Recipe for Success
This past week I made Christmas cookies: lemon drops, spice cookies, and oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips and cranberries. I’m a pretty good cook and a fair baker, so I anticipated that in a few hours, I’d have dozens of delicious cookies to mail to my in-laws.
The recipe for lemon drops, which was printed in Family Circle a year or so ago, said to drop the dough in heaping tablespoonfuls onto the baking sheet. It didn’t say how far apart to drop them, so I took a wild guess. When I finished, I had 16 cookies. The recipe said it makes 36 cookies. Now what? Follow the “heaping tablespoon” directions or the “36 cookies” statement? Being lazy, I chucked the already-scooped 16 cookies in the oven and hoped for the best. They took twice as long to cook as the recipe indicated and ended up burnt on the bottom. I guess I should have made 36 cookies, even if they were smaller than the recipe called for.
Then I made the oatmeal cookies from Cooking Light. The recipe said to divide the dough up into 36 pieces. It didn’t, however, say how big the pieces should be, which would have made the process much easier. So, math whiz that I am (not!), I divided the ball of dough into thirds, then tore each third into 12 pieces of approximately equal size. The recipe then instructed the reader to bake the cookies for 10 minutes. Well, after 10 minutes the cookies were a pasty white and felt not even close to cooked. I ended up baking them for 20 minutes. They turned out delicious, but it would have been nice to know what the cookies should look like when they’re done — pasty white and undone, perhaps? After all, some foods continue cooking once you take them out of the oven.
The spice cookie recipe, also from Cooking Light, said to flatten the balls of dough with a glass. What kind of glass? How flat? Just a little, because they’ll spread, or as flat as you want them to end up being after baking?
When I called Diana to tell her calmly whine and rant about the cookies, she mentioned that these recipe snafus are a good lesson for all writers: What may be obvious to you as a writer may not be obvious to your readers. I’m probably guilty of confusing readers myself. From now on, if I’m not sure if something is perfectly clear, I’ll ask someone else to read and critique the statement. I’d hate to ruin their Christmas cookies! [lf]
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Dec 13, 2006 Advice, Observations, Personal yammerings, Writing
As my hips can attest … I will eat a Christmas cookie even if it doesn’t turn out right. Send the flops my way. (And yes, the lesson resonates completely, however, the cookie comment took precedence.)
Recipes are really just a subset of any form of help documentation, so those rules apply. Mainly: give directives and then describe the expected outcomes. This also applies to driving directions (“Go two blocks to Oak Grove. You’ll see a Walgreens on your right. Turn right…”
The best help/recipes also offer advice or info on what *not* to do or what to beware of, or why a certain action might seem to be wrong but is the one to take because of X, etc…
So many of my friends and relatives hate cooking or baking. One of the biggest complaints I hear is how they’ll follow a recipe to the T, but it still comes out terrible. They don’t believe it when I say, “It’s not you — it’s probably the recipe.” And when you’re an inexperienced or novice cook/baker, you have a more difficult time looking at a recipe and figuring out if it makes sense or not. Ingredients get left out, the chemistry is all wrong, or the yields are inaccurate. I consider myself a fairly competent baker, but I can’t tell you how many times I follow a recipe for the first time and it turns into a disaster. For example, I remember years ago baking a mocha cake with coffee frosting. I was supposed to get 2 9″ rounds, but I was left with enough batter to barely cover one tin, and frosting that could have covered four rounds! More recently, I took a book from the library which promised to cut my cake baking time in half with some cutting edge techniques. Well, the one recipe I followed gave me a cake that looked like Devo hats and was raw in the middle, despite having a charcoal-colored crust. Naturally, I didn’t add that book to my personal library.
I write recipes for magazines and newspapers, and I hate saying this, but even my recipes have ended up with errors in them. It slays me! In one recipe, I’d specified baking something for 20 minutes at 325 degrees F but at press time, it mysteriously got changed to 35 minutes at 375 degrees F. I wanted to scream, because I’d tested that recipe at least a dozen times at differing temps, and I knew at that high temp for that amount of time, the poor baker would be left with a disaster of a dish. I’ve cooked/baked things out of FC/WD and had similar messes. There was a gorgeous cake on the cover of Woman’s Day last year — it looked lovely on the cover, but ugh — what a nasty taste! If I do use a recipe, I turn to Cook’s Illustrated. I love that they test a recipe 90 different ways and give you all the details, to boot. I don’t think I’ve ever cooked/baked anything from them that’s turned out badly. For cookbooks, I love Barefoot Contessa/Ina Garten, and as much as she irritates me on TV, Nigella Lawson writes a damn fine recipe with lots of sensuous detail about how things should look or feel. Martha Stewart’s recipes also work for me (both magazine and books), but I’ve heard other cooks/bakers complain about her earlier recipes.
That “heaping teaspoon” will get you every time
I think following recipes is also a matter of experience and interpretation. If you’re a creative type, it can be quite fun. The results can often be quite outstanding (or sometimes not)!
Of course, trying to recreate the adjustments you made to the recipe is never a certainty. I think it’s kind of like writing. Most of us don’t want to write “formula” articles, although usually we need to at least follow a set of guidlines. Finding out how to tweak them and still get an acceptable finished product – that’s the fun.