Dinner Prep – Crackerquest

A tertiary goal for my dinner party was to have as much of the food homemade as reasonable and this included the hors doeuvres so I cracked open my cookbook and set to making my own crackers.  I threw down $12 for the ridiculous quantity of sesame and poppy seeds required and pulled out my new rolling dowel which I set to stun (about 1/4″ of an inch).  After increasing the bake time by a factor of 4, I pulled the cracker – which I had flipped twice – from the oven and saw that the top was nearly raw and the bottom slightly burnt and one spot that couldn’t have been more than a millimeter thinner than another looked like it had been taken to with a brule torch.  Finally, a 1/4″ cracker is incredibly thick and could be used to spread asphalt and, being a burnt cracker, when I tried to throw it down the hill in our yard it initially sailed a good 10 feet before shattering on the ground.  The 3rd and subsequent crackers of 1/16″ thickness (3/16″ or so after baking) were acceptable but had to be watched with the attentiveness normally given only to premature infants and burn victims and this was a level of helicopter baking I wasn’t used to.  Per pound, my crackers cost about four times what Tollhouse or Nabisco would charge so this will probably be my last foray into baking muffin wafers.

Crackers are hard.