Baking Fail

We've successfully made chewy chocolate chip cookies before, but I still somehow messed up a batch. Let's begin the story... I wanted to make the chewy chocolate cranberry cookies for a dinner party. These are some cookies we've made in the past:


Chewy chocolate chip cookies. [link]


Chewy white chocolate cranberry cookies we made for Christmas dinner. [link]


Follow the first link above for the recipe. I began by creaming together the brown sugar, white sugar, butter, and salt together. Then added the egg, vanilla, and salt. Once everything was incorporated, the dry ingredients were mixed together. But I held off on about 1/4 cup of flour.

How was the cookie dough so stiff? I was so confused. I held off on some flour. I know that I was generous when I eye-balled the amount of cornstarch but not that generous.

You see, based on the cookie dough that we made for Christmas, I knew that if the consistency of the cookie dough was the same stiffness, the cookies would be more cake.


This is the drier cookie dough from the chewy white chocolate cranberry cookies from Xmas.


Now check out the softer cookie dough, which produced the flatter cookies in the first photo in this post.


I baked them anyway. They tasted good. A bit dry, but still good if you had a glass of cold milk or a hot beverage.

The cookies were received well, though it still bothered me throughout the night. It wasn't until I returned home that night that I figured out the reason of the drier cookie dough.


Butter. Damn! This was about half the amount of butter required in the recipe. What happened was that I took half the butter and softened it in the microwave. When it was softened, I added it to the mixing bowl and then placed the other half in the microwave to soften. While it was in the microwave, I mixed all the ingredients, forgetting that I still had butter in the microwave.

And that, my friends, is what you call: baking fail.