Orange-Coconut Macaroons: or, Success by vexation

Ever felt like a recipe was defying you?

Macaroons 2 egg whites ⅛ tsp salt ½ tsp cream of tartar ¾ cup sugar ½ cup flour 1 tbsp butter, melted 2 cups coconut flakes 6 oz chocolate chips 1 tsp grated orange rind 1 tsp vanilla Heat oven to 325°. Have pans lined with ungreased parchment paper. When you're measuring the coconut, lightly spoon it into the cup. Do not pack it down. Divide the sugar in half. Sift half of it with the flour twice. (The repeated sifting will help ensure they're very well-mixed.) Beat egg whites, cream of tartar, and salt until foamy. Gradually add the other half of the sugar, beating the whole time. Beat until it forms very soft peaks. Do not beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. You want them to be thick and creamy. Carefully fold in the flour and sugar. Then fold in the rest of the ingredients. Drop by spoonfuls onto the baking sheet, leaving room for them to spread. Bake 12-15 minutes, or until lightly golden on top. Store in a tightly sealed container. The orange flavor strengthens overnight. Note: These are also good if you replace the orange rind and chocolate chips with about one-third cup of chopped pecans and a generous splash of almond extract. Source: anonymous recipe card

Bonus recipe: Coconut Clusters These are a lot easier than the original recipe. In the above recipe, omit the chocolate chips. If desired, replace the orange rind with the flavoring of your choice. Stir together the sugar, salt, and flour, breaking up any flour lumps. Mix in the unbeaten egg whites and melted butter, stirring until smooth. Then mix in the coconut, along with the flavoring of your choice. Drop by small spoonfuls onto the baking sheet. You can neaten the cookies' shape if desired, by patting them with either your finger dipped in water or a wet spoon. Then bake as above. Note: If using orange rind (or any other citrus), rub it against the sugar to draw out the flavor. (You can't do this in the original recipe since the rind oils would deflate the whipped egg whites.)

This came up on a discussion thread of people sharing old hand-me-down recipes. I shared our graham-coconut cake, which wasn't so much handed down as it was inherited by decluttering. Someone else posted this one and said half the ingredients are incorrect, but they know how the recipe is supposed to go. (When someone hands you a recipe in person, you get more details than when you merely find a scrap in a box.) I asked "So what is it supposed to say?" They responded with this:

"That 'rind' is zest, and not from a lemon. You only want the whites. Use the yolks for something else. Custard, making brownies richer, toss them in a spicy ramen... whatever."

I promptly decided to divert some of the household coconut away from my original plans and make macaroons instead. 

The directions seemed easy enough: mix everything, then whip the egg whites and fold them in. And so, with foolish confidence, I mixed the flour and the sugar. The sugar broke up the flour clumps, as I knew it would. Our egg whites whipped up beautifully because electric mixers are wonderful. The rest of the ingredients all fell into place so easily I should have been suspicious. Soon, it was time to ruin everything.

The first spoonful of egg whites deflated on contact with everything else. "No matter," I said to myself, "We just need to be patient and gradually add the rest!" I was wrong. The cream of tartar and pinch of salt that I had added to the egg whites proved futile. Our allegedly finished dough looked deflated and quite dead. 

The chocolate chips kept falling out no matter how much I tried to mix them back in. I could have rinsed them and put them back into the bag to reuse later. It is always a bad sign when your cookies can't hold themselves together. 

At this point, I reexamined the recipe card. Had I mismeasured or forgotten something? Was an important ingredient left off of the card entirely? After a lot of frustrated consideration, I decided I had misinterpreted one of the lines written across the ingredients. See that arrow pointing to the words "fold in"? Note how the line "¾ c sugar" is not included in it. Instead, the sugar is free-floating between "beat until foamy 5-7 mins" and "fold in."

 

The next time I tried this, I beat all the sugar into the egg whites, whereupon they collapsed. It seems like egg whites have a maximum amount of sugar they can take before your meringue is ruined. If you keep your sugar allowance in the safe zone, you can get fearsomely sharp peaks like this: 

Remember when we made kisses?

