Biscotti-like Shortbread Cookies

Well, I made a disastrous first attempt at Shortbread Cookies last night.

I’ve been hurting pretty severely these last two weeks, and only sleeping about 4 hours a night, if that, so I’ve been prowling around trying to find things to distract me.  When I hurt this bad, it’s hard for me to do any one thing for very long.  I can’t concentrate to write, TV doesn’t hold my attention, and I can barely move, so gardening or anything physical is out.  I did read several Dean Koontz novels and both of the books by Patrick Rothfuss, so that helped some.  But I got the idea last night that I’d give shortbread cookies a shot.

For the record:  I cannot bake!  Now it’s not really something I worry about, but since I’m actually pretty good in the kitchen, it’s kind of embarrassing that I’m sooooooo bad at baking.

Chicken and dumplings, I rock.  Thanksgiving turkey, people rave.  Smoked bacon & chipotle bbq sauce on smoked tri-tip sandwiches, they line up around the block.  Shortbread Cookies?  The way mine turned out you could slap a coat of floor sealer on them and have a drink coaster that would last for eons.

I’m a “splash-of-this pinch-of-that” kind of guy when I cook.  I like flavorful food, and so spices are my friends.  I’ve got kind of an intuitive sense of how to season dishes and when something is fully cooked.  Don’t know where it came from, and haven’t really tried to hone it, but it’s there nonetheless.  If you want a great grilled steak, I’m your guy.  Stir-fry?  Look no further.  Baked goods?  Keep on walking.

A few years ago, well, maybe over a decade, my sister gave me a stand mixer.  (My sister, btw, is an absolutely phenomenally amazing cook and baker.  I’m just sayin’.)  However, her attempt to nudge me into baking with a really good mixer, failed.  The mixer looks cool on the counter, but in all these years I’ve never used it.  Not a single time.  I know, I know, what a waste; honestly, if you could see my face right now you’d see that I’m thoroughly ashamed!  And so, faced with mind-numbing pain and a cloak of shame, I slid the mixer into a more prominent position on the counter and assembled my ingredients.

As a side note:  I make really good chocolate chip cookies – I mean really, really good; and I don’t measure anything very carefully, but you can get away with that on chocolate chip cookies.  At least I have.

But in true baking, you need to measure, and measure carefully.  Paula Deen, I’ve been listening.  So I got everything ready, which was actually only three ingredients, and I let the disaster begin.

First, my butter was too cold when I put it into the mixer.  I missed the part where it was supposed to be room temperature.  So, step one, which was supposed to “cream” my butter, resulted in the wire mixer thingy getting filled with two sticks worth of cold, unmixed, completely congealed butter.  Refusing to admit that I could be that stupid, I carefully picked all the butter out of the wire mixer thingy, turned the mixer back on, and proved I really was that stupid since all the butter once again jumped inside that silly wire mixer thingy.  (Wire Mixer Thingy:  a hideously evil contraption that most people would identify as a whisk.)  Since by that time it hurt too much to stand, I took a break and let the butter reach room temperature while I tried to do the same.

So, a long while later (it took me longer to “cool off” than it did for the butter to “warm up”), I finally got back to it, deciding I would just throw the sugar in there to help “cut” the butter into the much-sought-after creamy stage.  And it kind of worked.  (Just FYI, Rascal does NOT like the sound the mixer makes.)

So, according to the directions I had printed out, my next step was to take my concoction and add in flour, mixing it by hand with a wooden spoon.  What?  Why use the mixer for anything in the first place?  I could have just nuked the butter and tossed in some sugar if I was gonna have to do the hardest part with my hand.  (People with RA do not hold wooden spoons very well.  And hand-mixing, forgetaboutit.)

So, after spending ages trying to scrape the “creamed” butter-sugar mixture off the satan-spawned wire mixer thingy, I added my flour.  I learned that the cookies are called “shortbread” because you add the smallest amount of flour you can until you reach the desired texture.  What I didn’t learn was what the “desired” texture really was.  But I winged it, figuring the right texture was the one I reached when my hands hurt too much to continue stirring.

Next, the directions told me to divide the mixture between 3, 8-inch round cake pans.  Um...  Well, since I never bake anything you can’t really expect me to have 3, 8-inch cake pans, now can you?  Or even anything resembling a cake pan, for that matter.  I did find a ceramic dish I use to make broccoli-rice-cheese casserole.  So, since it was good and deep, I just threw all the “dough” into there and pressed it down hard to flatten it out evenly.

The directions said 30 minutes at 325.  I know my way around a stove, so that part was easy – or should have been.  At the 30 minute mark my dough was still the color of raw flour and as goopy as soup.  I left it, checked it again in 5 minutes, then 5 more, then 10 more, still goop.  So, at the hour mark I said...well, my mom might read this so I’m not going to tell you what I said, but needless to say:  I gave up.

Much to my delight, the goopy mixture began to harden as it cooled.  Whoopee!  But it just kept hardening...and hardening...and hardening – is there a mathematical symbol for hardening to infinity?

Once I managed to chip them out of the dish (using a chisel and hammer), and broke them into pieces using an even larger hammer, my shortbread cookie (pieces) weren’t that bad.  Well, as long as you soaked them for half-an-hour in some coffee.

Shrug.  Did I mention I’m not so hot at the whole baking thing?  I did?  Good, because that should pretty much sum up the experience.

Inserting HTML Line Breaks

Something has always bugged me about my uploads to Amazon.  When I have Davina’s Magical Radio as a Word doc, it looks amazing, format-wise at least — would I lie to you?

