Day 15: Cookies and Instant Curry

The sublet that I'm in right now has a gas oven. The knob used to be missing so I didn't make anything with it thus far, but I got a "universal" replacement that didn't fit this oven but I made it work (sort of) with some tape. After some struggling and a finger injury, I managed to turn the oven on! I also happen to have an infrared thermometer on me because I had it from a science class that used it for a take-home experiment and I didn't get a chance to return it to the professor before the world turned upside down. I used it as an oven thermometer and it worked okay.

These cookies are supposed to be chocolate chip cookies though they don't quite look like that — they look more like scones, I know. Using a gas oven is tricky, especially because my oven back in my dorm was a brand-new, state-of-the-art electric oven that was big and had accurate temperatures and a beautifully even heat distribution/flow. Well, this gas oven has none of these things. These cookies were the first thing I made in this oven so it was a bit of an experiment just to get the hang of the oven.

The main problem I had was that the bottom of the cookies baked a lot faster than the top, so the bottoms would be burnt while the tops would be raw. In my previous electric oven, if I scooped little spheres of cookie dough and plopped them on the sheet, they would melt and flatten out into beautiful, flat circles. That didn't happen with these, probably because of the uneven heat distribution problem. I baked the cookies in three batches and Googled why some things may have gone wrong.

Some lessons I learned:

• Using a baking sheet that is too large and covers the whole shelf will block the heat flow so the bottom will burn and the top won't bake.
• Apparently, using a dark metal baking sheet exacerbates this problem. I used a black metal baking sheet, so that checks out.
• For baking, some people think it's better to use the top shelf than the middle shelf, and some people think the middle shelf is always better. I found that it didn't make a huge difference.
• It's best to rotate the baking sheet (or whatever else you're using) once or twice.

The recipe for this was the most basic chocolate chip cookie recipe you can imagine, but I'll include it anyway.

Ingredients

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar, packed
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
• Chocolate chips (I used 1 Lindt bar, broken up)

Steps

1. Preheat the oven to 350 F.
2. Cream the butter and sugar together.
3. Beat in the eggs one at a time.
4. Add the vanilla extract, baking soda, and salt.
5. Add the flour and mix into a dough.
6. Mix in the chocolate chips.
7. Scoop spoonfuls of dough onto baking sheets and bake for 10 minutes. (Note: I did 10 minutes, then flipped and 5 minutes more. Adjust according to how your oven behaves.)

For lunch, I had instant chicken curry. It was a Japanese-style curry from a Korean brand, SSG. I just made rice, poured the curry over it, and microwaved for two more minutes. I don't have a picture of the food because it isn't really very photogenic, but i have a picture of the packaging.