But if you add too much sugar, your egg whites turn into what looks like limp gravy, and no amount of extended beating will whip them back up. We ended up violently chucking our white glop to the municipal hereafter.

After a lot of exasperated recipe testing (punctuated by profanity), we landed on mixing half the sugar with the flour (to break up any flour lumps) and beating half the sugar with the egg. We also learned we absolutely must not mix the orange rind with the sugar, even though we normally do that to bring out its flavor. You see, orange rind has oils in it, as seen here:

Scattered on the plate between the little shreds of orange peel, you can see  LITTLE DROPS OF TREACHERY.

As we all know, the tiniest micro-drop of fat can ruin your meringue and lead you to dump an entire bowl of failed egg whites into the trash while cursing so loudly that the neighbors' impressionable children will learn new words while playing outside.

But after many (many!) mishaps, we had finally made a successful cookie dough. And so, with wonderful ease that suggested I had gotten the recipe right this time, I dropped the cookies onto the waiting pan. Every last chocolate chip stayed in place. Our cookies-to-be looked like cute lumpy clouds that, most importantly, actually held onto their own ingredients. After baking, they had puffed up beautifully.

If we zoom in on one of them, we can truly appreciate the crispy outer crust with its little cracks that hint at the soft, airy interior.

Before my frustration overruled my aversion to flinging food into the garbage, I dropped a few plops of the failed cookie dough onto a pan. Since the oven was already hot, I figured it was no extravagance. And the resulting cookies were better than I expected. They even look good until you compare them to what they're supposed to be.

You might think that unleavened cookies would be a tooth-cracking mess, but these were not. I made another batch without even trying to beat the egg white stiff first, just to see if it would work. Since the chocolate chips kept falling out, I spared myself stress and expense and omitted them. And instead of attempting any egg white peaks (stiff or otherwise), I mixed everything together. This was partially out of curiosity, and partially so I could try to come up with a really easy recipe to post under the finicky one.

After so many failed batches of stiff peaks and sad cookies, I really needed something you just dump into a bowl and stir. As a bonus to add to the bonus recipe, you don't need to worry about getting a little bit of yolk into the egg whites.

Unlike the chocolate chips, the coconut mixed right and showed no signs of falling back out. At this point, I really wanted these cookies to work because they were so easy.

I tried piping the coconut clusters into cute little shapes, but I got indistinct mounds instead. So if you don't want to bother with a piping bag (or the guilt over the residual dough that gets left behind), you can just spoon-drop them instead.

To my surprise, the unleavened clusters actually puffed up a little bit. In fact, they looked downright cute. And they were soft, dense, and wonderfully well-loaded with coconut. The "official" recipe is better if you get it right, but I'd recommend making these instead unless you're open to mishaps. I'll even go so far as to say the coconut clusters are surprisingly tough competition for the icing macarooons.

 

But let's get back to the original recipe. After many failed batches, we managed a successful one. And because I hate to give out a dud recipe, I made them again to ensure it wasn't a fluke. 

These cookies are really rich in one of the best ways you can imagine. Because of this, they're great to bring to a gathering when you don't want to make like 9 dozen cookies. Everyone will love them, but they will also be quickly sated.

Chamita Meatballs: or, You can't hide economization with potatoes

Autumn is officially here! Even though the nighttime temperature has barely dipped to 70 degrees (that's 21 degrees for our Celsius friends), people are determinedly going through all the rites of the season. This includes lighting their fireplaces, overworked air conditioning be damned. The whole neighborhood has that faint smell of woodsmoke that permeates the air when the frost really sets in. Of course, we at A Book of Cookrye aren't so cavalier about running up the electricity bill as to light a fire when our jackets are still in the closet from last winter. But we are letting ourselves get a little bit more carefree with the oven. 

