Brainless

So I haven't had the best day. My brain is moving at about half of its normal speed, which is already borderline roadhogging, so it's a wonder I made it home at all.

I had a sluggish day at work: yesterday morning I flung out 10 news stories for the website in half a day and felt pretty pleased about it (there are many things you can write about Australia not being in a recession). Today, in the same period, I managed to plod to five, scratching desperately for any angle that hadn't been overused by the mainstream press.

Then I was supposed to pump through a one-page report on the China Australia Business Congress I attended a couple of weeks ago for the magazine and it seriously took about 2.5 hours instead of half an hour.

Then I held back a sneeze and felt my eye pop. It was weird.

So I got sniffly and my head fogged up so I dismissed myself for the day (at about 4:30pm mind you, so not that much of an early mark) and shuffled homeward.

I'd brought with me a package to send to my friends in Finland as it is their wedding anniversary soon, and also I haven't sent them gifts I bought from my recent trip to Japan, and also there's a birthday thrown in there. So I went to the post office and found a suitable tough bag to put the shoebox of stuff in, paid for the bag and the postage and proceeded to address it.

I'd forgotten to bring the address. I thought I had it in my diary but apparently that was last year's diary. I even remembered most of the address, right down to the spelling of the street (no mean feat in Finnish) but could not for the life of me remember which number was the street address and which was the apartment number.

So I trudged home in the rain, parcel under arm, knowing it would be another day late to the post. I felt like shit, particularly because it wasn't really raining or even drizzling, just that really annoying spitting that doesn't justify an umbrella but gets everything damp anyway.

At the intersection before my place I got annoyed at a young chap in a hoodie dawdling down the footpath, dithering about whether to cross the road, only when I got closer I saw it was an old lady hunched into her fleece jacket stepping carefully around the wet spots on the footpath and I felt ashamed for even contemplating saying something nasty like "sometime today might be nice".

I got home, was pleased to get home, ate two choc fudge cookies without thinking about it (had previously vowed to eat healthy on account of being on the brink of having a cold). Cursed self. Had half a glass of juice with vitamin C in and a large mug of honey and apple cider vinegar 'tea'. Made and ate a big salad while reading Speakeasy #10, at which point my mood lifted considerably.

I don't remember the natural remedies to treat an oncoming cold, just the tricks to soothe a sore throat. Amazingly the lurgy I have has not carpe jugulum just yet so I feel a good sleep tonight may throw it off.

I will be SHIP SHAPE for this coming long weekend. Because I DESERVE the long weekend.

More about chocolate

One of the designers is leaving on Friday so I decided to make some cookies for her from the (American) chocolate recipe book that everyone pooled together and bought me for my birthday last month. (Also because I need to redeem myself for sending all my pages in late this issue, but that's a boring story).

Apart from having to convert all the measurements, everything went quite well so I now have a massive batch of 'Confetti Fudge Cookies' ready to share.

By volume, the three top ingredients of 'Confetti Fudge Cookies' are:
* Cooking chocolate
* M&Ms
* Cocoa powder

In other words:
* Chocolate
* Chocolate
* Chocolate

I think it is safe to say that 'The Everything Chocolate Cookbook' is not a tome for dieters.

No such thing as Anzac cookies

The first thing I ever made all by myself was Anzac biscuits. I was driven to do my own baking for two significant reasons: one, most commercial Anzac biscuits were crunchy; and two, all commercial Anzac biscuits contained coconut.

With the help of Family Circle: Irresistible Biscuits, Cookies & Shortbread (Murdoch Books, 1993), I developed a modified recipe for chewy Anzac biscuits consisting of no coconut but more oats and half the sugar but an extra 1/2 tablespoon of golden syrup. I brought these into work on Tuesday and they were enjoyed by all.

The other day a gift arrived from a PR company. The package contained Anzac cookies. Now, I'm the kind of person who calls a spade a spade and a cookie a cookie. Anzac biscuits ARE NEVER COOKIES. This is not some anti-American spiel against cookies, it is a recognition of the sad indictment that is poor education encompassing both the meaning of words and culinary difference.

In general, biscuits are hard and you should be able to munch on them noisily (unless they are chewy Anzacs...). They are generally flat in appearance as their ability to 'rise' is NOT a key factor in their making. If you were to break them, you would be able to snap them off. Biscuits can be sweet or savoury.

Cookies are 'little cakes', which means they are doughy. They are always sweet. If you were to break them they would crumble. Their key characteristic is that they have more 'air' in them and thus tend to be puffy or chunky.

Anzac biscuits are never and have never been cookies. When the recipe was developed last century, the women who invented them didn't even know what cookies were, as they would have come from Anlgo-Saxon stock which exclusively dealt with biscuits. Even mine, which are chewy rather than crunchy, do not become cookies because of that trait.

What would need to happen to Anzac biscuits to turn them into Anzac cookies? Well, the Anzacs never ate cookies so whatever modification made to the biscuit recipe to make cookies would render the Anzac adjective redundant. Perhaps Anzac biscuit-like cookies would be more accurate? Oatmeal cookies are probably most similar to Anzac biscuits and the main difference in the result probably comes from the beating of the butter and sugar (making the mixture fluffy) before adding the other ingredients.

By the way, I make cookies too. I like them and I'm getting pretty good at making them. I just hate the term 'Anzac cookies'.

P.S: According to my analysis, this means that the 'cookies' you get at McDonald's – the little kiddie ones you get in the box that are shaped like McDonald's characters – are actually biscuits.