![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Makin' Cookies with Math
Mar. 29th, 2011 09:34 pmI'm the dog's bollocks at dividing dough into equal portions (assuming "the dog's bollocks" means "terrible"). Told to create 24 equal portions, I will wind up with 12 golf balls, 11 ping pong balls, and a marble, which means the perfect baking time will be impossible to determine. For the sugar cookies I just made, I decided to put my lovely new kitchen scale to work tackling the problem.
I had mixed up the mass of dough in one bowl. I put another, empty, bowl on the scale, then zeroed it out. I moved the dough into the empty bowl, and got a reading of 2 pounds ½ oz. I then removed dough until I had 1 pound ¼ oz. on the scale, then again to get to 8⅛ oz., then once more to a smidge over 4 oz. Repeating this process with the other half and quarter gave me eight equal portions; all I had to do then was divide each of those in thirds, checking the weight of each to see if it was between 1¼ and 1⅜ oz. Voilà!
They are delicious, and remarkably similar. Next week on Makin' Cookies with Math: How to mix 1% milk and half-and-half to get something with the fat content of whole milk!
I had mixed up the mass of dough in one bowl. I put another, empty, bowl on the scale, then zeroed it out. I moved the dough into the empty bowl, and got a reading of 2 pounds ½ oz. I then removed dough until I had 1 pound ¼ oz. on the scale, then again to get to 8⅛ oz., then once more to a smidge over 4 oz. Repeating this process with the other half and quarter gave me eight equal portions; all I had to do then was divide each of those in thirds, checking the weight of each to see if it was between 1¼ and 1⅜ oz. Voilà!
They are delicious, and remarkably similar. Next week on Makin' Cookies with Math: How to mix 1% milk and half-and-half to get something with the fat content of whole milk!