It feels almost strange to turn on the oven in the midafternoon, but the lower temperatures allow us to do so without destroying the air conditioning or breaking the entire Texas power grid. Also, I don't need to fret so much when I find myself baking meatballs for an entire hour while the sun is out.

Chamita Meatballs ¼ cup milk 1 onion, finely chopped 1¼ teaspoons salt ½ teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon chili powder 1½ cups grated raw potatoes (no need to peel them) 1½ pounds ground beef ¼ cup shortening Place milk, onion, and seasonings into a large mixing bowl. Grate and add the potato. (You want to wait until you've got everything else in the bowl and ready before grating the potato, because shredded spud does not like to sit out in the open air.) Add the meat, mix well, and form into small balls. Put the shortening in the skillet and brown the meatballs. Cover and steam one hour. They may be steamed with spaghetti and tomato sauce. If desired, you can bake them instead (it's a lot easier). Place meatballs into a 9"x13" pan coated with cooking spray. (Don't bother to brown them first.) Cover tightly with foil and bake at 350° for 1 hour. Keep the foil on after removing them from the oven, and allow to rest for 5 minutes before uncovering and serving. Source: A program for a cooking school hosted by Mrs. George O. Thurn, sponsored by the Salina [Kansas] Journal, circa 1940-1941, via Yesterdish

Today, we are once again hearing from Mrs. George O. Thurn! But this time, we're not making a recipe from her book. For those who don't recall, a friend stopped at an antique store when taking a road trip and got me "the most ancient cookbook" (those were the exact words) on a rack of cheap ones. 

I had never heard of Mrs. George O. Thurn before getting her book. So naturally, I looked for whatever traces of her career were floating around the internet. There's not a lot, but I did find a handout from a cooking class she did in Kansas about six years after my book was printed. The person who posted it dates it from 1940-1941, because we see the World War II "Pledge of Health" but we haven't yet started rationing.

Conveniently, today's recipe is right next to her portrait. Source: Yesterdish

1940 must have been a rotten year (aside from the diversion of a music-hall cooking class). The news was full of the war brewing in Europe in a time when many people still were still on postcard terms with relatives "in the old country." Meanwhile, the Depression was still ruining everyone's lives. 

Even though no one was doing any wartime rationing yet, these meatballs are half beef and half economization by volume. Mrs. George Thurn's meat-stretching may prove timely again today, given how beef prices have shot through the stratosphere.

I had to ask: what is a "Chamita?" When I looked up the word, I only found a tiny town in New Mexico. Perhaps the recipe comes from the town of Chamita. Or, western/southwestern recipe names may have been code for "this is cheap," in the same way that the word "Hawaiian" means "contains canned pineapple." In other words, these meatballs might be as Chamita-related as Mrs. Wilson's economical sausages are Chinookan.

Depression-era budget concerns aside, potatoes seemed better than breadcrumbs or other fillers that go into a lot of meatballs. "Meat and potatoes" is a cliche for a reason.

I was going to cook these exactly as the recipe directs: browning them in a frying pan and then steaming. But these were the mushiest meatballs I have ever made. Any attempt to push them around a frying pan would have led to squishing them into the beginnings of Chamita chili (which is an unexpectedly catchy name). Apparently, the economizing (barely-)prewar housewife had to be very skilled with a spatula if she wanted meatballs.

In an act of self-kindness, I decided skip the frying pan and go right to steaming. Our rice cooker came with a steamer basket, which seemed perfect until I saw how many meatballs the recipe made. Keep in mind that since we only had one pound of beef in the freezer, I reduced the recipe by a third. Clearly, Mrs. George O. Thurn did not endorse wasting kitchen heat on tiny batches.

Cooking these for one hour (as specified in the recipe) seemed excessive. Perhaps this ensures that we don't have any raw potato in our beef?

