Brownies and Chips Off the Old Block

It's a new semester and a brand new beginning in the baking and pastry program at the College of Hearts and Sciences. With help from my class partner, today we shoveled together brownies iced with chocolate ganache and white chocolate ganache, and chocolate chip cookies. Have you ever wondered why the Toll House beauties you've made for years turn out differently from time to time, even when you follow the classic yellow bag's directions to the last chip?

We learned about the properties of "spread" - properly mixed dough and its ability to either hold its form in baking or flatten out and run for the pan corners. Some spread is good if that's what you want, but for a uniform cookie every time, it's important to understand the chemistry between fats and sugar in the creaming stage, how moisture affects spread, the amount of sugar, the type of flour, the precise measurement of ingredients.

Did you know that if you split the butter the recipe calls for and do a 50-50 with shortening, you can impact spread in a way that brings joy? Shortening melts at a higher point than butter, but shortening tastes like Dippity Do for hair styling, so you need that butter to add flavor. The shortening helps the cookie set its shape before melting, so butter and shortening together can make for a fine, shapely outcome.

Our strategy was to make sure we didn't overmix the dough nor undermix it, not bake it too long in the convection oven (which dries out cookie dough) and have a good shape to show when we presented our board to Chef. We've only just begun to ponder the chemistry of sugar molecules and their hygroscopic quality, how coagulation and caramelization happen, bicarbonate this and ammonia that.

Hard corpus callosum work like this deserves a treat, and we just happened to have a full tray of brownies and cookies at the finish line. Here you have the shape of things to come.