I have broken down cookies into percentages and also lost my mind

Plus, Notes are here! I love them.

Before we begin, I am fine, I am fine. (Narrator: she was decidedly, not fine)

I am just in a time period where I’m taking all the famous cookie recipes of the internet, breaking them down into percentages, and then comparing them to my own. I AM SO FINE.

One of the questions I always get asked (and used to take a lot of offense to, actually) is “How do you make baking recipes? Do you just take someone else’s and adapt it?” to which I always huff and think NO. I have INTEGRITY. I am an ALL-ORIGINAL-SNACK. But in truth, all of my baking recipes are adapted from baking rules and percentages I learned across two books, Understanding Baking, 3rd Edition, which I got at a church yard sale, and On Cooking: A Textbook of Culinary Fundamentals, 6th edition, which I had to buy for college, then I gave away, then had to re-buy for life. Pro tip: if you like a textbook, just keep it through all four of your apartment moves, it’s worth it.

These books are where my base cake, cookie and bread “formulas” come from. After that I tend to tweak measurements, ingredients and ratios, and that’s where new recipes come from. Then I build off of those to make other recipes, and so on, so forth. It’s a truly terribly fluid science. You can’t put me in an educational journal anytime soon.

But I’ve recently been in a tizzy of reworking my Gideon’s Cookie Recipe, which was a *cough cough* BAD recipe I uploaded two years ago (hey! we all have them, it’s good to admit them), and I decided to really compare and contrast how certain percentages in cookies yield certain outcomes. And that’s how we ended up with me breaking down recipes into full percentages. We’ve come full circle.

You can see a bit of my mad science here, along with my Gideon’s kids, who are on trial #2 and will probably be ready after trial #3. I think I’ll need a full newsletter-audio-episode to go through my findings, so let me know if you’d be interested in that. Right now, I’m just facing the hard truth behind the fact that I think baking soda in a cookie is a crime. More on that later.

I haven't lost it, YOU'VE lost it

My Gideon's Trials

The one good thing to come from this experiment is that I’m tweaking and adjusting all my old cookie recipes to be ones that I think really nail it. The first up is our beloved banana cookie, which is at the end of the weekly round-up! So let’s get into it:

The weekly round-up!

This Savory French Toast with Breakfast Radishes is quick, easy and perfect for one, but also enough of a “meal” meal that I feel like I’m treating myself.

Spinach Artichoke Bowl! The first part of my series of Snacks that Should Be Meals - keep an eye out for garlic bread in the next week or so…

Salted Banana Cookies - a new and improved recipe from the blog, which I’ve updated with the key changes of salted butter, nixing the cornstarch, adding chocolate in “shatters” instead of chunks, and flakey-flakey salt. It’s a glow up of a cookie, and so so good!!

And one last thing!

Notes are here! I literally have no idea what that means, since I’m not affiliated with Substack AT ALL (but if you guys can hear me, HI), but it seems like it’s a new form of Twitter for Substack users. I love my Substack App, so if you download it too you can use and read notes.

It seems pretty cool, and a great tool for newsletter lovers and writers alike. I also have so many thoughts on Elon and Twitter 2.0, so this keeps me away from that drama and in my own newsletter peace land. And for me, that feels worth it.

Until next week!

Xoxo,

Peaceful_Snacks