h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Spiced Pumpkin Cookies: A Holiday Treat - A87923604
Author: Dmitri Gheorgheni - U1590784

Thanksgiving Day was yesterday. This means we enjoy that annual bounty from the Hoggett Farm, the New Recipe.

This treat was invented by Farmer Hoggett, who is an A+ cookie baker when he's not feeding livestock, running the tractor, or repairing automobiles.

Yes, we get pumpkins over here. They appear a few weeks before Halloween, then disappear. I'd never heard of 'pumpkin spice', but the mixture of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves is a classic one.

Here, we're making Christmas cakes, those of us who bake. The classic British Christmas cake is made well before Christmas, contains masses of dried fruit and nuts and is occasionally 'fed' with spoonfuls of sherry or brandy.

You've done well providing metric equivalents to your cups, but I don't know what you mean by 'yellow cake mix'. There are plenty of cake mixes available but I use the old fashioned technique of beating butter and flour together. (You can do this in a mixer)

This will be an asset to the h2g2 Guide indeed, for the Pumpkin Spice translation alone Plus given that we have such an awesome pumpkin carving Entry A462188 we can never have too many recipes for using up the pumpkin innards Here is another one A42253562

Now to measurements A87797867 What is cc? Given that it is metric, I presume the first c is 'centi' but I find I don't know what the second c stands for... I had heard of it in connection with motorbike engines, but didn't realise breast implants were also described in ccs so I stopped googling after that 1 cup is 240ml, so 2 cups would be 480ml? 2/3 cup would be 160ml - ah, I see cc is ml and there is just a tiny typo in the 'flour' line Nice use of the 'approximately equal to' sign

Yes, 'yellow cake mix' is intriguing - makes me think there exists a 'pink cake mix' etc...

While I enjoy the snark in footnote 2, it is not quite correct I'll give you monolingual but only in the sense that biscuits are biscuits and cookies are cookies - these don't look like biscuits (hard flat things) to me as they look soft and chunky. In fact they may even look so chunky I'd call them 'scones', which means you would call them biscuits!

How many does this recipe make?

I googled yellow cake mix and got this:

homemade yellow cake mix
2 1/4 c all-purpose flour.
1 1/2 c granulated sugar.
3 1/2 tsp. baking powder.
1 tsp. salt.
1 1/4 c milk.
1/8 c vegetable oil.
1 stick butter, softened.
1 tbsp. vanilla extract.

I'm not sure this helps. What's a 'stick'of butter?

I'll take out the anti-British snark, if you insist. I was just 'funning with ya', as they say in the hills.

The problem with the word 'biscuits' is that in the US, a biscuit looks like this and is not sweet:

http://www.southernliving.com/recipes/buttermilk-biscuits

It is a bread. It sustained my ancestors for several centuries. Everything else is a cookie.

A cc is a 'cubic centimeter'. As stated in the footnote, the physicist (Mrs Hoggett) insisted on volumetric measurements. She says she gave out this assignment in class for decades: to convert a recipe to the metric system. The students invariably returned with the question, 'What do we do about the eggs?'

This recipe uses a cake mix for convenience - that was the point. I'm not putting in a scratch cake recipe. However, I did some research into what a yellow cake mix is abroad. I never thought about 'yellow cake mix' being a problem. I'll add a footnote.

PS Oh, a stick of butter. Here's a photo and conversion chart for sticks of butter.

http://www.errenskitchen.com/cooking-conversions/us-sticks-butter-conversion-charts/

Before any more quibbles arise: No. That is not butter. It is margarine.

Let me do a bit of fiddling, then see what you think.

Okay, I think I dealt with the problems but for the following:

1. I shall have to ask Hoggetts how many cookies the recipe made. I'll put the answer in after church tomorrow.

2. A scientist says 'cc'' are all right. If cc's aren't all right, which ones do you want changed, and to precisely what? (I didn't know that about breast implants, but it makes sense. ) According to the two scientists who built this recipe, grams is wrong because you should not be weighing flour and such. You should be using a volumetric measurement. If a cubic centimeter is a milliliter, I suppose we could use ml?

3. I put in a footnote about the yellow cake mix. I'm not putting in a whole cake recipe. But I searched, and the Guide's cake recipes don't include a basic traditional sponge. So....

MVP: could you throw that one together for the Guide? It would be a good basic go-to recipe to link to in every cookie-and-cake-related entry.

Cubic centimeters, of course... Yes, cc should be ml (ml is the usual unit for recipes )

Interesting - in the Q family we use sticks of butter for baking - the most famous brand is called Stork and is quite readily available. Good footnote about the traditional sponge mix, and that is fascinating that there is no basic sponge recipe in the Guide - hopefully mvp can help indeed

Ah, of course scones/biscuits have sort of straight sides so they are easy to break into two halves, so these aren't scones. I wasn't objecting to the snark, but I was objecting to you calling cookies biscuits... Maybe you can redo the snark to make passing reference to biscuits because it is good for search engines, but you can emphasise that these are not biscuits as they are not hard, flat things

Aha! See, we call them 'cookies' whether they're hard, thin, and flat, or soft, fluffy, and pillow-like...it's more than a vocabulary exchange, then! It's a semantic area overlap. Think Venn diagram. I'll see what I can do, then.

Okay, rewrite done. See if this meets requirements. If it doesn't, I'll keep tweaking.

And tomorrow, I will ask about how many cookies this recipe makes. Or how many Farmer Hoggett had before NT blew into the kitchen like a hungry tornado. I should have asked before.

Thanks for the help on this! You wouldn't think this international recipe business was rocket science, but it almost is...

Perfect footnotes!

"Or how many Farmer Hoggett had before NT blew into the kitchen like a hungry tornado."



Yes, I certainly learn more from these recipe Entries than expected - great for the Guide

A basic sponge cake recipe? I'll have a think and look into this... without eating too much

Sounds like a good recipe. Unfortunately I have never seen flour being measured in ml, it is *always* measured in gramms. Just like sugar.

Yes, but since they don't weigh the same, you can't get there from here. Hence annoyed physicist.

You can't just put it into a measuring cup?

I am going to add a footnote with a link to a converter.

Footnote added. More science. This is fun!

This is the beauty of cookery : it combines art and science.
My husband remembers lectures by Professor Nicholas Kurti, a distinguished physicist who delighted in applying scientific methods to cooking!

I remember that someone used to say, 'Cooking is chemistry.'

I googled 'Nicholas Kurti recipes' and got this from the Guardian, along with some information about microwave ovens and the speed of light....

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2003/oct/18/foodanddrink.shopping

Thanks for the tip!

I wouldn't know where I could get a measuring cup!

Ah, you mean a normal one, not a cup-cup...

You don't need a measuring cup - just use the same cup for everything, and the proportions always stay the same.

Growing up, we always used the cup with the broken handle.