Monday, November 16, 2020 Cookies: A Cautionary Tale

I had this funny idea that I knew how to make cookies, having made probably thousands of them over the years. Apparently, you’re never too old to fall flat on your face, your grandiose illusions of competence whisked away like a dream.

We were going to be having a large family over after church and I found a recipe for cookie dough that you make ahead, freeze in a cylinder, and then simply cut slices off and bake fresh when you need them. C’est parfait! (One needs to have some French phrases handy for moments like this.)

I was a little vague in my mind about this process of freezing the dough in a cylindrical shape and hoped by the time I got to that part, the solution would present itself. I don’t actually own the plastic cylinders used for this, but how hard can it be to roll cookie dough up that way? Very hard, as it turned out. The dough was soft and sloppy. I put several large blobs on some waxed paper and did my best to roll it up. It was not a pretty sight. However, I was still largely optimistic when I put it in the freezer thinking that the freezing process would cover a multitude of sins. I went to bed conjuring up pleasant thoughts about how fun it would be make these cookies with two little girls in the family, just the right age for cookie making. It’s funny how we can delude ourselves.

By the time I woke up, the scales had fallen from my eyes. It had occurred to me sometime in the night that the waxed paper would be hard to get off and would have frozen itself into little crevices of dough. It then occurred to me that this might not be the delightfully fun experience that I had pictured with the girls. I decided to make the cookies right away in the morning.

Ugh. I had to slice the paper off where it wouldn’t peel off. It was inextricably bound to the dough at both ends, so I had to cut those parts off and throw them away.

The dough was sticking to everything by this time and was surprisingly hard to cut. Instead of being circles of frozen dough, they were odd and misshapen lumps.

Bake for 14-15 minutes, the recipe said. I had cut them fairly thick and decided to go for 15 minutes. Just one more mistake in a long series of misjudgments.

Voila! Even at this point, I was trying to convince myself that they weren’t really burnt – just kind of “dark,” thus once again proving that “the heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick – who can understand it?”

So there you have it. In a surprisingly display of hubris, I ignored three basic rules of cooking:
1. Don’t try out new recipes on guests.
2. Don’t change anything in the recipe the first time you make it.
3. Use the shorter cooking time – you can always put it back in if it’s not done.

Still, this grim fairy tale has a happy ending. The night before, my daughter-in-law had brought over homemade snickerdoodle cupcakes with caramel and sea salt frosting, and left a whole bunch of extra ones with us. We cut them in half and served them with vanilla ice cream after our meal.

And here’s the best part: I couldn’t resist telling our guests about the cookies, so we tried them and decided they were rather edible after all. I ended up foisting two bags of them on their family as they were leaving.

THE END.

I’d better delete this all in the morning when the scales have fallen from my eyes about this post.