Baking!

[evilbearhunter]

On the advice of this article, I tried making cookies with butter at the proper temperature. For a control, I also made a batch with butter that had been microwaved for 15 seconds and felt the same. (I actually did this because I had only taken out one stick of butter, which is only enough for half a batch, and I wanted the amount of cookies a whole batch makes.) They came out really different! I forgot to take pictures, unfortunately, but the Right Way cookies (with the room temperature unmicrowaved butter) were fucking gorgeous, and the Wrong Way ones were... not. Like, not ugly, but not beautiful. The Right ones were more cohesive and less flat. The Wrong ones were crispier and greasier. That batter was also notably stickier. Very interesting. People at my sister's Solstice/Hnanuka didn't have strong opinions on which were better, only that they were both good and definitely different. I thought the Wrong ones were good while warm but too crunchy when cooled and the chewiness of the Right ones was excellent. I think I'm going to make it a priority to soften the butter correctly in the future.

Otherwise, I've mostly just been hanging out with my parents in Philadelphia. I went up to visit my grandmothers earlier in the week (on the INTERNET BUS), which was cool. My one grandma took me shopping, so now I have some new shirts. Today I got new shoes to replace my old shoes, which are like three years of constant winter use old. While we were at REI, I also got some bike gloves and two bike lights, so woo for not freezing my hands off or getting hit by a car (hopefully!).

Dudes I'm wicked tired. Night.