So Many Dishes

I am old enough to remember the Crickets version of “I Fought the Law (and the Law Won).” Last week, I felt as if I was fighting the cookie gods, and I think we battled to a standoff. Let’s just say, I’ve had better days in the kitchen.

I wanted to bake cookies before our annual “First Christmas” celebration. Because Luke goes to New York with his dad for the holidays, we always do an early gift exchange and special meal. (That’s a separate post; I’m running way behind these days). Rather than bake cupcakes, which is our usual dessert when Luke, Alice, and Dante join us, I decided to bake cookies. Also, for the last couple of years, I’ve made chocolate chip cookies with dark chocolate for the minister at our church. She and I are kindred spirits when it comes to dark chocolate.

The chocolate chippers were first. I had a package of Ghirardelli 60% cacao chips, and decided to use the recipe on the package. Afterward, I compared that to the standard Toll House recipe, and there were two small differences: less salt and more vanilla extract. Other than that, they were identical. The Ghirardelli chips seemed softer than the standard Nestle chip—have YOU ever made chocolate chip cookies and not sampled the chips—and didn’t have the distinctive peak, but seemed fine. The dough looked like and had the consistency of normal cookie dough. The first tray went into the oven.

I’ve written before about our finicky range. The word that comes to mind most often is “lemon.” The oven tends to have difficulty holding temperature, so I’m used to things being underbaked. Imagine my surprise when I took that first tray out, and they looked overbaked!

That, unfortunately, wasn’t the only issue. The cookies spread more than I’ve ever had happen before. And, when I went to remove them from the trays, I couldn’t do it without smearing chocolate everywhere.

I adjusted the baking time on subsequent trays, and let the cookies cool on the trays longer than I normally would, but I only solved the overbaking issue. After consulting some friends who are excellent bakers, I’ve circled in on two possible issues (aside from the oven with a mind of its own): old baking soda and/or chocolate with a higher fat content. My box of baking soda hasn’t reached its expiration date, but it’s really close. Since I don’t bake that often, I can’t say how long it has been open in the cabinet. Lesson learned: I’m adding baking soda to this week’s grocery list. As to the fat content, a Google search shows that the chips I used have a higher fat content (6g per tablespoon) than regular semi-sweet chocolate chips (4 grams) or the Nestle dark chocolate chips I’ve used in past years (5g per tablespoon). Is that difference enough to cause the soft chocolate? I don’t know. I do know, however, that despite all the aggravation and the fact that the cookies aren’t pretty, they taste just fine.

The second cookie was a new recipe that looked easy and would be a way to use up a box of devil’s food cake mix that I bought a couple of months ago and has been staring me in the face whenever I open the cabinet door. The recipe was from an AllRecipes article about cake mix cookies. The idea for this was that you add eggs and oil to the cake mix, but not as much as you would to make a cake. The result was supposed to be a dough that you could roll into balls, then stick a Hershey kiss in the middle of each and roll the dough up around the kiss. There was also an icing for topping the cookies when cool.

My first inkling that something might not be right was the recipe’s fuzzy math, as Ken called it. I read through the recipe several times, and it said it would make 48 cookies. Yet, it only called for 24 kisses. That just didn’t make sense. Ken very helpfully unwrapped 48 kisses for me, just in case.

The next issue was that the “dough” was still closer to batter. There didn’t seem to be any way to roll it into a ball. So I dropped an amount that would have made a 1-inch ball, as specified, onto the cookie sheet. I put the kiss on top, point down, according to the directions, thinking that I could somehow shape it on the tray to cover the kiss. No dice. I ended up creating a chocolate version of the old peanut butter blossom cookies that my mother used to make, where she put a Hershey kiss atop a peanut butter cookie. They baked up nicely, and I was feeling good about the enterprise, even though there were only 24 cookies.

But there was still the issue of the icing. Once the cookies had cooled, I proceeded with the icing recipe. It was pretty simple, but, sadly, no amount of beating would make it smooth. I haven’t even contemplated why. I took the recipe, crumpled it up, and threw it in the trash. At this point, I believe the cookie gods were telling me to give it up. I spread the lumpy gook as best I could around the kisses and prayed that the taste would make up for how the cookies looked. Thankfully, they tasted fine. They passed the Luke test. What more could I ask for?