Me in the Kitchen

As I've mentioned before, cooking and I don't always get along. A couple of weeks ago, I did make a mean pot of chili, no recipe needed. I was pretty proud of myself, chopping onions and peppers and throwing ingredients willy-nilly into the mix. It came out deliciously spicy, and I'm hoping I can recreate it.

However, the gold standard of all baking perfection, the Chocolate Chip Cookie, has evaded me for a couple of years now. I follow the recipe to the letter, yet my cookies consistently fall flat. Before, I could blame my oven for my baking woes. But now that I've moved to a different oven, I can hardly point the finger at the appliance. After all, when you're pointing your finger at something, there are three more fingers pointing right back at you.

I've tried butter instead of margarine and vice versa. I've gotten new baking soda. I've mixed ingredients according to package instructions. For a while I was convinced that every time I was forgetting to add the 1/4 cup when the recipe called for 2-1/4 cups of flour, but I've been extra careful on that step for awhile now. The only thing I haven't tried is new measuring spoons.

I can't complain too much though because luckily, the pancake-flat cookies always taste delicious. My most recent batch of cookies was a near success. The first two cookie sheets came out in utter perfection. Beautiful cookies, not too flat, not too fat. But the third and fourth cookie sheets came out as thin as paper and crumbled to the touch once cool. And they came from the same batch! I'm baffled. Here, my poor, pathetic, delicious cookies.



As you can see, there are a few wonderful separate cookies in there. But the rest of it is one crumbled cookie mess. It just meant I had to take more caution when transporting them to eat them at my desk. And Marti doesn't care what the cookies look like. She wants one. NOW. Here she is, using her paw to reel in my hand in hopes of getting a cookie. This is how she tries to fish for food, whether it's cookies or broccoli.