#kitchen science

Nobody can stop me from adding vodka to the Ecto Cooler I just made.

I don’t know if you bake, but I do, and I’ve been experimenting with the cookie recipe of my dreams. What I know so far is that Pop Rocks don’t bake off well, and that steeping bacon-flavored coffee in browned butter makes the whole apartment smell like melted football.

What I’m looking for is a base recipe that will allow me to make the thiccest possible cookie.

I am not talking about spread. I do not want a cookie puddle, or some crispy/sandy nonsense. I want a chewy monstrosity larger than my fist. I want this thing to be the pxrn-star of cookies.

I want a TALL BOI with CHEW.

I want people to look at it and say, ‘Dude, that is an unnecessary amount of cookie. It is too much cookie.’

And I want to look them in the eye, unhinge my jaw, and take a bite of the cookie behemoth.

Pinterest has not helped me.

You are my only hope.

I’m assuming I’ll need a metric behonkus of baking soda, but like--any other tips? Advice? Family recipes?

Orange Orchard soap and my preferred recipe, although I have a few variations for a slower trace etc. This makes a nice long lasting bubbly bar although the wheatgerm oil does make it a little yellow, which is fine with orange colours. I would swap it for sweet almond oil if I wanted a white base to do blues or purples with.

This article is one of a series of Experiments meant to teach students about how science is done, from generating a hypothesis to designing an experiment to analyzing the results with statistics. You can repeat the steps here and compare your results — or use this as inspiration to design your own experiment.

Making rock candy at home requires just two ingredients — water and sugar. A lot of sugar, as I found out when I ran a rock candy experiment in 2018 (and ran out of the sweet stuff). Most recipes recommend using about three times as much sugar as water. That’s so much, it seems like a waste. To see if I could get away with less, I ran another experiment.

Spoiler: Less sugar is not the answer.

In my previous experiment, I showed that seed crystals are very important for creating rock candy. Putting a few grains of sugar on a stick or string promotes the formation of bigger crystals. This speeds up the candy-making.

I had calculated that to make enough rock candy for that experiment, I would need to fill 52 plastic cups with a sugar solution. But the candy recipe used more sugar than I was expecting and I quickly ran out. That’s because the recipe required one kilogram (8 cups) of sugar for every 300 grams (2.7 cups) of water. That’s a sugar-to-water ratio of 3:1. In the end, I had to run my experiment with only 18 plastic cups.

After hesitating for several years, I finally got my hands into this book!

 What do propellers and beer have in common?

On chicken dinos, natch. Findings below the cut.