Speaking of spuds, I didn't want to waste the potato after grating half of it into the meatballs. But as we all know, potatoes have absolutely no shelf life after cutting them. So, to economize on time and get the most use out of the oven heat, I plonked the half-spud onto the oven rack next to the pans of meat. It wasn't nearly as good as when we baked potatoes in an extra-hot oven for nearly two hours, but the weather isn't cold enough for that yet.

After baking, I peeled back the foil and unveiled... um... this.

Back when we made porcupine meatballs, I knew the raw rice would expand into bristly protrusions (as if the name doesn't give it away). But potatoes tend to stay the same size when you cook them. I therefore had thought these meatballs would look normal.

Perhaps the potato shreds didn't expand, but the meat shrank away from them as the fat rendered off. After all, we had a lot of melted fat in the pan by the time these were done. I saved it for future use in frying pans. (We don't throw away seasoned beef fat.)

Something tells me I should have served these with gravy.

The meatballs were unbelievably soft and moist. I almost thought they weren't fully cooked until I remembered that they baked for a full hour. 

They taste like a really good meatloaf. Unexpectedly, you can barely taste the potatoes. They certainly add, um, visual interest to the meatballs, but they don't alter the flavor at all. So while the hourlong baking time gives me pause during most of the year, I won't mind making these again as the nights get chilly.

Red Velvet Brownies: or, A delicious excuse for food coloring!

Sometimes an innocent recipe wedges itself into my mind.

Red Velvet Brownies ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 tbsp cocoa powder, or 2 tbsp powdered instant coffee* 2 tsp vanilla 1 tsp cinnamon 2 tsp red food coloring 2 eggs 1 cup flour Heat oven to 350°. Grease an 8" square pan, or a 9" round. Line the bottom with a piece of parchment paper cut to fit. Press the paper into place, squeezing out as many bubbles as possible. Then coat the top of the paper with more cooking spray.† Melt the butter. Stir in the cocoa powder (or instant coffee), vanilla, cinnamon, and food coloring. Mix well. Whisk in the eggs, one at a time, mixing each in well before adding the next. Then beat the whole mixture very well. Add the flour, gently stirring just until it is mixed. Pour into the pan and bake 28-30 minutes. A toothpick in the center should come out clean. When cooled, top with either cream cheese icing, or white icing flavored with a very generous splash of vanilla. Recipe can be doubled and baked in a 9"x13" pan. *You can turn instant coffee granules into a powder by pouring them into a bowl and pressing them with your thumb, or by putting them into a spice grinder. They may not be perfectly ground, but they will be good enough. Or, you can purchase powdered instant espresso. †This pan preparation may seem excessive, but these really wanted to stick to the pan when I made them. If you bake them on paper, they cannot possibly stick to the bottom of the pan since they don't touch it. You simply need to cut around the sides of the pan, and they will free-fall out of it no matter what. Source: Harris Teeter

My minor obsession with Harris Teeter dumbfounds my friends who live in their market territory. I recently visited a longtime acquaintance in Raleigh for the weekend. Even though no one needed to get groceries the entire time, I confused him with an excited shout of "You didn't tell me your neighborhood is right next to a Harris Teeter!"

He was like "I didn't think that mattered...?"

Anyway, when we remade the Harris Teeter lemon squares, I couldn't resist wandering towards their website. I soon ended up flipping through their other recipes, which led to today's adventure in excessive food coloring.

The idea of red velvet brownies intrigued me. But I didn't want an entire pan of them tempting me from inside the house. The brownies therefore had to wait until the next time I went out to visit people. (As we all know, the best calories are the ones we share.) As soon as some friends and I got together, I couldn't rush to the red food coloring fast enough.

After stirring everything together, our batter-in-progress looked astonishingly like that shampoo that adds a magenta tint to your hair. (The hair color is temporary, but it permanently stains your bathtub.)

I've never baked brownies that were so aggressively brick-colored before.

