Not To Be Trusted With Knives

CyberCookies ’09 – Success!

December 19, 2009 by Beth

At noon today1, the first annual Snow CyberCookies bake-stravaganza ’09 began!  Five hours later, two kitchens were full of all sorts of baked goodness!

My sister, my niece and my mom baked up a storm in Nancy’s kitchen in Toronto – they made whipped shortbread, chocolate sandwich cookies, peanut butter cookies and spiced cashews2.  I made my famous shortbread, meringue snowflakes and chocolate mice!

Baking something for the first time, I find, never goes quite as planned.  My shortbread cookies, from a family recipe I’ve been using for about 20 years, are perfect, but the other two items didn’t turn out exactly as planned.

The mixture for the centre of the chocolate mice, which is made from sweetened condensed milk3 and melted chocolate, was far more gooey than it should have been, so I had to put the mice in the freezer to get them firm enough to coat in chocolate.  Also, the chocolate coating solidified pretty quick, so by the time I had coated all the mice, I only had enough time to get their candy eyes on before they were hardened – the were meant to have whiskers and noses too, but I just wasn’t quick enough for that4.  I still think they are pretty cute though.

The meringue snowflakes, while more successful than my meringue ghosts, still didn’t turn out quite as nicely as I would have liked5.  I think I needed a slightly smaller tip for my piping dohickey6.

Meringue snowflakes, before baking:

Also, my oven seems to run hotter than it should, as I cooked the snowflakes according to the directions (at 200 degrees F.  It said for 1 hour, but I didn’t even leave them in that long) and they weren’t supposed to get browned, but, well, have a look:

Meringue snowflakes, after baking:

So, maybe not perfect, but they taste good, and that’s the most important thing, right?

And we all had a good time “hanging out” via Google Video Chat.  The only drawback – I really wanted to try those spicy cashews and chocolate sandwich cookies!  When is Google going to release its Google Teleporter?

1. 3 p.m. Eastern [↩]
2. and probably a bunch of other things that I didn’t catch [↩]
3. It’s not really Christmastime until my mom says “You are going to cut your tongue on that!” when I lick the leftover sweetened condensed milk off the lid of the can.  Mmm, sweetened condensed milk [↩]
4. truly, I needed an extra pair of hands to do the decorating! [↩]
5. here’s a photo of what the meringue snowflakes are supposed to look like! [↩]
6. I’m not sure what you call it.  It’s not a decorating bag, but more like a tube that kinda looks like a big syringe that you use to pipe icing.  Does anyone know what those things are called? [↩]

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