Sunday, November 6, 2011

C4 Week 1

Softening butter is difficult when you don't have a working furnace and it is -5C outside. Thankfully we have a fireplace and access to free firewood! Oh, and having the oven on for several hours doesn't hurt either.

Today marks the start of my C4 study. I have 14 recipes, each of which has been assigned a number 1-14 so that I could use Random.org to randomly select which recipes are baked each week.. I am baking two recipes per week, from now until December 21. I sent out e-mails to my friends, family, and skating teammates and currently have 16 respondents plus myself (I'm eliminating myself from analysis because I will have bias because I know which cookies are which). Final results won't be available until the New Year because my sister is taking samples of each recipe to two of her former roommates in Germany (I am going to freeze the cookies for them, so each cookie should still test the same because they will have all been frozen).

I am also keeping a detailed research journal, in true scientific fashion. I am also taking photos of the cookies in dough form and after they have been baked.

The original list of recipes I had was 21 strong, but some of the recipes were not different enough for me; I actually did an ingredient ratio comparison to pick recipes that differed the most. Over the next 7 weeks I will be testing:

Ad Hoc Chocolate Chip Cookies
Anna Olsen's Chocolate Chip Cookies
The Best Cookies
Big Fat Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Brown Sugar Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chocolate & Zucchini's Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chocolate Chunk and Vanilla Bean Cookies
Giant Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Hummingbird Bakery's Chocolate Chip Cookies
New York Time's Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe
Pudding Cookies
Skinny Chocolate Chip Cookies
Smitten Kitchen's Favourite Chocolate Chip Cookies
Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

I'm really looking forward to it, are you?