Month: February 2005

The other request besides to make it less sweet was to make some with nuts. I’ve already made my position on nuts in cookies abundantly clear, but “the customer is always right”. So tonight I added some pecans and left out some of the sugar. Before I got to explain the changes my wife had already eaten half of one and said, “I don’t know why they are complaining, it’s not that sweet.” So I guess that’s a good sign. 4 dozen made, but they are a bit bigger than yesterday because I’m using a measuring scoop to make the cookies more uniform in size, but it’s a bit more dough than when I did it by hand.

Sold 28 of the cookies I made yesterday, though most of the rest of the batch went as samples. Still comments that they are too sweet, so will try again with less sugar. Still, encouraging.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2005/02/01/2003221789/print

(If you don’t get the joke, you’re too young or too old or something.)

Made up a batch of 5 dozen oatmeal raisin cookies. Maggie wants to try selling them to her customers, so this is a trial run. The feedback I got from the batches last week is that they were too big, and they didn’t like chocolate too much. But everyone liked the sound of oatmeal raisin, so this time made that and made them the smaller 2.5-3 inch diameter size. We’ll see how these ones go over.

Maggie brought home some cookies from another bakery that I thought weren’t nearly as good. They had a bit of an off flavor like they used bad oil or something. And the brownie they had once again was quite disappointing. But in any case, that kind of gave me a baseline idea of what to compete against, and how much handmade cookies go for here (it was more than I expected).

I was able to find American style brown sugar (the soft kind) at Wellman’s in Tianmu, but since I still had a bit left from the open package of the Taiwanese kind, most of the brown sugar in this batch was still the local kind.

God knows I’ve been to enough McDonald’s in a lot of different places. Besides the core menu items being pretty much the same everywhere, the other constant at McDonald’s is that the Number 1 meal is the one with the Big Mac. I honestly can’t remember it being any other way. So color me surprised when I amble on over to the local McD’s today and notice that they’ve renumbered the menu here. They’ve done it in ascending price order, which means that the Big Mac meal now rings in at Number 4. The Number 1 place is now occupied by the McChicken. While this may seem like a little thing, I wonder how much sales of Big Macs will decline with this change?

Besides that they’ve also gone and copied Mos Burger and added two rice burgers to the menu. A rice burger uses patties of rice instead of a bun. The new ones are fried chicken breast and spicy chicken breast rice burgers. Given the complete and utter failure of their curry rice dishes last year (mainly because they tasted awful), I’m gonna stick with Mos Burger when I want a rice burger.