Martha Stewart is a liar and I am a nerd.

Yesterday, I went swimming as I usually do, and after picking up a few ingredients, I settled down in my apartment to cook up a storm. And so after several hours' work, I made myself some pretty decent pad thai and a delicious beef and beer stew. The stew kind of reminds me of french onion soup, but with a nice brown beer taste included. If you're up to cooking for 3+ hours, I highly recommend it.

After all my cooking, it was time for baking. This week's recipe is mini black and white cookies (35), which are like the big ones, just smaller. How much smaller? Well, I'm pretty sure the recipe meant to make the cookies teaspoon-sized instead of tablespoon-sized, so these are about 2" in diameter. The cookie part is very simple: the buttermilk added to the recipe makes it taste like cake instead of a usual cookie, and otherwise the ingredients are pretty typical. The frosting is also fairly straightforward: confectioners' sugar, corn syrup, water, vanilla, lemon juice, and dutched cocoa added to make the chocolate half. I think that perhaps there's a bit too much lemon juice for the white frosting, but the chocolate is very tasty.

All in all, I declare these cookies worth making again, although I think I'll try making them smaller so perhaps they won't puff up so much (I doubled the recipe since I was promised a yield of 4 dozen and definitely got 2 dozen...).

As for being a nerd, I definitely looked at these cookies lying out on the counter and started to think of them as being magnetic dipoles that weren't aligned, like in a paramagnet. Fortunately, my thought train stopped there, but I'm a little ashamed that I even thought that way.


Okay, I think that's it for now, as usual I'm very busy, so I don't have too many interesting things to say. Perhaps I'll try to drum something good up for next week.