Sunday, October 11, 2009

Baking Madness

Yesterday seemed like a great day to bake chocolate chips cookies! Why? I don’t know. I haven’t made them since we left Iceland and my internal clock said that it was time. My older son decided to help me, and out from the cardboards came flour, and white sugar, and brown sugar, and vanilla, and salt and chocolate chips, until we discovered that we were missing baking soda and eggs. This minor obstacle wasn’t going to stop us. We went to a store and got the missing ingredients.

With everything in order we started the process. All the time while measuring, and adding, and beating, and mixing, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something smelled strange. By exclusion I zeroed on a just opened package of flour that we happened to ship with consumable from the States. It had a chemical smell, more as a cleaner than baking substance. I tasted it and, yep, the taste was off also. Not trusting myself I asked my sons’ and husband's opinions – the first ones pronounced it “weird”, the latter didn’t find anything suspicious with it.

Since the dough was ready and the oven was preheated, but mostly out of curiosity, we continued with baking. After 11 minutes in the oven and appropriate cooling time, we cautiously tried our creations and inferred that our cookies were irretrievably ruined. Not only they turned out unappetizingly flat but they had a distinctive aftertaste of some cleaning liquid. We sighed and tossed all batch away along with the barely used pack of flour.

You think it would be enough baking for one day but, no, the allure of the chocolate chip cookies was way too strong. My husband went to the store for a new package of flour and by dinner time we had a tray of fresh, with height, good tasting chocolate chip cookies!

The moral of this tale – if flour has a chemical taste, baking will only reinforce it.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They look delicious! Bet they tasted even better because they were so well anticipated :) If you had any extras can you send some to Oman? Did anything else go bad in your shipment or just that one bag; am hoping that all other shipped foods aren't suffering the same fate.

VC said...

Hey there, dear Omani (Omanian/Omanese?). I'll send you some cookies next time I bake them - it will be an experiment "what can happen with cookies after two/three weeks of traveling". Nothing else went bad so far,I'll keep you posted.
VC