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Today, besides looking at Crystal Farms butter, I wanted to see if I could nail down a problem with my Butt-Ugly Butter Cookies. Last week I noticed that a batch I made with mixing the baking powder in by stirring came out pockmarked, while a batch I made the same way, but mixing the baking powder in with my tri-level trigger handle sifter, was not pockmarked. A photo is attached, and you can see the cookies on the left are pockmarked, and on the right, not. They were baked on the pan together, though spaced further apart than the picture shows.
I thought, a-ha! That must be it! I have to be sure to sift the baking powder with the flour, instead of mixing it in by stirring. So today I tried it again, also testing sifting with my rotating ring sifter. I used the creamed butter and sugar I was left with at the end of the Crystal Farms test, so as not to throw it out.
I thought, a-ha! That must be it! I have to be sure to sift the baking powder with the flour, instead of mixing it in by stirring. So today I tried it again, also testing sifting with my rotating ring sifter. I used the creamed butter and sugar I was left with at the end of the Crystal Farms test, so as not to throw it out.
Result - all the cookies look great, except the cookies with the tri-level trigger handle sifter are flatter. No pockmarks at all.
This makes no sense at all. Several things were changed, and I see I just can't change even the simplest things and predict what can happen or draw conclusions if I change more than one thing at a time. By rights all these cookies should have been flat because I had creamed to a point of incorporating the maximum amount of air, and I was looking to see some differences based on how I incorporated the baking powder. It's nice to have the cookies come out well, but when I have no idea why it's just frustrating!
So I think I need to do a whole battery of tests with Weyauwega butter, and then repeat a subset of them with Crystal Farms, in order to stay closer to what I've been doing. I have to say, the prospect of doing a zillion batches of the same cookies with different amounts of creaming with a butter I don't even want to use in the long run, and then doing more with a different butter doesn't sound like so much fun. I hope I will be able to control the process well enough so that I'll be able to figure something out from it! That's going to take a while, and I think my posts will become a little less frequent during this time, because I probably won't have that much to say until the tests are done. They're too repetitive to report on every single one. But we'll see what comes up.
This makes no sense at all. Several things were changed, and I see I just can't change even the simplest things and predict what can happen or draw conclusions if I change more than one thing at a time. By rights all these cookies should have been flat because I had creamed to a point of incorporating the maximum amount of air, and I was looking to see some differences based on how I incorporated the baking powder. It's nice to have the cookies come out well, but when I have no idea why it's just frustrating!
So I think I need to do a whole battery of tests with Weyauwega butter, and then repeat a subset of them with Crystal Farms, in order to stay closer to what I've been doing. I have to say, the prospect of doing a zillion batches of the same cookies with different amounts of creaming with a butter I don't even want to use in the long run, and then doing more with a different butter doesn't sound like so much fun. I hope I will be able to control the process well enough so that I'll be able to figure something out from it! That's going to take a while, and I think my posts will become a little less frequent during this time, because I probably won't have that much to say until the tests are done. They're too repetitive to report on every single one. But we'll see what comes up.
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