If that didn't get your attention, just walk away now.
I need to back up just a little. Woody went to my house in NN yesterday to fix the problem with my internet connection (that I had made worse when I myself tried to fix it on Thursday night, this is why I shouldn't live alone) even though I was riding horses all weekend and not around. I felt like he was always doing these super sweet things for me and I really wanted to do something to show him how much I appreciate him - so I thought about it for awhile. I mean, we just started dating so some really big gesture is probably not the most appropriate, but I just wanted to do something special, because seriously you guys, seriously - he is amazing.
I made the decision to make him some cookies. I'm not sure if you know this, but given my past escapades in the kitchen - which include but are not limited to, attempting to use a plastic pot to boil water (this ended very messily) and even more recently, melting the wiring on my toaster because it was on the stove when I turned it on and I didn't notice - I should really never be left unsupervised in the kitchen. Uh yeah, let's call that Reason #2 that I should not be living alone, because let's face it, one of these days I am going to burn the house down while making a grilled cheese sandwich. Anyway, I asked mom to supervise because as one of my professors accused me last week, I am "always the voice the caution." However Mom was sort of stressed out and I was like "Nevermind, you go relax, I've got this."
Ladies and gentlemen, this is our first lesson of the night. Under no circumstances when I say the words "I've got this" should you leave me to my own devices; I can now guarantee you with 100% certainty that no, I most certainly do not "got this." By speaking these words I have just jinxed myself and you should probably remove any sharp or flammable objects from my general area.
I am not really sure where things went wrong, exactly. Cooking is easy, right? There's a list of things and you do them in that order and then you have created food. I'm good at lists; write something down in a list for me and I can not only get it accomplished but I will kick it's little listy butt. Not to mention, I have made these exact cookies more times than I can count and they have always, always been perfect. I'm out of practice, sure, but there is really no explanation for what happened tonight. It was just - wrong. It was clear from the beginning - the cookies were not ever flattening out into cookie-ness, instead they remained like mountainous blobs of dough. They didn't ever darken in the middle no matter how long I left them in there - some of them were burned on the edges and still really tall and poofy in the middle. We tried a few of them. They were not moist and delicious and chocolately-chippy treats, they were large, awkward and dry and didn't really taste like anything. They had the consistency of cake. I tried everything - leaving them in for longer or shorter lengths of time, adjusting the size of my balls of dough, but every time it was the same. I had my mom look at them and her ultimate decision was that a) either I had left out an ingredient in the initial mixing-the-dough stage, or b) something was up with the oven. (This is about the time when I made the comment about the size of my balls.) Anyway, this is a really new oven and as an equestrian I have to blame everything on rider error. Well in this case, baker error. It's not the oven's fault - I messed up the cookies that I was going to make to give to my sweet, sweet boyfriend.
And yet even after realizing these were not up to my standards I kept going, getting increasingly frustrated and disappointed as each little batch of cookies that came out of the oven had the same issues as the ones before. I managed to burn my finger in the middle of this and at that point just wanted to give up on them. And then one cookie came out that made this whole night so incredibly awesome that instead of going to sleep write now I felt the need to blog about it. And I promise you that I pulled it out of the oven looking this way, I did absolutely nothing to make it take this shape:
It's a heart. It's a chocolate chip cookie in the shape of a heart. For my boyfriend. It probably tastes terrible (the rest of them do, they are not fit for public consumption) but look at it. I could not have planned a more perfect cookie. I'm going to give it to him but I'm going to warn him that he probably shouldn't eat it.
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