It has been raining all weekend, so I decided this was a good time to do some baking. My snickerdoodle project started out just fine: I had Nigella's recipe, which I followed faithfully, measuring ingredients while my fantastic new stand mixer did all of the hard labor. The flour that I grabbed from the pantry did seem a little lumpy, but I was not worried.
The first sign of trouble came when the round balls of cookie dough refused to flatten into nice normal cookie shapes, even after 15 minutes in the oven. A few also had mysterious cracks along the tops. Something was amiss. When I tasted them, they weren't horrible, they just didn't taste like they should have. They were kind of dry, they were misshapen and they kept falling apart. That's when I decided to look more closely at the flour and discovered that the use-by date was June 2004. (This shows you how often I bake.) I did some research and found out that flour actually does expire - you're not supposed to keep it for longer than six months. OOPS. I'm not discouraged though, I just need to try again, with non-ancient flour. I will conquer the snickerdoodle recipe!
2 comments:
You should try smelling the flour before using it. Sometimes you can tell if a food is sour by doing that.
Yes, like the time I saved you from pouring sour milk all over your cereal! :-P
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