But, I then convert it to html for Amazon, and they convert it to the Kindle format.  And — drumroll please — it doesn’t look so hot after that.  It’s kind of squished.  All the spaces are missing, like between the chapter title and the first line of that chapter.  No biggie in some ways, but looks like I don’t know what I’m doing — amateurish — which may be true, but I don’t want everyone to know.

And along comes the magic line-break.  Years ago, believe it or not, I knew HTML — way before it was even cool to know it.  I actually designed one of the first web pages for a city I contracted with — it wasn’t beautiful, but it was still one of the first.

However, html has flown from my brain, as have so many other fine tid-bits of info.  But I knew, deep, deep down, I knew there was a way to fix my line-break problem.

And last night I found it.  Now it is probably not the fastest way — those of you who really know html can go ahead and laugh, I really don’t mind — but it is A way.

I use/insert <br/> at the end of a line when I want a break before the next one.  I convert the Word doc to html, and then use Notepad to modify the html code.  It takes a long time to insert all the line breaks I want, but it makes my happy when I see the final result:  No more Squishy!

So, the next time you’re reading Davina’s Magical Radio on a Kindle, and you come to a pretty line break, you can say, “Not only did he write the book, he made it pretty for me too.”

Forgetting to Blog

Okay here is something I hate to admit, yet I’m doing it with a smile at the moment:  I seem to forget a lot of stuff these days.

I have 5 versions of Davina’s Magical Radio (master copy, print copy, 1 copy for each of the 3 major ebook-readers), so when I spot a formatting or grammatical error in one, I have to change it in every version.  Yet, here I am, a month of solid work on finding even the smallest errors (especially formatting), and I keep finding things that I know, or think I know, I’ve corrected before.  Often I will spot something wrong in one version, but when I check the others I’ve already fixed it there.

Most of the time I have every version open at the same time, and when I’m making an adjustment I go down the line and fix every version, so I have no idea how this keeps happening, other than I must simply forget what I’m doing right in the middle of doing it.  I hate to think that’s correct.  My family will have a field day because now when I make a comment about something I think should have been taken care of, they can say I never told them, or I forgot to tell them — a little mean on their part, but they may zone me out because I repeat myself, forgetting I’ve already said something.

Wow, all that is confusing.  I mean, I don’t have Alzheimer’s (thank Goodness), but for a guy who used to have an exception memory (one of the things I privately was very proud of), I now seem to be habitually forgetting things.

By the way, I haven’t posted about this already have I? — ha, ha.

Apparently I've been forgetting to blog lately too.  But I've been assembling some Indie publishing notes these last few weeks, so I'll try to get some of those up soon.  I hope they help those of you who've been asking about publishing your own stuff.

The Dark Days of Dark Courier

There’s nothing like having to fix a mistake a million times to teach you not to ever make it again.

For the last few hours I’ve been making corrections to Fighter’s Bane.  Not the normal kind of corrections you might expect, but instead corrections needed because of a “technical” snafu, boggle, insert your own word for stinkin’ mistake.

A while back I did some research on the preparations for manuscripts prior to sending them out to publishers or agents.  Font was, of course, a consideration.  For the most part I was pointed to Courier as an acceptable choice.  One author suggested Dark Courier since it showed up better on the page and thus saved some eye strain from those I hoped to win over to my side — that seemed like a no-brainer.

So I converted Fighter’s Bane into Dark Courier thinking that one day I might try to send the book out to an agent.  For whatever reason, that font seemed to not like spaces between sentences, and often — following no pattern I could discern — would just drop a space and squeeze a couple of sentences together.

So, not really liking that, and not wanting an agent to think I'm an indiscriminate spacer, I meticulously picked my way through 100k worth of words, looking for missing spaces.  I kind of didn’t like Dark Courier at that point.

Now, fast forward to a few months ago when I made the brilliant decision to be my own man and publish my own material — I don’t need no stinkin’ agent, editor, publisher, etc., etc., etc., I cried, my fist thrown triumphantly in the air.  (No offense to any of you who actually hold those jobs, because I wish you really were a part of my life at this point.)

So, ready to make my bold debut in the publishing world, I’m momentarily slowed down when I learn Dark Courier really won’t cut it for E-books or CreateSpace — not only does it seem to go wonky when you convert it, but it drops even more spaces when you convert it from Word to PDF, which really limits your ability to love it since you spend so much time grumbling under your breath while you hunt for more missing spaces.

So, out with Dark Courier and in with Garamond — which is a TrueType font and can be embedded in PDF documents; something CreateSpace really likes. 

But does Dark Courier go without a fuss?  Oh no my friend, it does not! 

Much to my dismay, it not only once again tosses out blank spaces like a fastidious baker throws out moldy bread, stinkin’ Dark Courier decides not to share italic formatting information with Garamond; meaning that I have a 100k document without a single italicized word.

Do you have any idea what it’s like to hunt through that many words, trying to find the ones that need to be italicized?  Now I’m not a complete idiot, so I did keep a copy of the old document still in Dark Courier, allowing me to search for italicized words in that document, and then, finding one, switch to the Garamond document, again hunt down the word, and finally apply the much needed italics.

Honestly, stuck at home because of my medical condition, it’s not like I have a ton of things pressing on my time — other than constant pain, medicinal side-effects, and those kind of things — so I have the time to do all this hunting and correcting.  But do I want to?  NO, I most certainly DON’T want to.

Now, I’m sure that one day I’ll find out there’s a simple way to fix all my problems — at least my font conversion problems — but for now, here I sit, taking a break and writing this up for you, so that you can give me much needed sympathy when I once again start tracking down all those naked words so desperately needing to be clothed in italics.

You are NOT my friend Dark Courier, and you should most definitely not expect a Christmas card this year.