On a mathematical note, the original recipe tells us to use an 8" square pan. I don't have one of those. But a little bit of math told me that a 9" round pan (which a lot more of us have in the kitchen) has almost exactly the same area. Therefore, the batter would have the same thickness after pouring it into the pan. The only downside: no one gets a corner piece if you bake your brownies in a circle. Anyway, here is the mathematical proof:

I haven't used calculus since I spite-burned the textbook, but it turns out you use middle-school math a lot in daily life.

As we cleaned the countertops, I was reminded that there is absolutely no way to wipe up splatters of red food coloring without looking someone had a nosebleed. When the top of your trash can has a pile of paper towels that look like this, kitchen visitors get nervous.

While we were wiping red food coloring off of the countertop, the batter had baked into a beautiful-looking batch of brownies with a subtly sparkling top.

As much as I like cream cheese icing, I didn't use it today. I know cream cheese icing is a traditional part of red velvet cake, but saying something is delicious with cream cheese icing on top is like saying vegetables are delicious if you deep fry them. I wanted to know if the brownies can stand on their own merit.

So, I made plain white icing instead (though I was deliberately heavy-handed with the vanilla). Of course, this raises the question of whether the brownies were a highly-dyed substrate for vanilla icing instead of cream cheese. But I decided to let that conundrum join the eggshells in the trash.

The brownies tasted absolutely wonderful. The cinnamon is a downright inspired addition. I may put it into all my future red velvet cakes. Unfortunately, one of my friends said "I'm allergic to chocolate,"  and I can't bear to deprive people of dessert because of an allergy.  

Omitting the cocoa seemed like a trivial alteration. Red velvet cake only has a slight whisper of chocolate, anyway. The chocolate is only present to darken the cake. I argue that the food coloring, with its synthetically bitter undertones, is a more critical component of red velvet's distinctive flavor. 

With that in mind, I didn't need to come up with a counterfeit chocolate. I just needed another edible brown powder. Instant coffee seemed like a perfectly fine substitute. We had one minor difficulty in obtaining any: no one in the house drinks it. Because I absolutely hate when grocery money goes rancid on the back of the shelf, I refused to purchase an entire jar of the stuff. Fortunately, Mom generously donated these packets to the cause.

Of course, no one wants gritty granules of instant coffee in their brownies. Also, we wanted to evenly darken the batter, not bespeckle it. So, I needed to turn the coffee into a powder.

I first tried pressing the coffee granules into the side of a bowl with my thumb, but they were surprisingly hard. After more minutes than I expected (and a slightly sore thumb), the coffee still looked like this.

I next tried putting the coffee into the electric spice grinder. While we did manage to pulverize most of the coffee, a lot of the crystals remained stubbornly intact. So if you use instant coffee instead of cocoa powder, you may want to choose a different brand.

The coffee batter was a little runnier when we used cocoa. Maybe cocoa powder absorbs more water (or "moisture content" if you want to sound like an expert) than instant coffee. Also, if you look closely at the surface, you can see the infuriatingly intact coffee granules floating in the artificial red.

The finished brownies somehow had an even shinier top than when we made the recipe as originally written.

It turns out instant coffee tastes a lot stronger than cocoa. Fortunately, the coffee went perfectly with the cinnamon already in the recipe. (If cinnamon and coffee didn't go so well together, pumpkin spice lattes wouldn't exist.) I think I may actually prefer the coffee red velvet brownies to the cocoa ones. 

But whichever brown powder you choose, I definitely recommend making these. 

 

Second-Stab Saturday: Harris Teeter lemon squares, correctly this time!

There is no logical reason for Harris Teeter to be on my mind.

