Baking with Stone

I truly love to bake. I also love to eat what I bake, so.. there's that. It's why I can't seem to get my weight to stay under 160 lbs (145 is my healthy weight). Lately, my ego has taken a bit of a hammering, what with the "mishaps" in the kitchen.

I was making Chocolate M&M Cookies with the Hurricane and the Princess the other day (you know, just re-reading that made me realize why things go so very, very wrong). Here's how they should be made:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

1/2c butter or marg
3/4c packed brown sugar
1/2c white sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 c flour
1/2c cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/2c M&M's
1/2c chocolate chips

Cream butter and sugars together. Add egg and vanilla, mix well. Add flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt, mix well. Add M&M's and chocolate chips, mix well. Spoon onto ungreased cookie sheet, bake for 10 - 12mins.

(This recipe is actually the one on the back of the Chip-its bag, except you bump each of the sugars by 1/4c and add 1/2c cocoa. I don't use a whole cup of M&Ms because that's just a little too sweet for me, so I go half and half with chocolate chips.)

Where Things Went Awry:

I added the extra 1/4c of brown and white sugars, but somewhere in the process of coralling my two wonderful children into staying on task, I forgot to add the cocoa to balance it out. I think I lost track of what I was doing when my FLOUR CANISTER HIT THE FLOOR. AGAIN. AND BROKE. (RIP my friend.. we made some good cookies together..) That is what happens when mama doesn't pay attention to her two small children who are standing on the same chair and one asks the other, "Can you pass me Teddy Bear, Princess? He's behind the flour fing."

I realized that I had forgotten the cocoa when the first batch was already in the oven.. right about the time the whole kitchen started stinking like cookies-on-fire. This was also right around the time I remembered that my oven runs hot and I really don't need to crank the heat right to 375; usually 360 does just fine. I tried to correct the next batch by turning down the oven and adding a handful of flour (why didn't I just add cocoa at this point? I don't know. I think my underwear were on too tight that day) before I scooped out the next sheet.

The second sheet seemed okay, but I still hadn't added enough flour. So they weren't the greatest cookies ever, but they were certainly better than the smoking, gooey piles of sugar the first sheet turned out to be. The kids ate the second batch with no problem. Actually, the Princess loved hers so much that she took it to the bathroom with her when she went pee. Something I never thought I'd say: "Honey, you can't wash cookies with soap." At least I am 100% sure the brown smears on the sink are chocolate this time.

After another half-handful of flour, the third sheet turned out reasonably well, albeit a bit brown; likely due to the fact that I was busy scrubbing "Cajuned" (we don't use the word burnt around here) cookies off of cookie sheet #1 when the timer dinged.

Really, a whole lot of work for 12 measly cookies.

Important Life Lesson: Wrecking two batches of M&M cookies for one good batch while wasting about an hour of time actually is worth the effort.