Today I came across this site while I was searching for info on sourdough starters and recipes, and loved it! Baking is one of my favorite things to do, although I'm not very good at it yet.

 I have a sourdough starter that I made from a recipe on allrecipes.com two or three weeks ago. After four days of fermentation, I made sourdough bread, but it didn't taste very good. Today, I made more, and it tasted a lot more like sourdough bread. It was crumbly, though; doesn't that mean too much flour or something? I only let it rise for about two hours. Once in the bread machine, then I put it in two bread pans, then I let it rise again. It wasn't doubled, but I was impatient. It still tasted really good, it was just a bit heavy.

 I don't know if this site is just about baking bread or if you guys do cookies and stuff, too, but I'm going to write about them. I decided to make cookies sans recipe(I was bored), and I think I did pretty good for a first try. I creamed together about 3 T margerine (it's all that was left) and 1/4 cup each packed brown sugar and white sugar, and nuked it in the microwave for about 30 sec. Then I added 1/2 cup oats, and about 1/4 cup mini-marshmallows, although I don't think they really did anything. I microwaved that for maybe 2 min, and then added 3/4 tsp vanilla, 1 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp baking soda. I added another 1/2 cup oats, and maybe 1 cup flour, and lots of heath toffee chips. I baked three teaspoonfuls of this in the oven for 8-10 min, and the result was a flat, thick, chewy, candylike cookie. So I added more flour, and made one more. This one was a bit flat, but still okay, so I made a whole batch of these, but while they were baking, I added another 1/2 tsp of baking soda to the remaining dough, hoping that'd help with the flatness. When batch #2 came out, my dad suggested adding more flour. I wasn't sure, because the dough was already really hard to stir, but I did. Those ones came out nice and happy and more cookieish. I think they still could have used more flour, but I liked how they turned out.

That's all!

Adele