6/100: (extra)snicker doodles!

Greetings from Seattle! This weekend I had the opportunity to visit my older brother and his wife and new baby boy! This is my second time seeing the baby, and honestly I'll never have enough time. Even in three weeks he's changed a lot! His hair is longer, his eyes are open more, he writhes around a lot and makes so much more noise (he's going through a chirping phase). Everyone tells me I'll miss the baby times because one day he won't always want me to hold him! There's nothing like cuddling that little nugget, so I suppose I'll hold him as often as I can (although everyone else is trying to top off on their Winston holding, too!)

I wanted to bake something for Tristan (Win's mom) and I asked her what her ultimate favorite baked good was. Her answer? Snickerdoodles! An easy request, and I was happy to oblige. We decided to use another New York Times Cooking recipe, so my brother and I went out to provision.

Another baked good, another kitchen

One bit of trepidation I had about cooking at their house was the lack of electronic mixer- stand or hand! My brother Ben was adamant that mixing by hand was SO easy. So I trusted my most favorite butter mixer and let him go to town:

This butter mixer is a special edition!

Looking good bro!

I covered the dry ingredients and started mixing and mixing and mixing. But, in going over the ingredients, I realized something quite disastrous. In our zeal to try hand mixing butter we had added both sticks instead of 1 and 1/4 sticks! Yikes- we were going to have some very buttery cookies. Honestly, we couldn't stop laughing. The texture was definitely off- there was batter all over my hands when I was trying to roll them for the cinnamon + sugar coating. However, we put them into oven to just see how they turned out. Well... now I know what it looks like when cookies have too much butter!

Before 

After

Well, that was a baking fail! I actually think the placement of the cookies helped to give them structure- the cookie probably would have continued expanding without any resistance! My brother and I cheers'd on a cookie and tried them and... they were okay! They were tasty, but you could definitely taste the heaviness of the butter. Not my proudest bake, but I certainly wouldn't fault the recipe on this one. I suppose lessons for next time are: even if you are nervous about not having the right equipment, always make sure to add the right amount of ingredients! I can't tell you how many times I've almost added the wrong amount of butter, so it was about time this happened.

One crazy thing that occurred this morning is that the first text I woke up to was from my friend Laura about baking fails. And the primary picture was of cookies that looked just like mine (a little worse, but not by much!). I was curious how in the world someone failed like that and, well, now I know! Be careful what knowledge you wish to attain (:

Me with the bake requester!

The best part of this bake was definitely getting to bake with my brother in his lovely home. We probably laughed for 10 minutes straight, so we certainly added a lot of years to our life! Thanks for having me during this trip, Ben and Tristan!

Up next... brownies in my own kitchen!