Lemon Squares       Crust: 2 cups flour ⅔ cup powdered sugar 1 cup butter, softened Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9"x13" pan.* (We recommend lining the pan with parchment paper or foil first.) Mix butter, flour, and sugar together until crumbly. Press into the pan and bake until light brown, about 18-20 minutes. Make the filling while the crust bakes.       Filling: 4 eggs 2 cups sugar ¼ cup flour ½ tsp baking powder ⅓ cup lemon juice† 2 tbsp powdered sugar Mix all dry ingredients except powdered sugar. Whisk in the eggs and beat well. Then stir in the lemon juice. Pour over the hot crust and bake until set, about 20 minutes. When cooled, sprinkle with powdered sugar. You can make the powdered sugar look much nicer if you sprinkle it through a sifter. *The original recipe claims you can do this in an ungreased pan, but I have always had rotten luck with that. †If squeezing your own lemons instead of using juice from a bottle, grate off the rind and add that also. Note: If halving this recipe, use an 8" square pan or a 9" round. Source: Harris-Teeter powdered sugar label

The last time I made the lemon squares from the back of a bag of Harris Teeter powdered sugar, they were a goopy failure. And I know I didn't remove the previous batch from the oven too early because they were as brown on top as well-done toast. Here is a visual reminder:

That hot mess still pops into my mind to this day. 

Usually, the recipes on food labels are very thoroughly tested. (Apparently, some commercial test kitchens deliberately make the most likely cooking mistakes to ensure that people at home still get a passable result.) At the time, I figured that I must have made a mathematical error when halving the recipe. And so, I decided to actually write down the halved amounts this time. Furthermore, I did all my ingredient calculations and double-checked everything before even softening the butter.

Having ensured that our recipe was completely correct, we could proceed with the first part of it: the crust. Just like the previous time, we got a slightly crumbly shortbread dough. It's not very sweet, but I figure all the sugar in the filling makes up for that. Of course, this recipe uses far more butter than I've encountered in other pastries. We must remember that Harris Teeter is from the American South. The Midwest may be famous for its life-size butter sculptures, but southerners eat it instead.

Back when we first made this recipe, the crust baked perfectly. And it did the same today. 

Because the last lemon squares went wrong at the filling, I was afraid of once again feeding the trash can. A last-minute double verification of my recipe math did not make me feel better. Nevertheless, I whisked everything together and poured it out. Twenty minutes later, our lemon squares were baked and goop-free.

Although lemon squares had firmed up and set beautifully, they looked a bit pallid and underwhelming on top. This must be why Harris Teeter printed this particular recipe on the back of their powdered sugar bags. A quick sprinkle of white fairy dust made them look so pretty!

I love how they molded themselves exactly to the precautionary foil that I put in the pan.

Harris Teeter's lemon squares are almost as good as the lemon loves (and that is high praise). I think they'd be a lot better if you used fresh lemon juice in the filling (and also grated in the rind). The flavor would pop a lot better. Of course, using bottled lemon juice speeds up the recipe and eliminates the need to clean out a juicer. But whether you use pre-bottled lemon juice or squeeze it yourself, these lemon squares are really good. And if you don't mess up your amounts when halving or doubling the recipe, they will come out perfect. 

Stuffed Potato Surprise: or, Are you plagued with leftover ham?

Autumn is upon us! Inflatable ghosts and witches have sprouted in many people's yards. The supermarkets are replacing the beach balls and picnic sets with pumpkins and plastic skeletons. Large hams are once again migrating into the meat section. For those who will soon struggle with the problem of leftover ham crowding out the drinks in your refrigerator, Helping the Homemaker is here for you!

Stuffed Potato Surprise 4 baked potatoes* 2 tbsp cream ¼ tsp paprika ¼ tsp onion salt ¼ tsp celery salt ½ cup chopped cooked ham 2 tbsp butter Heat oven to 375°. Cut potatoes in half lengthwise. Scoop out centers while still hot, and mash. Stir in rest of ingredients and beat until fluffy. Scoop this mixture back into the potato cases. Bake 10 minutes. *Even if you usually don't like microwaving your potatoes, it's fine for this recipe. They will get crisp after baking them again. "Helping the Homemaker;" Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram; October 17, 1934; page 5

Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram; October 17, 1934; page 5

Based on old refrigerator ads, leftover hams used to be quite the problem in earlier decades. Those of us who only purchase a ham for various large holidays will never know the struggle of earlier homemakers, who had to figure out how to get their grousing husbands and whining children to eat the rest of the extra-large ham that took up an entire shelf in the refrigerator. (As a reminder, most 1930s "family size" refrigerators and iceboxes were the size of the mini-fridges that college students put in their dorm rooms today. People did not have the space to casually let leftovers sit for a week.)

