How to Ruin Chocolate Chip Cookies

The precious bag of chocolate chips was extracted from the freezer and 1/2 can of precious Macedamian nuts were chopped up... all in preparation for making chocolate chip cookies to bring to the cell group on Monday night.

The first thing to go wrong was when I tried to cream the butter, vanilla and eggs. They were lumpy, runny and just wouldn't fluff-up. Then I realized that I'd forgotten to add the sugar. Once that was done it creamed up quite nicely.

With step one done, in a separate bowl I mixed the salt, 1-1/4 cup flour and baking soda and then added the whole mixture to the creamed ingredients. The end result was a tiny bit sticky, but I've had cookie dough do that before so I didn't think anything of it and went ahead and added the precious chocolate chips and macadamia nuts (given to me by a Chinese Alliance church when I was on Oahu).

Then I got inventive. I thought to myself, "Oh, why don't I put the cookies in a muffin pan? That'll be fun." Only, the end result was not what I'd planned and was a pure mess to clean up. Also, because I'd done that as the first batch, I'd not noticed that something was wrong until the second batch was in on a regular cookie sheet.

The cookies were MELTING! It was a gooey icky looking mess! Oh what did I do wrong? They actually reminded me of the way my cookies looked when I first moved overseas and could only find vanilla sugar (it's near impossible to find vanilla extract here). Anyways, to compensate I had to add more flour.... FLOUR! It was then it hit me! I'd only used 1-1/4 cups flour instead of TWO and 1/4 cups flour!

Well, it was too late to save the cookies that were already in the oven, but the last 1/2 of the batch was still salvageable. So I proceeded to add the missing cup of flour. But it wasn't until I'd mixed it up that realized that I'd forgotten to compensate for the batter that had already been used up. Too late now. I went ahead and baked up what was left... the result? Tough cookies with a heavier flour taste and not quite the beloved chocolate macadamia nut cookie taste.

But that's not all. While the last batch was in the oven, I got busy with the laundry: sorting, loading, and hanging out the previous load to dry. Well, then I decided to mop the balcony floor.... mid-swish a whiff of chocolate chip cookie wafted my way....

OH NO! I dropped the mop and rushed to the oven.... and pulled out 7 very BROWN and TOUGH chocolate macadamia nut cookies. Well, I'm not going to let them go to waste (chocolate chips are precious here because you can't get them locally... people send them from the US). Anyways, I've packed up all the cookies and will still bring them to the cell group. They're not perfect, but they'll still taste ok. (I hope.)

So there you go. A lesson in how to ruin chocolate chip cookies. Now, go and DON'T do likewise.

Master-chef (not)
Carolyn