Musings on cooking

[jethrien]

Last night, I made apple dumplings for the first time.

I'm not totally thrilled how they came out - the crust was too...pie-crusty. Mostly because I used slightly modified pie crust. I'm not sure what's supposed to be different, but these didn't seem right.

Anyway, though, they were an astounding amount of work.

Which got me to thinking about the formality of desserts and the corresponding effort.

My mother's apple cake, for example, is relatively straightforward. If you choose a cake that doesn't require peeling and slicing fruit, it's even easier.

And yet a cake seems so much more formal and elaborate than the humble cookie...which actually take as much or more effort to produce. My pumpkin cookies, for example, take far more time to make than an unfrosted cake. Or even a frosted one. Each cookie has to be spooned out and flattened, and you have to be whipping things in and out of the oven instead of just sticking something in and leaving it. And then each cookie needs to be frosted.

Or apple dumplings, which seem so quaint and simple. And are a royal pain in the ass to make.

Comments

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

My point is that, even though cakes tend to be automatically viewed as "fancier", a simple cookie recipe will inherently take more effort than a simple cake reciple.

So - chocolate chip cookies vs. chocolate chip bundt cake. Just the name sounds fancier. And the fact that the cake comes out with a pretty, elaborate shape and the cookies look somewhat rough-hewn makes the cake appear more formal.

Yet they have practically the same ingredients, with different proportions. Mixing the batter takes about the same amount of time and effort.

But with the bundt cake, all you have to do is pour it into one pan, stick it in the oven and toddle off for at least half an hour, usually more.

The cookies, on the other hand, you have to spoon out each individual cookie. You usually end up with two sheets. One cooks faster because of oven positioning. They also cook in about 10 minutes. But you have to bake sheet A and B. Sheet A finishes first, you take the cookies out and put them out to cool. You put more cookies on A. B comes out. By the time you've got B's old cookies off, new cookies on, and the sheet back in the oven, you now have three minutes to kill before A is ready again. (And you pretty much can't do anything in 3 minutes.) And so on.

So even if you have things in the oven for an hour in total for both cake and cookies, the cake you just leave and the cookies need near constant attention.

What brought this up, by the way, was the fact that I was trying to do work on my laptop at the same time as making pumpkin cookies. I'd made an apple cake the week before, and had a load of time to do stuff while it baked. But I didn't have time to do anything while making the cookies - the entire time the oven was on, I was busy.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I think your original point was lost on a lot of people, am I'm not entirely sure why. It's a simple concept of time-intensiveness.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought. But apparently I didn't express it very clearly.

[(Anonymous)]

I can't believe this topic generated so much response. (So I'll add to it.) I got the drift of what you meant immediately, having the rare insight born of spending more hours with you than anyone on earth (so far). (This is trumped, however, by the Amazing Psychic Link.)

But I think for ridiculous ease of preparation with deceptive impressiveness ratio, I'd do my chocolate mousse recipe or the one-bowl brownie recipe I found on the box of the unsweetened chocolate squares. Both are available upon request.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Ooh, chocolate mousse...