Modern Baking

I've been replaying the following incident in my mind over the past week, and each time, I think about watching my mom or my grandma cook from recipe cards, or more often, from memory. If they wanted to try something new, they were limited to the recipes on the backs of packages or those begged from relatives at family picnics. In contrast, I own a shelf full of cookbooks, a pretty small collection for someone these days, and I find most of my new recipes in my email inbox, on a food-devoted television network, or on one of my favorite websites.

The boyfriend and I, to best deal with our newfound poverty and hatred of processed foods, are now devoted to making things from scratch. And although I am unable to make chocolate chips by hand, I figured the supporting wholesome ingredients (if brown rice is good for you, than so is brown sugar!) made chocolate chip cookies as close to "from scratch" as sweets were going to get. So I headed to bakerella.com, where I remembered seeing some yummy cookies and an accompanying recipe. Can you imagine telling your mom that although you had her time-tested recipe, you were using one from a website instead?

To make things worse, I've been known to take my laptop into the kitchen and cook from it. In my defense, it does save paper, and I have used it to view hand-me-down recipes that my mom had typed up for her own convenience. But on this day, the laptop was with the bf in an architecture class of some sort, so I scribbled the recipe down and set off to bake. I made it all the way to the end of the recipe when I realized - I don't have baking powder. I parked the batter bowl in the fridge and, I can see grandma cringing now, changed my facebook status to reflect my recent disappointment. Immediately folks started replying - why did I need baking powder? Usually cookies have baking soda. A trip back to Bakerella confirmed I had copied it down wrong.

Thanks for the rollercoaster, technology. I wish I could say that in the future I'll stick to what I know, but those cookies were so darn delicious. And come to think of it, my mom always used whatever recipe was on the back of the chocolate chips. How's that for modern baking?