My recommendation, when baking with butter, is to take out the butter well before you plan to bake. Put it in a bowl on the counter, cover it as well to avoid attracting pests, and leave it for a few hours – for example, take it out, go to work, then come home and bake.

“Proofing” dough is the process of allowing the gluten production to complete, allowing the dough to take a more solid yet more elastic form than it does initially. It’s generally done in a cool, dry place – so if you’ve stuck pastry dough in the fridge, you’ve proofed dough before. Tempering chocolate is technically a different process – it’s heating chocolate to the correct temperature range to encourage the polar bodies within chocolate to line up, which both gives chocolate a nice luster as well as a crisp snap when it’s bitten into, both producing a much nicer mouthfeel when eating the chocolate.

In retrospect I don’t think I’ve ever made cookies with room temperature butter. I get impatient and either use it straight from the fridge or perhaps don’t leave it long enough. >.< (You should see what I do with the butter for cakes, I… let's just say it involves a microwave. I know, I'm ashamed.)

My baking terminology is lacking here: Is proofing cookie dough, similar to tempering chocolate? Does it mean I have to leave it in the fridge as with pastry?

I will give this a go once I know, I think! Thanks a lot! :D

That said, I do good cookies. I generally have fairly buttery cookies, and I’ve discovered that how you treat your butter determines how your cookies will come out. There are two parts to this.

The first part is, you should have your butter at or just below room temperature before you start making your cookie dough. Butter needs to completely blend with all of the ingredients, the sugars need to cut into the butterfat in order to create the proper texture and not create mini-friers, and the flour needs to mix just enough to begin gluten production. Butter that’s too cold is too hard, and butter that’s too hard will not blend with the other ingredients properly.

The second part is, you need to proof your cookie dough. Cookies may not require the sheer amount of gluten that bread does, but keep in mind the much lower moisture amount in cookie dough (since most of the moisture comes from the butter and eggs, as opposed to water or milk). A properly proofed dough will result in better gluten formation, which will yield a softer, chewier cookie. The process for proofing cookie dough isn’t as long – 4-24 hours, as opposed to up to 48 for certain types of bread dough. One further advantage is that because the butter in the dough is cooler, it spreads out less when baking.

I’ll mix it up a bit depending on how I want my cookies to come out – I like a little crisp to my chocolate chip cookies, so I don’t proof those, but I do a full 24-hour proof for ginger snaps. But definitely, it’s all in the temperatures at which butter is treated that determine just how a cookie will come out.

Uh… And on the cookies related note, seeing as you really ARE a chef… they always grow to twice the size I expected, bleed together on the silicon lining, stick together and yet they’re still go too hard and dry. :/ I can do cupcakes and pastries and everything no bother (okay I lie, pastry is difficult), but for some reason this always happens when I attempt cookies and I have no idea why. I’ve tried varying the mixture (like trying non-milk based cookies) or just using less dough but it still happens.

Now, as for your other part… well, I just spent the better part of an hour going over things. I see you and several other people are a bit confused.

This blog is a gift from a friend of mine, who I presume is running this alternate reality game that you and the others are playing. This friend asked several months back if I wanted a blog, since they knew how much I liked talking about food. I agreed, and I started this up. I did forget about it for a while until I was reminded about it, probably around when the game actually got going. I felt a bit embarrassed about forgetting about the blog, but I figured I might as well catch up with it.

I’ll admit that some of the ideas that were put up here did come to mind after chatting with my friend – probably intentionally planting ideas in my head. As I’m sure you noticed, that’s not exactly hard to do. Though some of the things you guys came up with were way off-base, like the Japanese knife. I bought it a couple years ago. It’s a santoku knife from the Edo collection by Shun. You can buy them for about $200 each online, along with other style knives in the same collection.

I hope you understand that I won’t join in on the game you’re playing, for several reasons. One being that it’d be a bit unfair to have someone close to the people running the game join in on the player’s side. For another, you obviously have a ton of stuff to go through – I can’t imagine trying to take all of that in at once. Finally, I could see that game eating my life even more effectively than TV Tropes would, and I have real life friendships I want to maintain. That said, I do hope that you and the others keep reading this blog – I have had fun working on the recipes that you’ve all suggested, and I hope that you liked the recipe ideas I’ve given out.

Two last notes. One, if you really wanted to catch my attention via TV Tropes, you probably should have picked a page that would have described my blog much better than In Vino Veritas. Two, now I know why my friend was mentioning limeade the other day.

I admit, I did take a quick peek at that page. But since the top says it’s about how someone’s “true personality” comes out when they’re drunk, and I’ve never talked about being drunk at all on this blog – and I certainly don’t advocate it – I don’t think it applies, and I honestly didn’t bother reading the page through. Beyond it not applying, again, I don’t want to lose a day to reading various entries on the site.

As for the part about cookies, I’ve made dozens of different varieties of cookies over the years. I actually first started cooking by baking cookies. Lime cookies have been in there somewhere along the years, but after a certain point, all the cookies start blurring together. Just what went wrong with the lime cookies you tried last time? I can give advice on what you did wrong if you give me more details.

On an unrelated note, have you ever tried making Lime Cookies? I spoiled the last batch I tried to make, but with your cooking skills, I think it’s awesome enough to work.

:(

Look, I like doing recipes, and I do sometimes take inspiration from fiction. But like I said, I’m no Iron Chef – I can’t just take any idea, or any ingredient, and turn it into something. I wouldn’t even call myself a chef – I’m a cook, and I like to think that I’m a decent cook, but I do know my limits.

I don’t know why you’re so tied to Sherlock Holmes, anyhow. Even if you’re restricting yourself to detectives, the mystery genre is huge. Why not just pick a different fictional detective? Like that guy from the Oriental Express… I think he liked to eat a lot. I’m sure there’s plenty of inspiration elsewhere.