Thanksgiving was pretty good. We went down to my parent's house and had dinner with them and my brother and his family. Jack is getting big and is still as cute as a button. Friday we went over to Julie's parent's house for dinner and they had a smoked turkey. It was amazing. I've found a new food to love. It was like a turkey that had been made of ham. I'm definitely going to try smoking my own one day.

I made fudge earlier this week. The first batch turned out ok, but the second was better. The only difference was how I handled the temperature control. I let the first batch cool down too much before stirring which resulted in the need for a lot of upper body strength to actually stir the stuff. Both batches were fun to make.

I finally ordered the parts for the R50 last week. New bearings, seals and gaskets all round. I also included a new rear main bearing holder since mine was borderline and it's the single hardest part to replace in the entire bike so I might as well do it now. Next weekend should see the bottom end going back together. Then I need to figure out what to do with the top end.

I know that you are all dying to know more about the Cookies of Science™. I tried some blind taste testing but that didn't work out as well as one might think. As mimsy pointed out the perfect chocolate chip cookie is a matter of taste, so different people liked different things. That said, there were definitely differences between the doughs.

First, between the plain and vacuum packed dough there was only a slight difference. They looked the same and tasted the same. The only difference that I saw was that the vacuum packed cookie seemed to fall apart in your mouth a little more readily.

As for the rested dough, there were some marked differences. Firstly I only baked those for 12 minutes instead of 13. I think that I should have held out for 13 since the time difference changed the texture of the cookie pretty dramatically. They were more moist, more buttery. They tended to leave an oily spot on the napkin where you set them down. The odd thing is that they were more golden brown than the regular dough, even though they were baked for less time.

Also the cookies baked 36 hours before were of course drier than the fresh cookies. This had a definite effect on the testers.

My conclusions thus far:

1) The sea salt on top of the cookie is a stroke of genius
2) Rested dough browns quicker

More research is called for. I'd like to mix a batch and rest it, then 36 hours later mix another batch and bake them together. If I can stick to the recipe the doughs should be pretty similar.

It's really amazing that you can bake such different cookies from a single dough. Most tasters saw differences between even the basic and vacuum packed cookies and were a little skeptical of my assurances that they were from the same batter.

Today I stumbled on an article about making a better chocolate chip cookie which was linked from a blog entry about how to perhaps attain the same effect but in a shorter time. As the chocolate chip cookie is one of the greatest inventions of the modern world I was definitely intrigued. Reading the post at Ideas In Food however I was disappointed that the author didn't maintain a control sample during his experiment. There are so many variables in the baking of a chocolate chip cookie that it can be difficult to determine what changes had how much of an effect. Could vacuum sealing the cookie dough in a plastic bag have an effect on the cookie dough? Would it aid in the rate of hydration of the flour grains? The world must know!

I decided to use Science™ to find out.

I made up a batch of my favorite chocolate chip cookie dough. I split the batch into 3 more or less equal portions. One portion was placed into a glass bowl and covered with plastic cling wrap. The second portion was vacuum sealed in a plastic bag with a consumer grade vacuum sealer. The third portion was left in the mixing bowl, covered with plastic cling wrap (this is my control). All three portions were placed in the fridge.

Three hours later I removed the vacuum sealed and control portions. I portioned the cookies out using a #20 disher on identical room temperature half sheet pans lined with parchment. Each cookie was sprinkled with a small amount of course sea salt. I baked each pan for 13 minutes at 375º F. I allowed the cookies to cool for about 30-45 minutes.

Willing test subject 1 (crankygirlie) tried both cookies and found the control to taste better, but detected a definite texture difference in the two samples.

It should be noted that I have identified an potential difficulty in preventing test subject 1 from exhausting the supply of test cookies. Hopefully I will be able to prevent such a catastrophe before completion of the experiment.

Should we make it to Friday with sufficient supply in hand I intend to conduct blind taste tests with more willing test subjects. Applications are now being accepted.

