April 21th, 2011: Weird Cookies made as a treat for Blair

It was 4-21.... interesting... did I make cookies because I had the munchies from the day before? I most certainly did not. I don't smoke that type of smokable herb. Instead, I made them to make a treat for Blair, who was having a particularly bad day. I had been watching food movies all day, I watched Fat Head , Food, Inc and part of Food Matters. Blair caught the very ending of Food, Inc and left the room in a huff yelling about it being "too intense" and "depressing" to watch a cow not being able to stand under its own strength. I laughed and commented that it's probably ridiculously tender and delicious. She had the same objection to seeing my hand up the ass of a chicken to pull out the giblets the day before. Some people really aren't interested in where their food comes from and would rather not be shown how awful what we eat is. Personally, when I see veal calves in a veal crate, I salivate a little bit. That isn't to say that I have no compassion for the cows, but rather that I've come to a quiet resignation about where my food comes from.

In anycase, the cookies I made were Nestle Toll House cookies, but I didn't have chocolate chips, so I tried to make my own chocolate chunks. But then I didn't have enough butter for both the chocolate and the cookies, so I used a vegetable oil roux, instead of butter, to try and make the chunks. I used a mason jar to emulate a double boiler, so that I didn't burn the chocolate. I mixed coco powder, sugar and the roux and then placed the concoction in the bottom of a pyrex dish and froze it. The chocolate never hardened. I was pretty proud of my ingenuity in this situation and thought for sure that a few hours would yield more than chocolate roux. How wrong I was.

What could go wrong next? I don't have a stand mixer or bowls big enough to make cookies in. So, this is gonna be great. I had to use all of pyrex bowls attempting to find one that was big enough to make the dough it, ultimately I settled on one of my large Revereware pots. I made my cookies in a soup pot with a hand mixer. Here's the next catch: my hand mixer is crazy powerful. I mean it, I rarely use it, because when I do, it invariably hurls food all over the kitchen. Flour, butter and sugar... EVERYWHERE! Things were starting to shape up, but I still didn't have chocolate chips. I tried to marble the chocolate into the dough. I made several attempts at it and found that every batch of cookies I made was different. I didn't even intend to make them different, I just unsuccessfully marbled it.

The cookies were oddly thick and cakey. They tasted not like cookies, but rather like thick cake. It was weird... I guess I shouldn't be allowed in a bakery anytime soon.

edit: Blair said that they were "cake-like" because I made "Ice-box Cookies." I don't know what that means, but... it could be that the cake like texture of the cookies came from me freezing the chocolate roux, or the fact that I don't know how to bake. In anycase, they were still delicious.