October 12, 2004:
For lack of anything better to do last night, I bought cookies. Halloween cookies. Three different kinds! Two of 'em came from the Pillsbury Doughboy, the other is a Toll House special with a scary mummy on the package. There were actually more varieties on sale, but grabbing anything over three boxes of uncooked Halloween cookies felt excessive. Anything over six is outright nuts.
I took the boxes home, not really sure if I'd ever make the things, but confident that just knowing I had Halloween cookies was a thought delightful enough to justify the purchase. As fate would have it, I got really hungry five minutes after this epiphany and made all three boxes at the same time.
The Pillsbury varieties were sugar cookies; the dough rank of Christmas, so I had to stare extra hard at the pumpkin and witch shaped imprints to remember which holiday had inspired me to bake. Toll House gave me a more sinister chocolate chip variety, with all sorts of tiny Halloween candies clumped into the dough like the sporadic pebbles that pass through a dog's digestive track unchallenged. I resisted the serious temptation to eat the dough raw, and for my devoted patience I was rewarded with trays too small to fit all of the cookies. Then Buster Keaton busted through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man and said "well you know what, that figures."
I'd given some consideration to baking the sugar and chocolate chip cookies separately, but the cooking time and required temperature was just so incredibly similar. Besides, if making one package of cookies is fun, it stood to reason that making three at the same time would be the natural equivalent of taking heroin and having six hour sex on a gold couch while a nearby parrot spit coins in your shoes. I was digging the potential. And, generally speaking, I've always liked cookies.
In they went. Cooked for about ten minutes at 375 degrees, I stood near the oven and downed merlot in anticipation of this most high class meal. The directions on all three boxes insisted that I should've kept the mounds at least two inches apart on their nonstick trays, but honey, they just waddn't room for that. I soon realized why they listed that part of the instructions in bold: it's important. When my cookies came out of the oven, they were more like fully formed yet very trim cookie cakes, separated only by the vague outlines that were once their defining features. Something like that. Quickly prying them apart, I was able to salvage most of my children, though some crumbled into incoherent bits of doughy chocolate Halloween madness that could only be eaten with a spoon. Now here's the bright side: I had spoons.
I've got nothing to add, except that ugly misshapen cookies taste just as good as beautiful ones. There's a lesson to be learned somewhere therein. Not sure what, but the pieces are all here.
- Matt (10/13/04)
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