Better Living Through Chemistry

One good way to eat fewer sweets is to only eat half a cookie at a time.

Oho, you say, easy for you to say but me, when I get a cookie, I have to eat the whole thing!

Oho nothing, I reply. You have to eat the whole thing when you eat half a GOOD cookie. When you are eating the top half of a cookie whose bottom half is burned to a crisp and stuck to a cookie sheet (A NON STICK COOKIE SHEET) I predict you will find it quite simple to only eat half a cookie.

Possibly even a quarter of a cookie.

Monday afternoon I set out a cup of butter to soften while I made supper. After we ate and were certain that no more fierce bellowing from upstairs would require our attention I set about making chocolate chip cookies. I use a modified “Chipits” package recipe. Here, I know it from memory:

1 cup butter
1.5 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
vanilla splash
tsp soda
tsp salt
2 cups flour
lots of chocolate chips
maybe some oatmeal if I feel like it
bake at 375 for 10 minutes.

OK? See how I did that? I just rattled it off while picking my nose and thinking about John Stuart Mill. I know the damn recipe.

So why, after several minutes (I set a timer) in the oven on Monday night did I smell, instead of sweet, chocolately goodness, the smell of burning charcoalness?

“Why do I smell something burning?” I asked SA, pausing the previous night’s episode of The Apprentice: Holy Crap These People Are Irritating: Los Angeles to run into the kitchen.

SA leapt to his feet and immediately began fanning the smoke alarm in our living room because if you so much as mention how candles are pretty around this thing it goes off with a vengeance. I opened the back door and placed a tray of smouldering cookies on the grill of our barbeque.

Then I swore a lot.

After reviewing the recipe carefully (did I put in twice as much butter? not enough chocolate? too high heat? had an hour passed, not 10 minutes?) I decided to blame the No-Stick Cookie Sheets Of Satan we have had forever or at least a couple of years, even though I use those same sheets every time I make cookies the exact same way. (No, I didn’t grease the sheet. No, I never grease the sheet.)

I mean, look at this cookie:

The next day I went to Safeway for more butter and headed to the baking isle for non-non-stick cookware. The only non-non-stick stuff they had was made of tinfoil but on closer examination of the cookie sheets, I had to buy them. (Plus it was only $2.77 for two sheets.) It’s a cookie sheet with the cookie spots marked out for you.

“Hey, where do I stick the cookie dough?”
“Up your butt?”
“No, that can’t be right. On the ceiling?”
“I don’t think so. Oh hey, the cookie sheet is trying to tell us something!”

No longer would I toss cookie dough, willy nilly, at a cookie sheet. Now that I had the Perfect Placement cookie sheet, I would have a guide to dough tossing. Nice! After all, I screwed up chocolate chip cookies just the night before. Apparently I need all the help I can get.

That night I got busy doing something else, so no cookies got made.

Yesterday morning, Trombone and I ended up at Superstore where I found two fabulous things. Fabulous thing the first:

Pride Twizzlers!

Fabulous thing the second: an uncoated cookie sheet of the fancy pants variety that has two layers of sheet with air in the middle for even cooking and blah dee blah whatever I bought it. I bought it, OK? I bought the $15 cookie sheet. Because I collect points with my Superstore brand credit card so the cookie sheet was actually free. So were the Twizzlers. Moving on.

Trombone napped just long enough yesterday afternoon that I could make a second batch of cookies, using both new cookie sheets. Is anyone surprised that the ones on the cheap sheet turned out better? Come on: Perfect Placement!

The ones on the fancy pants sheet would have turned out better had I heeded the instruction on the pan to cook at the greater end of the suggested cooking length. With the No-Stick Cookie Sheets of Satan, we had adopted the habit of under-cooking our cookies so that the bottoms would be done perfectly while the tops were still a little mushy so the cookies would be soft and chewy rather than hard and crumbly. Because the fancy pants pan accounts for cooking discrepancies between the top and the bottom (using the middle layer of air as insulation) it’s actually smarter than you. Than me. Than I. The pan is smarter than I. So one pan of cookies was a little raw. But I would rather eat raw than burned cookies. Wouldn’t you?

The rainbow Twizzlers taste horrible but I’m thinking maybe I should make rainbox Twizzler cookies next?

In related “Strange Products You Can Buy” news, I purchased a tube of “Warming anti-blackhead cream cleanser” made by Biore, the people who make those awesome bandaids for your nose that pull out all your pore gunk. The instructions on the tube (alas, no placement guidelines) say “…wet face…squeeze product into palm of hand, massage cleanser over entire face…rinse.” I don’t know what I was expecting (it was on sale and I am a capital-S Sucker for beauty products on sale) but Stephen Joseph Harper if it doesn’t warm up when you put it on your wet face. It is so freaky. My face was wet and then it was warm and wet. And gritty.

That shit ain’t right.

The End.