I wrote this on November 13, 2004. Thanks to Zed for suggesting the title.
Question of the day: when is it a good idea to use a hammer as a kitchen tool? Answer: probably never, but I'm not about to let that stop me.
This all came about as fallout from the brownie project of a couple of weeks ago. I found myself with some leftover ingredients, such as a couple of eggs, some butter, and plenty of flour and sugar. So I decided that baking chocolate chip cookie bars would be a good way to dispose of the leftovers.
Now, one of the ingredients of chocolate chip cookie dough is brown sugar. No problem, I thought; I've had some of that in the kitchen for months. Well, that is part of the problem. When you leave brown sugar in the kitchen for months, particularly hot and humid summer months such as we get in New Jersey, anyone with more common sense than myself (i.e., most people) could tell you that it's going to harden into a solid block. (One of my friends suggested storing it in the freezer, which actually seems like a good idea and which I will do after this.)
So the smart thing to do would have been to walk to the grocery store that's 15 minutes down the street and buy some more brown sugar. But first of all, I very rarely do the smart thing, and secondly, I was rather annoyed at this sugar for not being usable, and third and most importantly, if I'd done that, there would have been no story to tell.
This is where the trusty old hammer comes in. Place the block of sugar in a metal bowl, and WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! -- smash the sucker into mid-sized chunks. After that, I take a big wooden spoon and pound and grind at the chunks in mortar-and-pestle fashion, until they start to re-pulverize. From time to time, run the contents of the bowl through the flour sifter, to separate out the bits that are sufficiently granular. Return the larger chunks to the bowl, pound away with the wooden spoon some more, and watch the chunks become smaller and less numerous with each repetition. Et voila, as Julia Child probably wouldn't say, after just about an hour, the large lump of sugar is returned to a proper powdery state.
Now, you can probably think of skiddledy-nine reasons why this was not at all a good idea, and to be honest, so can I. That's not the point. The point was that I had it in for this block of sugar and was determined to teach it a lesson. And the cookies came out pretty darned good if I do say so myself. Which just goes to show that there's not much you can't acomplish if you're too stubborn to give up on a bad idea.
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