catastrophes & milk

There's something I've learned in my many years of baking:   the better the chocolate chip cookie dough tastes, the crappier the cookie it will make.

And today, I made the most delicious cookie dough in all the kingdom.

It's perfect.  It's creamy.  It's chocolatey.  And I refuse to bake the last 1/4 of it that's sitting in my fridge...

...because, they betrayed me and the oven from whence they were baked.

I give you, Exhibit A:

(Let the record show, that I chose the best cookie to photograph.  No, really.  That's the beauty queen of the bunch.)

You know when you look in the oven, expecting to see cookies rising to the heavens, telling you that in just a few minutes, you will have the most delicious warm cookie to eat with a tall glass of ice cold milk? 

I didn't have that moment.

I felt shamed.  They just sat there...baking...bein' all hideous and lookin' all sad.

Then, as I tried to get them off my super-fantastical-magic golden non-stick pans, I felt more shame.

They wouldn't come off.

And then I laughed.  Cuz what else was I supposed to do?

This was not the cookie baking experience I had envisioned for the afternoon.   

(They looked so bad, that when I gave one to Lily, she said with a face, "Ew.  Well.  I think I can make a cookie out of this."  And then proceeded to mold it into what she thought an proper cookie should look like.)

Where did I go wrong?

I know how to make a freakin' cookie!  I know the science behind every ingredient.  Yet, there they lie...looking as though they were baked by 12-year-old Amy who had come back from a world that didn't have Food Network and Alton Brown to teach it about baking cookies the correct way.

And so, I concede.

Such an epic failure.

Cookies 1, Amy 0.

Until we meet again, Cookie Dough.  Until we meet again.

(There is a happy ending to this story.  The cookies taste really good.  I was judging the book by its cover.  And it's a pretty good book.  Even if it is all flat and a little too brown at the edges.   

And ya know, I bet even Martha made a bad batch of cookies once in her life.)