Cookie Recipes

Wednesday 30th July 2008
The Bamboo was very quiet last night, it was chucking it down for most of the night and the wind was howling but we didn’t hear a thing from the Bamboo.
Turns out, Carolyn was a tad fed up with it and chopped it down, you could say the last windy night was the Bamboo that broke Carolyns back. Anyway it is no more, it is an ex Bamboo, or at least the bit that used to rattle the window is an Ex Bamboo. Of course the problem will come if somebody has been taking us seriously and a Panda arrives, the poor sod will have nothing to eat.
When Ian left the house for work this morning it wasn’t raining, by the time he got in the car it was raining, by the time he got to the Bussel Highway it had stopped again, this on/off scenario carried on all the way to the Café. As he drove into the Car Park it stopped, this was going to be his lucky day, wrong, just as he was getting his bags out of the back of the car, it chucked it down. Still, we do need this rain, apparently.
It was a dull dreary day with wind and rain on and off all day, the wind must have been blowing from a different direction today because we nearly lost one of our outdoor umbrellas.
Now bearing in mind that it is a 3 metre umbrella you would expect it to be blow about a bit with the wind that we get, however this one was attached to a very heavy cast iron base and held in position by a metal table with a glass top. The wind has never even moved it an inch before, this time the whole lot was on its side and making for the Car Park. Fortunately it must have been a freak wind because we hadn’t had any customers tell us about it, so it couldn’t have been like that for long and when we found it, there was no wind at all.
We had an interesting day today, we made and sold a few more pies, the staff are experimenting with different fillings although we think that they are just trying weird and wonderful to satisfy their own cravings rather than coming up with ideas that might actually sell. We will let them play until they get used to the machine and sick of pies, then we will push the edible versions on the customers.
On the subject of cooking, don’t laugh, but we can’t make Cookies for love nor money and are on the verge of buying them in. We have got so many ingredients in our kitchen we are having trouble finding space for stuff that we can cook successfully, we have taken recipes from books, on line, customers, you name it we have tried and failed dismally.
The problem is that the mix just seems to dissolve into a gluttonous mess as soon as we put it in the oven, we have tried putting them into a cold oven, we have tried putting them into a hot oven. It is an electric fan oven with the heat element in the bottom so if we put them on the bottom the bases burn, if we put them in the top the edges burn, if we put them in the middle they just splat, they splat in the top and bottom as well they just burn as well.
If anyone out there reading this has an idiot proof recipe for Cookies, it doesn’t matter whether it’s plain or fruit or choc chip, anything would be welcome at the moment and can’t be any worse than what we are producing at the moment. Of course the problem with so many failed attempts at Cookies is it costs money, but also the staff have taken to eating all of the unsaleable Cookies and are starting to put on weight.
If you do have any recipes that you think could get us out of trouble, at the bottom of this or any other page is a section marked Comments. Click on that and send us the recipe, if it works we will give you a mention, if it doesn’t we will just get fatter.
By the time Ian finished work tonight it was chucking it down and he got soaked on his way between the Café and the Car, having got to the Car he remembered that the fuel situation was getting a bit desperate so got soaked while filling the Car with Petrol. The petrol pump did have a roof over it, unfortunately somebody forgot to tell the rain which was hitching a lift on a gale force wind and was in horizontal mode as it reached the petrol station. Never mind, we could do with some more of this.
Carolyn has been out and bought a Gas Heater which is very effective on warming up the cold side of the house, which it must be said, is most of it really. We were going to see if we could get through our first winter without resorting to this, but everything is starting to get damp and according to the locals “this is nothing, you wait until August and September, it gets really wet and cold then”. Well if this isn’t really wet and cold then we’d like to know what it is, when we get up in the morning it feels and looks wet and cold, in fact it is very similar to how it looks and feels in the evening as well. Come to think of it, it looks and feels like that at lunchtime and in the afternoon as well, so August and September should make a nice change.
We have had to order another load of wood today or we will run out by the weekend, it is about a month since the last lot arrived, it is not a particularly cheap way of heating the house, specially when it only does one end ($45 - £22 per week), but it has got us by so far. If everyone over here burns as much wood as us, it is no wonder Australia has got such a big hole in the Ozone layer above it.
Carolyn cooked again tonight, Chicken in a Honey, Mustard and Mushroom Sauce and it was very nice, even the kids liked it. Ian had brought home some Cream for the sauce and whipped up what was left with sugar and served it to the kids with Apple Pie, now normally the kids won’t touch Cream for love nor money but this time they wolfed it down, it’s amazing what a bit of sugar can do.
This evening we sat and chilled out to some of Ians Soul Classics and wrote the blog before having an early night.