Usually, when a recipe fails, it is because the person cooking/baking didn't actually follow the recipe. Every once in a while, you run into a recipe that just sucks. This is a story about one of those. A week ago, I was flipping through some Southern Dessert compilation magazine and they had a recipe for teacakes. Teacakes are not actual cakes, they're cookies. I guess they're a Southern thing. The only time I can ever recall having a teacake was when I worked at Cou-yon's. Our boss traded a guy a plate of BBQ for the teacakes he was selling. And they were good. They weren't crunchy, a bit soft, but still crumbly. I remember commenting at the time that it'd compliment a sweet potato filling really well. So when I saw this recipe, I had that in mind. However, the recipe called for seven cups of flour and I thought that'd be a bit much to make for this house hold with two people in it.
I looked for another recipe and came across
Paula Deen's Southern Teacakes. When I look up recipes online, I always like to read the reviews, see who didn't follow the recipe, see how many reviews there are. I mean, a recipe with one five star review isn't necessarily as good as a recipe with 50 reviews adding up to 4 1/2 stars. I always poke around and look at alternatives and compare. I decided to stick with Paula's because of all the "It tastes like my grandma/aunt/church lady's teacakes" comments. I was hoping I'd get similar results.
Well, I didn't. I should have been suspicious of the brevity of the instructions. They're barely a paragraph long! No mention of creaming the butter and sugar. It reminds me of asking a kid to write instructions for a peanut butter and jelly. Put the peanut butter and jelly on bread and you have a sandwich. Ok, but how?
The recipe calls for two sticks of softened butter, 2 eggs and a half a cup of buttermilk and only four cups of flour. It mentions that the dough will be soft. More like completely unworkable for what comes next. There was just no way in hell that soft sticky dough was going to be turned out on a floured board, rolled, cut with a cookie cutter and put on a pan. But, skeptical as I was, I tried it anyway. The dough stuck to everything. I floured my cookie cutter, it stuck. I criscoed my cookie cutter, it stuck. I wasn't even able to get the excess dough from around my shapes because it was too soft! Clearly, it needed either more flour or to be chilled in the fridge and with that much butter. Though, I still couldn't see it working well after chilling without more flour.
Now, the funny thing is, I went back to the Southern baking magazine and do you know what their recipe calls for? Everything that's in Paula's recipe with the exact measurements, except it calls for 7 cups of flour instead of 4. I should have gone with that one to begin with. I had to work in more flour and stick it in the freezer and I'm still not sure if I will have anything worth eating. I wasn't very thrilled with my test batch of sticky dough. The two cookies I had came out so gooey. The flavor is pretty much standard sugar cookie. Basically, it's disappointing in so many ways. It's not like I changed any part of the recipe. I did add a bit of nutmeg, to attempt to get that spicy taste I remembered, but that's it.
I'm baking up the fortified dough that I had in the freezer now, but I'm already so disappointed with these teacakes, I don't know if I want to eat them. I hate it when a recipe falls through. The last time I had this happen, it was also a cookie recipe and also had issues with the butter. Basically, it was all butter and a ridiculously small amount of flour, and the cookies, if you could call them that, turned into melted puddles of butter in the oven. I had never been so pissed at a cookie recipe before. But now I'm having similar feelings of disgust. Now I'm going to mope around being grumpy all night. Stupid teacakes. Now I'll be stuck on the hunt for the perfect teacake recipe. The "perfect" recipe of anything can be so elusive!
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