Today I went shopping and ended up looking at Shun knives. I didn't buy any because that's some serious cash, but now I know what I want so I can save up for it.

I got home in time to handle my on-call shift for work. Fortunately it was a quiet shift so I spent some time in the kitchen. I made french onion soup and an angel food cake. The soup was ok by itself, but once I added the cheese toast it became quite good. I think that my substitution of mead for the white wine resulted in the soup being a bit too sweet. Next time I'll use something drier. The cake came out quite well (I've been making it a lot lately) and we topped some with strawberries and macadamia nut liqueur. That was quite a treat.

In other food news I've been practicing making coconut cake. I've made it three times. The first was an unequivocal disaster (the cake was dry and the frosting thin resulting in the cake absorbing the frosting overnight effectively un-frosting the cake) so it went in the bin. I got it right the second and third times, but I think that it can be even better with some tweaking. I really like the 7 minute frosting, it's easy to make and quite tasty, not heavy like butter cream.

Work has been going very well. My project is approaching beta launch which is very exciting. I'll be down in the bay area in a few weeks, anyone want to hang out?

I made another cake tonight for Julie's Granny's birthday. I had some left over cake from leveling it so I made some petits fours and then covered them with ganache. I'd never made ganache before but it's so simple and so tasty that this will not be the last time. Next time I think the entire cake will be ganached :)

I weighed myself this morning and I am down 40 pounds so I went shopping for clothes again. I found that I'd dropped another size. I'm down to a 30" waist according to the fine folks at Carhartt. Though there were no double fronts in the right length in stock so I bought another belt instead.

In other news:

• I'm getting my money back on the dead console server.


• I bought Metroid Prime 3 and it pretty much rocks


• micahbird pooped on Niko's head today and she was mightily pleased.


• I'm making Peach upside down cake
  

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Just for the record, I actually did get over to the gym on Friday and work out for 25 minutes. I think that it helped my energy level for the rest of the day. I felt pretty good and more eager to get stuff done. I just did 25 minutes on a bike while listening to my iPod. Included with my membership are two consultations with a trainer to set up a plan to get fit. I need to get that done so I can have a routine to go through in the morning.

Let's see... I had a terribly exciting friday night. I stayed at home and baked creme brulee custards and played with meringue trying to make cookies. The custard came out great... not so much with the cookies. Oh well.

Saturday crankygirlie and I went over to her aunt and uncle's house to bird-sit for them. crankygirlie's little brother came over too and spent the evening whistling to the bird, who absolutely loved him for it. We watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow which we'd not seen yet. I was pretty impressed actually. The characters were so stereotypical and the acting was a bit overdone, but that actually helped lend to the comic book feel. The visual effects were perfectly matched to that feel. I loved the plot too, it was so 50's comic book ridiculous.

Today we got up and did a bit more bird-sitting. I left early to come home and ride my old bike down to Tacoma for my dad. He's buying it from me so he can save on gas riding it to work. I nearly didn't make it as I rode the less than 2 blocks to the gas station and back, killing the engine but leaving the high beam on for a couple of minutes when I got back. The bike hadn't been really run for a couple of weeks so the battery was low to start with and that did it in. I tried a few more times before I called for roadside assistance. After I got off the phone with them I tried one more time, and of course it started. A quick call back to cancel the jump start and I was off.

Riding the Suzuki after being on the BMW for a couple of weeks was interesting. I really do like the BMW more, but there are some things that are nice about the Suzuki. It's lighter and revs much higher, so it's a totally different feeling bike. I missed the tourque of the BMW though :)

Got down to Tacoma without incident and put the bike in my parent's garage. I showed my dad some of the finer technical details of how the bike worked before we took off for Seattle. We had dinner at the tasty place with mimsy, ibexris and xsorin. My dad was a little puzzled by the selection of food, but I think that he liked it. I must have been hungry because I finished off my meal.

We got home and my dad tried on my old riding gear and I let him borrow it. I also managed to get rid of some bicycle stuff from the garage. My dad left with some tires and pedal clips. More-room-in-the-garage++