Exercises in Mommyhood

I recently decided to get some mommy practice in and the best way to do this seemed obvious: bake some chocolate cookies.

I know, it seems cliche, overly traditional and perhaps a tad sexist to conflate cookie baking and motherhood but I have such fond memories of making cookies with my grandma that I want to carry on the tradition with my boys. Of course, the problem has already been discussed: I am not so Betty Crocker-ish in the kitchen. But armed with this awareness, I confidently sent The Saint off to nap and began the task.

I started by carefully reading the directions and gathering all the necessary ingredients. This proved to be a wise choice as I realized we were out of baking soda. I almost used baking powder but thought better of it....okay, I briefly woke The Saint up and asked if the 2 were interchangeable but the point is I averted a major disaster. I dashed off to my Mom's to borrow some, dumping a few tablespoons into a plastic baggie. I did get some strange looks from the neighbors when I walked out of my parents' house with a white powder in a little plastic bag but I will let them deal with that when they get home. (Perhaps deal isn't the best word choice - please ignore that if you are in the law enforcement field.)

After carefully combining all the ingredients per the instructions, I was ready to bake. That is when I hit the second snag: according to the recipe, I was supposed to use "rounded tablespoons" to dish out the dough in order to make 5 dozen cookies.

FIVE DOZEN COOKIES???!!? I didn't have time to sit around and wait for five dozen cookies. So I made an adjustment: I used an ice cream scooper to dish the dough out, so the cookies looked like this:




I thought this would simply save time and make for a bigger, and thus more delicious, cookie. But as I should have learned by now, directions are there for a reason.

At first, all seemed fine: the smoke alarm wasn't ringing, I hadn't burned myself yet and The Saint was sound asleep. Then it was time to take the first batch out. I was hoping to see a nice, big cookie dotted with chips. Instead, I saw big blobs of chips dotted with a little bit of dough. They looked like this:




I am not sure how they taste yet because I ate a good chunk of the cookie dough, which led to another snag in the process that I will keep to myself. Let's just say it's a good thing we have two bathrooms in our house.

Good thing the boys missed this one. These are not the kinds of memories I was hoping to create.

- The 2nd Mommy