Intentional and Accidental

After my two-week hiatus, I came back to find my kitchen top covered with a thin layer of dust. Armed with my table cloth, it’s wipe-down time to prepare for the ‘re-opening’ of my kitchen.

What I didn’t expect is my baking skills to be also covered with a layer of dust, or rather, rust. Or probably I should not have tried out new recipes so soon.

This Cranberry Bread is made using the recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, one of the few ‘straight-dough’ recipes in this book. It’s supposed to be formed into a braid. Alas, my shaping was so poor that I had to use my tube pan to give it some shape. The texture is also not satisfactory as it is quite dense, most likely due to my over-zealousness when shaping.

Not willing to succumb to my failure, I got hold of a brownie recipe. Brownies are generally easier to do right? Right. But I still failed. After adding in eggs to the butter-chocolate-sugar mixture, the mixture started to look ‘wrong’. It has clumped into a big brown mess. Dilemma: should I dump the whole mixture, therefore wasting my dark chocolate, or continue adding in the flour and risk getting something totally inedible and destined for the bin eventually? I chose the latter. The batter became more like a cookie dough and I knew I cannot bake it as a brownie. So cookies they shall be.

These ‘accidental’ cookies do not taste so bad after all, they had a very intense chocolate flavour due to the 72% chocolate. I had a piece after it cooled off a bit, not the super-crispy type, but crisp edges with chewy centre. Although they had gone soft after one day(to my disappointment), I am not surprised because the ingredients proportions are not meant to produce a cookie. But they crisped up nicely again if I pop them into the oven toaster for a few minutes.

Looks like I’ve got to brush up my skills a little. Morale of the story: better not go on long trips away from my kitchen and oven *lol*