Getting to today's recipe, I like to make twice-baked potatoes as a way to stretch meat. However, I tend to be a little more extravagant than Helping the Homemaker, adding such expenses as chopped green onions and bell peppers. But even with such wanton grocery spending as fresh produce, twice-baked potatoes let you get four or even six economical servings out of a single pound of beef.  Helping the Homemaker is using the same method to make a single slice of ham serve four people.

 

I have to credit Helping the Homemaker for writing such an easy recipe. After scooping out the insides of the potatoes, we were halfway done. Also, the paltry amount of things in the mixing bowl is a harsh reminder that there was a depression on. We don't even have fresh onions-- just onion salt.

The quarter-teaspoon of paprika in this recipe is doing a lot of the work in making these potatoes look like we loaded them with rich ingredients. You would almost think I mixed in so much ham that the spuds can barely hold themselves together.

You will note that for one of the potatoes, I went off-recipe and added cheese on top. We all know that ham and cheese go together like pumpkin-spice and lattes. But because cheese may have been too expensive for the economizing household of 1934, I left it off the other spud. After all, it's silly to make big changes to a recipe without first trying it as written (unless you're omitting the walnuts from brownies, of course).

The cheese-topped potato had a certain "institutional cafeteria" pallor to it after baking, but a minute or two under the broiler would have solved that had I the patience.

I don't think I need to tell you that these were really good. It's hard to argue with ham and potatoes. Also, you can slap these together really quickly. They make a good hot lunch on a chilly day (when we get around to having those), and are also a nice light supper for when the rest of the day was full of rich, heavy foods.

I do love when the good recipes are also the easy ones. This one may seem too simple to be worth writing down, much less putting in the newspaper. But I had never thought to put ham into twice-baked potatoes before. As the season of leftover ham approaches, spuds are a great way to serve it.

Butter Alert! Are things too moist in your kitchen?

Have you thought about the moisture content of your butter lately?

This post is loosely dedicated to a commenter who wrote that they tried Maxine Menster's cookies and the dough came out too runny. They said that they even went out of their way to purchase-- and pay for!-- stick-type margarine as specified in the recipe. When I read their comment, I wrote that the dough is supposed to be a bit runnier than expected (which it is), and that it will harden in the refrigerator (which it does).

However, I recently made the cookies again (they make regular appearances at this house) and the dough seemed runnier than usual. I refrigerated it anyway, secure in the knowledge that I have made this recipe countless times and it has never failed.

The thoroughly chilled dough was trickier to work with than usual, but again, I felt no worry. When you've made a recipe ten times, you assume that it will be the same on the eleventh. However, the cookies melted in the oven and barely resembled cookies when they were done. 

At first, I blamed myself. Then, the same problem showed up when I made a batch of chatters. Again, I've made these cookies many times. But for whatever reason, these chatters spread out so much that they fell apart when I tried to get them off the pan. They look like I squashed them after baking, don't they?

For reference, chatters usually come out looking like this:

At first, I blamed myself. I figured I must have mismeasured something. But this problem showed up again when I made chocolate chip cookies for a friend. 

As we all know, the best way to ruin a recipe is to make it for someone else. Baked goods always like to embarrass you in front of witnesses. Nevertheless, I didn't foresee any problems. (Also, no one talks about this, but chocolate chip cookies are actually kind of finicky to make.)

I made the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag, as countless people have done before me. I should note that many of my preteen batches of chocolate chip cookies ended up discreetly going to the trash (or at least they should have). But this time, I told myself that most of us are terrible bakers at the age of nine. Having since learned the importance of things like correctly measuring the ingredients, surely I wouldn't bake multiple pans of future compost. Besides, I was making chocolate chip cookies of all things! I wasn't doing something notoriously failure-prone like those foofy macarons that have been such an Instagram and wedding trend in the last few years.

