Baking cookies
When our family lived on Beech Street in Sterling, Ben worked in the machine shop right across the street. On numerous occasions, I baked cookies after lunch. The kids and I had fun taking a few of them over to him. Ben loved the surprise and would start eating them right away.
When our daughter, Sarah, joined 4-H, she decided to bake chocolate chip cookies for her Logan County Fair entry. The rules stated they wanted the cookies to be uniform in shape.
I had a Betty Crocker recipe book, and I loved how the chocolate chip cookies turned out. I told Sarah to use that recipe.
The recipe said if you wanted rounder, softer cookies to add extra flour. That is the way I’ve always made them for our family. I instructed Sarah to do the same.
She followed the recipe and was doing a good job until she decided to take her hands and pack the dough into tight balls. “You should just drop them onto the cookies sheet by a rounded teaspoon,” I advised her.
She insisted on doing it her way. I didn’t interfere further because it was her 4-H project. I knew she’d be disappointed in the results.
When she took her cookies out of the oven, the shape of them were blue ribbon quality. She had some extra cookies, so she gave one to her father to eat. After biting into it he joked, “You need a chainsaw to cut through those cookies.” He pretended to be starting a chainsaw and did his interpretation of one firing up.
Sarah sampled a cookie, too. She knew they were as hard as a rock, but she didn’t have time to bake another batch. We needed to drive to the fairgrounds and submit her entry before the cutoff time.
The next day we went to the fairgrounds to see how her entry faired. There wasn’t a ribbon beside her plate of uniformly formed cookies. We read the judges’ remarks, “The cookies are too hard.”
Sarah was disappointed, but she understood why they commented as they did. She had to agree with them.
Years ago, when all three of our kids lived at home, I baked chocolate chip cookies quite often. Since they are all grownup, I rarely bake a batch of them. The recipe makes way too many for Ben and me to eat.
The other day I decided to make a batch but cut the recipe in half. I started to put a few of the ingredients in a large bowl when I realized that I needed brown sugar. “We need to run into the Inman grocery store,” I told Ben in a disgusted tone. “I don’t know how many times I’ve started baking something and had to make an emergency trip there to pick it up.”
The cookies turned out great. Ben has enjoyed eating homemade chocolate chip cookies again. I’ve never been a fan of cookies. I prefer other sweets over them, but I did eat a couple to see how they tasted.
I did have fun baking those chocolate chip cookies. Mainly, because it has been a long time since I’ve made them. Plus, I enjoy watching Ben eat them.
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