The art of recipe making

...or at least my art :-) People ask me where I come up with all of these recipes. Well I just kinda get a hankering for something and I go up and make it. Sounds pretty easy huh? Well it doesn't always work out, sometimes I get it right away and others take all day to try to master. I've come up with my own system of testing out small amounts of batter before I cook all of the batter, in case it doesn't work-- I can still try to salvage the remaining batter. This week I was working on Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies...which I am still not satisfied with, after 3 different batches.

Usually I will start with a little research by looking at similar recipes. The thing you really want to pay attention to is the ratio of of eggs to flour, did they need baking soda, etc. Then I take into consideration that I am usually cooking with almond butter, or coconut flour, which changes the dynamic of the batter. When using almond butter, you usually need less oils or liquids, but more leavening than when you use traditional flour. When using coconut flour, you will need ALOT of eggs to avoid a crumbly chalky mess.

I'll head to the kitchen and whip together a batter (make sure to write ingredients down). On the menu today: Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies. I'll bake a few individual serving and wait for them to cool, which is the hard part...the waiting-- but the taste really will change once cooled. My first round of peanut butter cookies were alright, but not what I was expecting:


So that's when you go back to the drawing board trying to fix whatever it was that you didn't like. My cookies were too bitter, peanut butter can get bitter once cooked if you don't add enough sweetener. So I added more stevia and honey, I thought about adding molasses-- but decided to try it without it and made another individual serving.


Still not my favorite-- maybe now add the molasses and more peanut butter, and re-bake a batch. It just turns into a trial and error, which can be very time consuming. Now the reason why I advise making a few individual servings is that after eating enough peanut butter dough...your taste buds are kind out of it and need a break. I've found that the best tasting occurs the next day-- when the flavors have settled and cooled. The next day I realized that the first round of peanut butter cookies I made that day were my favorite out of all of them, even though I didn't like them at the time. Which is unfortunate cause I made a bunch of third round cookies that weren't my favorite- lol. But really now, how bad could a peanut butter chocolate chip cookie be...?