Inedible Cookies No. 2

Am currently on study leave (hence actual time to spend in front of computer) and have discovered (though coming rather late to it) numerous blogs with amazing pictures of incredibly complex food (I think 'food porn' is the correct term). Here is my (; version (please note the culinary disasters are genuine!):-

Inedible cookies No. 1
On Saturday I craved a sugar-fix, and what better way to raise the blood glucose than to imbibe sugar blended with a load of pure animal fat and refined carbohydrate. A recent trip to Edinburgh stoked my appetite for shortbread, and the website of the self-proclaimed Ultimate Guide to Scotland provided what surely must be a fail-safe recipe. The recipe called for ground rice as well as plain flour, and having none of the former to hand, I substitued raw bulgur wheat.

Ingredients:
200g butter
175g plain flour
50g bulgur wheat
85g caster sugar

When I was working on my BSc thesis way back in 2001, my supervisor once said "a lab protocol is NOT a recipe. You have to follow a protocol to the letter." His advice served me well. Therefore I deduced that the converse must be true, and ignored the details of the recipe completely, sprinkling a few scant handfuls of flour over my creamed butter-and-sugar, and randomly grating the rind of an orange into the mixture, along with the crumbs from a packet of salted cashewnuts I found under my desk, and a tablespoonful of ground cinnamon.

The mixture looked fairly inhomogenous, but came together sufficiently to sit gloopily in the centre of a baking tray. By then I had turned the computer off, so I simply made up the oven temperature. I guessed it to be about 200 degrees celcius, without pre-heating. Shortbread is often thought of as uninteresting and stodgy, but this version was turning out to be anything but. The cookies seemed to come to life and sprawl as they baked, until they coalesced to form a bubbling lumpy pool. It smelled good though. And here is the end result:


My flatmate tried one and it almost broke his teeth.

Inedible Cookies No. 2
3 weeks on, and a little wiser, I cycled to Hackney Central Woolworths to get a measuring jug for 49 pence before embarking on my next attempt at cookie-making. This time, I decided I would study several recipes from those glossy-looking foodie-type weblogs to figure out the correct proportion of fat : sugar : flour. A ratio of 2:1:2 seemed fairly safe, so that is what I used:

Ingredients
250g butter
120g caster sugar
250g flour
zest of 1 lemon
spoonful of greek yogurt
crushed almonds

Ah, the taste of a Mediterranean Summer! A citrusy note and greek yogurt, to make it, like, Greek. These ingredients were quite challenging to blend, not least because I had only a wooden spoon and a flat-bottomed casserole dish with which to mix everything. I nearly got a splinter. The cookies looked OK as they baked. The oven temperature was 180 degrees celcius, preheated this time. Cooking time was 13.3 minutes, the mean time from among the recipes I looked at.

The cookies came out looking ok, but when I bit into one, it was raw in the middle. So I shoved them back in, for another 15 minutes. And the same thing happened. These cookies must have a really high specific heat capacity. So I gave up, removed them from the oven, and finished them with some caster sugar on top.


My flatmate tried one and he says they are better than the last batch. He also mentioned that I should maybe stick to Medicine.