it was time to regroup.  I had enough sugar to start over, so that’s what I did.  I ziplocked the first mixture of sugars to use later this week to make the cakey brownies.  They will go into my military care packages.

I started over without any distractions.  The brownies were delicious, Mr. J said they were addictive and that the chocolate was worth every penny.  If you knew how cheap frugal Mr. J is you could really appreciate that last statement!

About the Cookbook

If you are a home baker and wonder what causes some problems that you encounter, you may consider Shirley Corrihers’ book,  BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking with Over 200 Magnificent Recipes.  It does an excellent job of explaining how things work.  A word of caution though, there are some mistakes in the recipes.  I think her editors did a little too much cut and paste.  For instance, in both brownie recipes mentioned above, the recipe has you measure, roast and chop nuts; but it never says to put the nuts in the brownies.