okidoki

i'm trying, i'm trying to finalise the recipe for jeffrey cookies. but just to play with the recipe, i included some white chocolate chips this time. you can see it in the dough, but not quite in the baked cookie.
i'm feeling my way into getting the right amount of salt in the recipe. (i only recently realised that my recipe didn't use salt; either i accidentally deleted it along the way, or i never used it.) still, the butter to sugar to flour proportion seems to be correct now.

and then i made some whole-wheat brioche, because i found some good butter on sale and bought lots of it to store. the recipe for these comes from peter reinhart. brioche refers to rich, buttery white bread, so this whole-wheat version almost doesn't make sense. still, it's nice to eat a fatty bread that's whole-wheat.
the biga and the soaker. one is whole-wheat flour with lots of eggs. the other is whole-wheat flour with lots of melted butter. so much that it makes you scared.
getting the fridge-cold pre-doughs to mix into the final dough was quite difficult. the cold pre-doughs were quite hard, especially the one with all the butter. but after a while everything came together.
divided the dough and preshaped the pieces into balls. reinhart's method of shaping the brioches à tête ensures that the head stays in the centre all the time. first you roll the ball into a cone shape, then make a hole in the fatter end. then, you push the cone end through the hole to form the nub of dough in the centre. then pan them in (my newly bought!) brioche à tête molds. i think the size of the dough was a little too big for the mold though. but i'm very excited about these molds because it took me so long to find them. now i can finally make perfect brioches à tête with fluted sides.
puff, puff, puff. the brioches grew (and outgrew the molds). so they sagged a little on the edges. but overall, very pretty, very buttery-smelling, very golden, very crusty.
i have a dilemma. i don't know if i should be eating the $2.50 breakfast set at mcdonald's anymore. you see, it was a $2 set initially: sausage mcmuffin and coffee. to change the drink to milo, you have to add 35 cents. now, it's a $2.50 set: sausage mcmuffin and premium brew coffee. (correct me if i'm wrong,) it still costs 35 cents to change the drink to milo. isn't there a problem here? it's like saying the milo has also been upgraded to premium brew milo or something, such that to change the drink to this 'new' milo you have to make the some amount of payment (when in fact the milo has been salient in this change of menu and cost).