The cookie dough looked just like I remembered, tasted just like remembered, and they came out just as terribly as the first time I made them.

Now, if you go online you will find fifty million possible fixes for this problem (many of which are on websites that may be entirely the work of bots with no human intervention). But the only one that works is adding more flour. No amount of adding refrigerating the dough or jockeying with the oven temperature will turn puddles into cookies, and it doesn't matter if the person claiming otherwise is wearing a chef's hat.

After angrily dumping the first batch of cookies directly into the trash without bothering to let them cool off, I threw a lot of flour into the bowl and rage-beat it into the dough with a wooden spoon that somehow didn't snap on me. I don't know how much I added, but it was a lot. We weren't twiddling with teaspoons of flour here, but fundamentally altering the recipe. Then, just to be very sure I wasn't about to throw away the rest of the chocolate chips and the dough they rode in on, I baked a single cookie to ensure I had everything right.

It looked so lonely in the cavernous oven, and I wrestled with the conflicting guilts of wasting electricity versus wasting ingredients. Chocolate may grow on trees, but grocery money doesn't. Ultimately, guilt from wasting chocolate won out over guilt from running a hot oven on a hot night to bake cookies one at a time. 

Happily, our extra-floury test cookie came out perfect. As I (successfully!) baked the rest of the cookies, I couldn't help wondering why they came out so badly when I made them as written. Did Nestle change the recipe? 

Fortunately for my doubts, the internet has everything, including people photographing old food packaging. I found a picture of a chocolate bag from (I think) the 1930s, and the recipe was the same.

Source: Old Recipes on Reddit

If you wanted to be painfully pedantic, you could point out that in the 1930s you were supposed to dissolve the baking soda in a little water, and today they tell you to simply stir it in. And the older recipe tells you to chop the chocolate because chocolate chips hadn't been invented yet. (In the early days, they sold a specially-molded chocolate bar just for these cookies, which was scored to break into very small pieces. It came with a special tool for breaking it up.) But aside from those truly pointless nitpicks, the recipe is the same.

So, I had made the recipe correctly. The recipe itself hadn't changed. Nor had I miscalculated anything when halving the ingredients. While eating some of the cookies and wondering why they couldn't come out so perfect when I actually made the recipe exactly as written, I remembered reading some online cooking-forum angst about watery butter.

Apparently post-2020 butter has more water in it than it used to. This has been ruining countless people's recipes, no matter how successfully they've made them before. (As a quick aside, true baking experts-- and people trying to look impressive-- use the term "moisture content" instead of "water." It sounds more authoritative.) Of course, all butter contains water and always has. But apparently post-2020 butter is simply too moist to be reliable.

Normally, I care about the "moisture content" of my butter as much as everyone else I know: not at all. Furthermore, I figured that all the people complaining about faulty water-to-fat ratios were making much more finicky things than I do. I wasn't making a Frisian Domme Snobbersguod torte, I was making chocolate chip cookies! Nevertheless, the problem of watery butter had at last come to my kitchen and sabotaged me.

So, if you are having problems with runny cookie dough, you have two options. The easiest: Add more flour!

The second option requires a bit of planning ahead. First, melt your butter. Get it really hot, not just barely melted. Then, pour it into a small bowl or cup so it hardens into a block instead of a flat disc. Let it sit out at room temperature for an hour or two so the water (or "moisture content" if you prefer) can separate out and sink to the bottom. Then refrigerate the butter until it is hard. You can now lift out the butter and discard the water it left behind.

In these times of uncertain butter and inconsistent oleo, I must also recommend baking a single cookie before committing an entire pan of them to the oven. It may be an extravagance of energy, but it's better than possibly sending your grocery money directly to the dump.

Whatever you do, be careful with your butter and your oleo! Treachery and betrayal are packed into those boxes.