Your Summer is going as well as you plan, I hope. It’s been a busy month for me, but I still had time to add the following pages to our Web site.

Empanadas – Cookies in Disguise. Ingredients, direction and images illustrating how to prepare popular Cuban cookies known as empanadas.

Cinnamon Butter Cookies. Flour, butter, eggs, sugar, and cinnamon are all you need to make these intriguing looking cinnamon butter cookies or raivas as they are known in Portugal.

Baking Birthday Cookies for America. Celebrate America’s special day by baking soft, moist pina colada birthday cookies. Some of the ingredients are rum, crushed pineapple, coconut flakes, coarsely chopped peanuts, unsalted butter.

In addition, I also updated the Resources page to bring you Yahoo! Web Hosting. It is a truly dependable name in the Web hosting business.

When you are serious about building a Web site, you don’t want to be distracted by many non-functional, gimmicky features. If you are an amateur like myself, you will need timely, reliable technical support; flexible, drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG Web building software; and the ability to submit your site to major search engines. Yahoo! Web Hosting will OVERdeliver at least those features to you.

Learn more about other wonderful features of Yahoo! Web hosting before you embark on a demanding, yet exciting and challenging experience of building your own Web site.

Best Wishes,

Trinh


CONTENTS


Top Ten Signs That You Are Baking Cookies Too Often

As a child, I often counted sheep when I had trouble falling to sleep. Since counting sheep doesn’t work for me anymore, I turn on the television to catch up on late night entertainment. My favorite show is Late Night with David Letterman, that has obviously inspired me to write this list, “Top Ten Signs That You Are Baking Cookies Too Often.”

10. Your kids are bouncing off the walls because you keep feeding them cookies.

9. You are always out of eggs, butter, flour.

8. You constantly look for training courses on baking cookies.

7. Every time the telephone rings, you think it’s the oven timer going off.

6. You spend hours in libraries looking for cookie recipes that you haven’t yet prepared.

5. You answer to the name “Cookiesi”.

4. You experiment with gluten free cookie mixes even though no one in your family is sensitive to gluten.

3. You think that the kitchen is an actual laboratory and you are a real chemist.

2. The first thing you do in the morning is preheating your oven.

1. You start a Web site to explain and illustrate proper cookie baking techniques, and can’t stop building it.


Recipe Comparison

This segment is to give you a general idea of possible taste and texture cookies might have before you actually bake them. It is not to determine that one recipe is better or worse than another.

In this issue, we will compare the proportion of some ingredients used in baking pralines.

R 1 – SARAH R. LABENSKY, EDDY VAN DAMME, PRISCILLA MARTEL, KLAUS TENBERGEN. On Baking – A Textbook of Baking and Pastry Fundamentals. Pearson Education, Inc. 2005

R 2 – THE PILLSBURY COMPANY. Pillsbury Best of the Bake-Off Cookbook. 50th Anniversary Edition. Clarkson Potter Publishers. New York, NY. 2001.

1 cup = 8oz = 16 Tbsp = 48 tsp
1 whole egg is approximately 2 oz., yolk is about 0.5 oz. and the white 1.5 oz.

Amount Baker’s %
R 1 R 2 R 1 R 2
All purpose flour 1½ cup 1½ cup 100% 100%
Brown sugar 1½ cup 1½ cup 100% 100%
Unsalted butter 1 cup ½ cup 67% 33%
Eggs 10 oz 2 oz 83% 17%
Pecans 1 cup ½ cup 67% 33%

The above analysis indicates that praline is literally one heck of a sweet cookie. The ratio of brown sugar to flour in both recipes is 1:1.

With a higher percentage of fat and liquid, R1 yields richer cookies that are expected to spread much more than R2 does. In addition, the nutty texture in R1 is more prevalent than in R2 due to a higher concentration of pecans.

However, if you prefer frosting on your pralines with a dollop of pecans on top instead of having the nuts mixing in with the cookie dough, check out the preparation for R2.


Baking Trivia

Why does butter soften instead of melting like ice?

Ice is made up of identical molecules of water that melts at a specific temperature (32 degrees F., 0 degree C.). Butter, on the other hand, consists of tiny fat molecules that are chemically bonded to one another. Since these chains of fatty molecules are different in length, they melt at different temperature.

As a result, butter softens when external temperature is warm enough to break only bonds in shorter chains of fatty molecules, but is unable to harm those in longer chains.

I hope that you enjoy this newsletter. Please share it with other cookie lovers you know. So long ’til next time.


Published date: July 12, 2006

Copyright 2006 by Trinh Lieu. All right reserved.