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Valerie

Baking with Intuition

There is the saying "women's intuition," but I think there is also baking intuition. When you've been baking for a long time, you just kind of know when something is done. Don't get me wrong, I still use the timer on the oven because I often venture to do other things like laundry or dishes or sometimes I just completely forget I put something in the oven (not even kidding).


Last week, a few days before Christmas, I was getting ready to bake Christmas cookies with my husband and kids. I started a batch of sugar cookies, a recipe that I've been using for at least 12+ years without fail. I made sure to use fresh ingredients because the week before I made cookies and they tasted fine, but spread like crazy. Anyway, the dough was perfect and I was baking the first tray to make sure everything was right. The cookies not only spread, but they burned like crazy. I was so upset, but decided to mess with the dough as maybe I didn't put enough of something in. I may have made the problem worse, but in the end, the cookies were terrible - dry, crunchy, burned, etc...


I was truly upset. I knew something was wrong with the oven. It wasn't even two years old which made me mad. I won't slander any brands but I will say it was a pricey double oven range with convection. My husband went to the store for me to buy an oven thermometer. Upon his return, we tested it. Sure enough, we'd set the oven for 350F and the oven was going over 500F. Before doing anything rash, I contacted a repair technician and he said it was most likely a bad control board since the oven was so young and based on the brand. We priced out the parts to fix this thing and it was over $200 for the parts needed and it wasn't something I wanted to tackle, so a repairman would be another $100 easy. Do I invest $300 in an oven that's never really been awesome or invest that $300 into something I like.


Three days before Christmas, we made the decision to buy a new range. I looked on Consumer Reports which recommended LG and Samsung ranges, so that's what we hunted for at first. The stores had NONE. We were told it would be 3-4 months before those were in stock again. So, onto the next brand recommendation - Frigidaire. The salesperson showed up a nice Frigidaire range and it looked nice. I liked that the knobs were metal, not cheap plastic, and that it came with the griddle for the center burner. It also was convection and had an air fryer feature. Nice. As I essentially told him to go away so I could play with it, I checked it out on the Consumer Reports website. It gave it a good score, so we decided to spend the money. The best part is that it was on SALE! We did opt for the extra 5 year warranty because I am NOT buying another range in 2 years.


It was delivered on Christmas Eve and you know I got to baking as soon as I could. Cookies were made that night for Santa and then I made some the next morning for my family.


The overall message of this post - Trust your instincts especially about your oven. :)



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