Last night, some friends of ours came over for dinner and we were joking around about how I did not cook dessert. And how I never cook dessert because I totally suck at baking. If Adam and I want dessert, which we usually do!, we eat ice cream from the freezer or go to TCBY for sorbet with gummy bears - totally awesome, by the way! get psychedelic sorbet, it's the one that looks like Play-Doh, and cover it with gummy bears, delicious! About a year ago, I just quit baking altogether, because every single time I baked, it turned out disastrous.
Adam agrees. You should see the smirk on his face when this subject gets brought up.
One time I tried to make chocolate chip cookies but they all ran together to form some kind of burnt, bubbly-on-top dough soup that didn't even taste good. When I make brownies, even from the box, they're burnt on the bottom and mushy on the top. And even if I use one of the pre-made cookie dough varieties, I always put the cookies way too close together so they bake into one big clump and it's not a pretty sight.
I used to put all the blame on my oven. We had a really cheap oven in our other house and I complained that it was the oven that ruined all my creations. Then we got a new oven, and the same things still happened, so I quit baking.
Anyway ... back to dinner the other night. Caroline says, with all the confidence in the world, "I make great chocolate chip cookies," and she does!, "I'll show you how!" So after dinner, we went to the store and got all the ingredients. Even bought the butter that says, great for baking on the box.
We were so confident that we would achieve cookie success that we even made a double batch! My plan was to take some to our neighbors, and she wanted to take some home for her in-laws who were coming to visit the next day. We followed the recipe to the T. And Caroline is a rule-follower, we did not deviate one single bit. (See, me, on the other hand, am not so much a rule follower, especially when it comes to cooking. I take many creative liberties that usually work in my favor. In fact, I'm a really good cook! I just suck at baking.)
Here's a few shots of us in action, courtesies of my husband.
We put those cookies into my super fly oven and set the timer. The directions said 9-11 minutes so we checked the cookies after 8 minutes. No where near done. At 11 minutes, still dough.
At 14 minutes, still dough.
At 18 minutes, not much had changed.
We went on like this. I think that first batch was in there for something close to 30 minutes. And when we took them out, even though they looked really light and mushy and pretty, they were hard. Really. They looked mushy but they were hard as rocks. We had to scrape the little suckers off the pan because they stuck! so they didn't even turn out pretty after all!
And the second batch burnt to a nice smokey crisp after being in the oven for like 15 minutes.
Did they taste good? No, not really. I lied and said, oh they have good flavor but they really didn't. In fact, when Caroline left, I threw my half away because I knew we'd never eat them.
Can you believe this? So pathetic. Caroline really does make good cookies. I've had them. But with me, she too was cursed to suck at baking.
So I think we'll stick to sorbet with gummies or vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup. It's pretty hard to ruin that!
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