It’s that time of the semester and though two of my final papers are already turned in, the literature review for my thesis and an 8 page Bollywood paper still lie between me and winter break. This week calls for cookies.
I bake all the time. I bake when I’m happy, when I’m sad, when someone has a birthday, when a friend done something awesome, and when I’m stressed. The emphasis lies on that last one, as almost nothing can get rid of a bad day like homemade chocolate chip cookies. They must be from scratch and they must be delicious.
There’s a lot of chemistry involved in baking. Everything must be measured, added, and mixed in just the right proportions and orders. Chemical reactions occur – just today I bought new baking soda as my box had gotten old and things were no longer rising correctly. Why? Because baking soda (sodium bicarbonate for you other nerds out there) decomposes in the heat of the oven and gives off carbon dioxide to help the baked goods rise. See? Chemistry!
The more specific Brandeis chemistry in my cookies comes from the Smart Balance. Surely you’ve heard that it was developed right here? It makes me laugh every time I pick up the packaging to see “Researchers at Brandeis University have discovered…” Dairy free cookies, brought to you by us!
But possibly the most scientific part of today’s baking was the failure of the first batch. The dough felt too soft and putting it into the oven I knew something was wrong. The cookies came out flat, soft, and weird. They were fine cookies, you see, but I hold myself to a higher standard.
This is not what Chocolate Chip Cookies should look like...
What do you do when an experiment fails? You hypothesize (maybe those extra large eggs had made everything just a little bit too wet) and change a variable. I stirred more flour into the remaining dough and tried again.
Cookie dough, now with added flour!
The cookies looked far better now, taller and more stable. These were the cookies I meant to make in the first place. When an experiment fails, you observe, learn from it, and try again.
It's a subtle difference, but when you're a baking perfectionist...
So what did we learn? That experiments fail (not unlike those four months I spent examining a gene that ended up having no real phenotype), that sometimes researchers make things that actually directly impact our lives (Smart Balance makes lactose free baking so much easier), and that chemistry makes delicious cookies (with the addition of dark and white chocolate swirled chips – yum!).
About Alex Dainis