New to Me

Pardon me while I just plagiarize from the lovely New To Us blog, because I have a new thing that I simply must tell you about.

I baked cookies.  From scratch.  And they were edible!

This is big news.  I've come a long way in my quest to be a better chef, but baking is still my downfall.  It's just so precise.  It's so easy to ruin things.  And I still don't know what a jelly roll pan is.  However, since one of the simple pleasures in my neurotic life is using things up to make more space for new things (to be subsequently used up), I declared that I was going to bake some cookies.  We have a whole cabinet filled up with vanilla extract and sugar and spices that were bequeathed to us when all of our friends made the exodus out of Baltimore.  I've been using the sugar in my coffee on weekends (in lieu of Splenda packets covertly lifted from Starbucks), but that was just taking too long.   So I decided to bake. 

I found a pretty simple-looking recipe on the internet, and I made my first attempt a few weeks ago.   

(I actually had to go out and purchase flour because it turned out what I thought was flour was actually corn starch, and luckily I noticed this slight difference before I made Joel eat two dozen corn starch chocolate chip cookies.  I suppose that purchasing a bag of flour to use up a bag of sugar is really quite counterproductive, but you try telling that to the voices in my head.)

I burnt the bottoms of the first batch horribly (note to self: put on a damn oven mitt and move the rack up.  It's not that hard, really), but the second and third batch came out OK.  Not great, but not awful either.  I tried to get all fancy by purchasing a bag of chocolate AND peanut butter chips, and that just made the cookies taste salty.  Also, I thought it would be OK to use the Country Crock margarine stuff that we buy by the tub, but that made the cookies strangely fluffy.   Joel still ate every last one (or else he took them to work and threw them away, I'll never know), but I was not satisfied.  I went out to the store and bought a bag of plain chocolate chips and some real  butter. I even spent the extra $60 cents for brand name butter.  That's determination.

(And just in case you're keeping track, I've now purchased two bags of chocolate/peanut butter chips, one bag of flour, and butter in the interest of using up some sugar.  I realize this.  The voices, they're so stubborn sometimes.)

(I also had to buy more eggs.)

Behold the result:

Deliciously golden brown, perfectly sweet and not at all salty, chocolate chip cookies.

Maybe there is hope for me after all.  Let's all just cross our fingers that I can replicate this success in the future, because I now I have all this flour and butter sitting around, just begging to be used up.  But at least I've made a good dent in the sugar. 

Comments

[alyndabear]

Oh they look so good to me and my dieting belly PUT THEM AWAY BEFORE I EAT THEM ALL. That's all. :)

(Well done!)

[Angela]

Oh man those look good--I'm so curious about the recipe you used. I've always made mine from the recipe on the back of the yellow bag of chocolate chips, Tollhouse I think? Anyway, they always turn out so thin and flat and I haven't got a clue what I'm doing wrong.

[Audrey]

Those look delicious. Way to go!

[Isabel]

Hooray for trying new things. Yippeee.....

And this New Thing is awesome.

(I'm so proud of you. Really, they look great.)

(And also, do you cook but just not bake? I mean, what do you guys eat for dinner?)

[RA]

Oh, I cringed a bit as I listened to your substitutions, but hooray for real butter! If you're interested, I have a recipe for cakelike sour cream cookies that hasn't failed me yet. So easy and yummy.

Angela, have you tried using half butter, half shortening in the Tollhouse cookies? Butter makes things crisp, but shortening makes things fluffy, so it might help.

[angela]

Those look so perfect they could be fake.

[Laurel]

Delicious looking! Real butter is essential... Like RA, I swear by 50% real butter / 50% crisco for fluffy and buttery cookies. Yum.

[Abbie]

It's the placebo effect with these things sometimes...as long as they look good or edible, that's really all that matters because they WILL taste good.
Good job...

[Jemima]

Mmmm...chocklit (cookies with a good book). Bring me some at once!

What did you think of Love in the Time of Cholera? I've been dying to read it for ages.

A jelly roll pan is a thick, flat pan with higher edges, so that when you bake your spongecake and spread gooey love on it, then you can roll it up in a tube from one end of the pan to the other. And then you slice it up and have little spirals of fatty happiness.

[heidikins]

Mmmmm, nothings beats chocolate-chip cookies, excpet chocolate-chip cookie dough. My favorite!

xox