I love my thunderstick

2003-05-08 - 12:27 p.m.

No, this is NOT a dirty entry ;-).

The thunderstick is a hand mixer that I bought off of an infomercial in the middle of the night after learning that I can use it to whip skim milk into a tasty dessert, whip water into a coffee house treat and make my own peanut butter.

Well, I did whip the skim milk and it's pretty damn good, but I couldn't whip water and I never made peanut butter. But nonetheless, the thunderstick is an incredibly useful product.

I use the chopper to make hummus, I use the food process or attachment to crush ice and strawberries for fresh daqueris and to make fresh salsa. I also use the blender to mix a variety of batters. I probably only use it once a month, at most, and the hummus is really the only important thing I make with it. But still, I like it.

The whole motivation behind it is that I used it last night to make cookie dough. I usually do it the old fashioned way - buy it in roll form at the supermarket. Okay, sometimes I'm more industrious than that and buy a mix. And sometimes I'm more industrious still and make them from scratch, but I get lazy and melt the butter before mixing it with the sugars and all. I then mix the rest together and wind up mashing the dough together with my hands because I either bend or break the spoon.

Well, not last night. I used the thunderstick and did everything right. I whipped up the softened butter and creamed in the sugars and pudding mix (they were chocolate chocolate chip cookies with a Soft Batch texture, hence the pudding mix). Let me tell you, there's not much tastier than butter with sugar whipped into it, except for maybe butter with sugar and pudding mix whipped in. I was even able to still use it when I added the baking powder and flour. This thing was just fantastic. I wound up with a creamy, smooth, even textured cookie dough. Normally I have lots of lumps.

And I'll tell you, this is some YUMMY dough! I ate a whole bunch of it during the baking process. Actually, it's some of the best cookie dough I've ever had, better than standard chocolate chip cookie dough.

It's too bad I can't say the same for the cookies. They're good and all, but I'm not crazy about them. The texture is too cake-y, not chewy cookie enough for my tastes. But they won't get too hard, they'll stay nice and soft thanks to the pudding :-). So in that respect they were the perfect cookies to make for my mommy for mother's day, since they were put into the mail today :-). I imagine they'll get there by Monday (at least that's what I'm hoping for).