Mistaking Heroin for a Baking Ingredient

[peefy]

Hello, all

Comments

[amielleon]

This is purely personal experience, but I've had to make do without baking soda for cookies on several occasions and they still came out very much like cookies in almost every way. They're a little less soft, but definitely passable.

Of course, remember that even the fluffiest of cookie recipes will at most call for a pinch of baking soda in a batch of two dozen. I'm not familiar with how much heroin it takes for a high (google says 5-10 mg for a first use?) but it *might* be too dilute.

And baking soda is definitely not an ingredient you want to add too much of, because then the cookies expand like crazy and you get a tray of molten cookie-like substance half a centimeter high. It happened to my peanut butter cookies. :(

[twilight2000]

hmm - I've run into the same thing - when it's not used specifically for rising, the tiny bit that's used in a whole cookie batch wouldn't much change the look of the cookie... Whether there's enough heroin in the amount you would use baking soda for is another question (like you said :>)

[amielleon]

5-10 mg isn't very much, so if it was very pure....

Oh, and while I'm talking here again, I think there could be a lot of problems with having it replace sugar. I don't know how heroin dissolves, but probably not very much like sugar. It would probably look pretty different, not that I've tried. And with the amount of sugar used in a cookie recipe, it's almost guaranteed to be a lethal overdose.

[peefy]

I figured replacing any sort of major ingredient like sugar would be way too much, so the powdered sugar idea was more for items that are dusted with it (and even then, that may be too much).

From what I've read, heroin is much less potent when orally ingested, so that may help with how much I could safely get away with adding, I also don't necessarily need to have anyone actually eat the items she baked (or if I do, it could easily be a character who is involved in the trafficking, and who has used heroin before and therefore may have more of a tolerance so could handle a larger amount).

The information about baking soda and cookies is really helpful! Thank you!!

[twilight2000]

How about Stevia? In it's "Truvia" form, it's a decent little white powder and wouldn't change the look of the food (the taste? oh my yes!) - Truvia might be too granulated for this to work, but it's a thought (and a newer baking ingredient for us in the US ;>)

2 notes:
1. truvia is about 40% of sugar in terms of weight/recipe - so less, but still substantial in things like cookies and fudge
2. might work in Bread where the sugar/truvia added is far less than sweets...

[peefy]

That's very helpful, I'll definitely look more into that! I'll be reconsidering if anyone even needs to eat the items she bakes, so it may not matter if I'm using an ingredient that would take up a lot of a recipe, and because she's inexperienced, if she were making items with a sugar-alternative she likely wouldn't have any idea what the ingredient was supposed to look like, anyway, so the mistake may be more convincing than if it were a more common ingredient.

Thank you!!

[peefy]

This may work perfectly, as it seems like a more convincing ingredient to mistake and it turns out I do probably need the taste to be noticeably wrong.

Thanks for the extra info!!

[peefy]

I think shades-of-brown powder heroin is much more common, especially in the U.S., but I have found numerous pictures of the pure-white and off-white types. Using a type that's a brown-powder could work really well if I wanted her to mistake it for a spice, though (or even something like cocoa powder, maybe!).

Thank you!

[lizvogel]

If you go with a brown-powder heroin that resembles cocoa, how about putting it something like French Silk pie? That's not baked, so you wouldn't have to worry about the heat breaking down the heroin, and it's actually a very simple recipe that an inexperienced baker might tackle.

[quizzicalsphinx]

Liquid O (black heroin in a water base, sometimes packaged and sold in medicine droppers) can easily pass for that dash of vanilla in your cakes and cookies.

[peefy]

I didn't even think of that! Thank you!

[mmebahorel]

If you need a decent yet small amount of sugar - try cornbread recipes? True southern cornbread is not sweet, but northern (Pennsylvania Dutch style) does include some sugar. Not nearly so much as you'd need for an actual sweet like cakes or cookies or brownies, so it should be less likely to affect the end texture as well. (The recipe I use has 1/3 cup sugar to 2 cups other dry ingredients.) Or a less-sweet variety of muffins, maybe?

Either cornbread or muffins, the batter is supposed to be a bit lumpy, so the difference in the way the heroin interacts with liquid ingredients may be less noticeable.

[peefy]

That would be great, and be a good way out of having to stick to recipes that relied on a lot of sugar! Thank you!