When Good Cookies Go Bad: A Bite Sized Blog

I have just won the 2012 University of San Diego Cookie Baking Contest! As I am triumphantly striding toward the Olympic sized podium to receive my award from none other than Betty Crocker herself, I look around at the audience. This is when I notice that instead of my friends and colleagues, the audience is made up of burnt cookies. And they are all laughing at me. I awake in a cold sweat, safe in my bed. Winning the cookie contest was not real, but the burnt cookies were...

I had great expectations for my cookies. I even believed them to be award winning. I had a killer recipe - Grape Nut Cookies with the secret ingredient of Peanut Butter Company Bee Knees peanut butter. I had made these cookies before with astounding success. They were delicious and could, with a little imagination, be construed as vaguely in the realm of good for you. So I had tastiness, healthiness (sort of), and the belief that I would win all going for me. I went to the store and bought fresh ingredients. I even waited until after dinner to commence baking so that I would not be rushed out of the oven by someone's incessant need to eat dinner - some people just have strange priorities - don't they understand I am trying to win a contest here? But I digress. So, dinner was finished and now it was baking time.

I carefully laid out all my ingredients and pre-heated the oven for 350 degrees - as instructed by the recipe. Everything was coming together perfectly - the butter was nicely softened, the brown sugar came out of its bag in manageable pieces and even the peanut butter did not fight me when I removed it from its plastic cocoon. All the ingredients were playing nicely in my large blue plastic bowl. I snuck a small taste and it was cookie perfection. I thought - this is in the bag - I could win this thing without even baking these cookies. Just show up with the raw mixture and say, "Try this" and they would just hand the award over to me. Not even bother to try the other cookies - it was that good. I broke out my special cookie scooping spoon (thank you Yogurt Land for your perfectly shaped spoons.) Onto the cookies sheets went perfectly rounded, 2 inch drops of cookie mix deliciousness. I set the timer for 10 minutes, the minimum on the recipe, and started the clean up.

About 2 minutes in my husband said, "How long have those been in there, they smell like they are burning." Silly husband I think, they have only been in there 2 minutes. What I actually said was "That can't be, they have only been in there 2 minutes." But then, the dread started to creep up on me, so I flipped the oven switch and son of a #$!*& they were burning on the bottoms. I quickly moved them to the top rack. We then carefully repositioned the other rack so it was in the middle. But sadly, the damage had been done. 18 perfect cookies went into the oven, 18 burnt cookies came out. I still had 9 to bake, but now I was trigger shy. I set the timer for 8 minutes and hoped for the best. Eight minutes went by and they weren't quite cooked enough. Two more minutes and I couldn't take the stress any longer. I ripped the cookies from the oven and surveyed the wreckage that once was my triumph.

We tried to resuscitate the burnt ones. I chipped away at the burnt edges, hoping maybe it was only an aesthetic thing. What the judges can't see won't hurt them, I thought. But finally I had to do a taste test and the hot slap of burnt cookies realty hit me. They were beyond repair. My husband, seeing my distress made one more valiant effort and tried to cut the burnt bottoms off. That was the way the cookie crumbed.

I had fallen victim to the baker's age old nemesis, the rental apartment oven. Oh you imprecise appliance, many a meal you have butchered. But this evening I thought we had made a truce. You had cooked our dinner so lovingly and prior baking experiences had resulted in sweet success. I let down my guard for one moment and innocent cookies were sacrificed. Darn you evil oven, darn you.

But, lest you think this whole exercise of late night baking was all for naught, there did turn out to be one winner in our household that evening. My husband, who loves a burnt cookie. So it turns out that one man's burnt cookie is another man's perfect snack.

And I did manage to find about 7 cookies, out of the whole batch of 27, which seemed decent enough to enter.  Stayed tuned, I might make a come from behind victory yet.