Interesting Experiences Warming Butter

Today's cookie experience was less than perfect. I wanted to finalize the cookie pan calibrations by testing the times I'd come up with earlier with full sheets of cookies, instead of one to three cookies on a pan. That requires a lot more cookies and ingredients. I made up the same recipe I used earlier, but quadrupled the ingredients. The first pan I tested was a disaster. The cookies came out like they were made on another planet from the ones I made before. They were very flat, thin, crispy, and dark, only about a sixteenth-inch thick. I have no good idea of what went wrong. Doing my best to analyze differences, it might have been any of these things:

1. I think I used three sticks of butter and one of margarine, instead of four sticks of butter.
2. The butter had been sitting at room temperature for about six weeks. The flavor was very slightly off but not bad and nobody was going to eat them unless it was me, so I went ahead and used it. Its baking properties may possibly have changed a bit after so long at room temperature.
3. While I was measuring the flour I lost track of how many cups I'd measured and thought I finally got the right number, but maybe I added three cups instead of four.
4. With the larger recipe, I used the larger mixer bowl. That changes the degree to which things are being mixed, and I wasn't sure how long to cream the butter and sugar.

Which of those caused the problem, or if it was any of them, I just don't know! Since it was just for calibrating cookie pans the cookies didn't have to turn out just right, but these were so thin that the dark brown bottoms on the heavier pan I tried first came right through to the top, and it just wasn't possible to use that batch for calibration. Do over!

I needed to go back to the store for more butter, then. I got home from that little visit with Woodman's and it was already 9 PM, but I wanted to at least get the batch mixed up and in the refrigerator, and then I could do the calibration baking Monday night. The butter, being fresh from the store, was on the cold side, too cold to beat. Normally I would have decided to leave it out overnight to come to room temperature, or even to put it in the microwave for a few seconds, but last week I read this great informational page on creaming butter with sugar on baking911.com. There's a lot of information packed in there and lots of ideas for experiments which I plan on getting to. But what I remembered tonight was the "Butter Tip" it gives, which says if you forget to take the butter out of the refrigerator, get it ready for creaming with the mixer by simply grating it, and then wait a minute for it to warm up a little. That makes a world of sense, and I thought I'd try it. Grating it should expose a large surface area of the butter to the room temperature air, which thus would let it warm up much faster than if left in a solid stick.

So I pulled out my grater, which shortly led to experience #2. I have one of those box-like graters, with a space in the middle into which cheese or other grated foods fall, and a handle on the top. Well, the butter wasn't rock-solid, but it was hard enough that this worked OK. It seemed very easy to grate one's fingers doing this, but I persisted. When I was done I lifted the grater and realized I should have done that after each stick of butter, because of course all the shavings had collected together in the middle of the grater. Now I had a pound of butter shavings semi-glopped together in the middle of my cheese grater to somehow scape into the mixer bowl. The insides of cheese graters never seem to be the most accessible cavities, so that was a treat. But not too bad - after a couple of minutes almost all the butter had found its way into the mixer bowl one way or another, and it still was more or less flaky, though probably not what had been intended.

By that time I figured enough time should have passed, and I turned on the mixer. Experience #3. The beaters very nicely collected all the butter from the bowl into themselves. The butter was very thick and fifteen seconds of mixing didn't help disperse the mess. The mixer motor was not sounding happy, so I thought it best to stop mixing before I did something bad to the motor. I am attaching a photo of the result to this post as an example of what creamed butter is not supposed to look like.

:-)

I scraped the butter out of the beaters in double tablespoon-size hunks, let it sit in the bowl for half an hour, and tried again. This time the butter initially looked like it was going to glom up in the beaters again but only got half-way there before reversing and spreading out in the bowl.

I still think grating the butter is a great idea to shorten warming time, but I see it's also important to make sure it falls freely into the bowl after grating, and needless to say, it's necessary to wait for more than one bare minute before starting the mixer up. Next time I'll take thirty to forty-five minutes as the guideline.

Tomorrow is a new day! Thank goodness. On to bigger and better things.