Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Cooking 101


Yesterday evening, in an effort to save money on all those prepackaged, single-serving snacks the kids pack for lunch, I decided to make Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies. They're healthier than the Chocolate Chip cookies I make - which the girls (and me) love.

When I went to assemble the ingredients, I had no butter. Torrents of rain are streaming from the sky, it's so windy I'm scared another tree is going to fall in my yard but out in the miserable weather I go.

By the time I got back my youngest had the ingredients out and was looking rather pensive at the container of brown sugar. It was hard. I mean so hard no moisture was left in it to even pack in down like the recipe asked for. By this time it was raining even harder and the fog was rolling in but I went back out and bought fresh brown sugar.

Whew, back to baking the cookies with my daughter. With the two of us working together it takes no time at all to get them in the oven. Why don't I do this more often?

When the timer rang and I opened the oven, the cookies had all run together like a flat, burnt pancake. I don't know if you can get the full impact from the picture above of just how bad they turned out. We checked the recipe twice to make sure we didn't get the ingredients wrong but we had followed it exactly.

I tried lowering the temperature on the next batch - same thing. On the last batch I made the cookies smaller and used an even lower temperature - same mess.

They look bad but they taste worse.

How much money do you think I saved with that little experiment?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Ohmygosh! That's so funny. And now you know why I don't bake. BTW, the next time your brown sugar gets like that, put a piece of bread in the bag. The sugar will pull the moisture away from the bread and soften up.

Unknown said...

Thanks Cat,

I knew there was something you could put in it but couldn't remember what it was.

Annette Gallant said...

Hmm, not sure what happened with the cookies. Baking can be a mystery sometimes.

I bought one of those terracotta brown sugar thingies and they work really well.