Cookies disabled

Last year, for Lent, I gave up meat. It was one of the more difficult things I've voluntarily done in my life, but I managed it. Not only did I feel proud of myself for having set an ambitious goal and achieved it, but I discovered a new, exciting fact: I really did have the capacity to change myself, to reach inwards and shake awake my extremely reticent self-discipline, to do things like eat healthier and lose weight and run a half-marathon, for crying out loud. Flush with remembered success, I decided this year to give up both meat and desserts. A challenge, certainly, but I didn't want to rest on my laurels.

Day two of Lent 2012: FAIL.

Well, okay, not complete fail. But pretty close. Really, the closest I could have come without chowing down on a steak. With whipped cream and a cherry.

You may remember that I mentioned wanting to start baking for work again, last post. And what would be more appropriate for a first offering, I reasoned, than good old chocolate chip cookies? As American as you can get, extremely work-friendly (plentiful, individual, finger food), and readily adaptable to UK ingredients. Never mind that the chocolate chips I found were kind of absurdly expensive (£2 for a couple handful-sized bags). Needs must.

When I'm baking, I tend to measure out large quantities with the cup-fraction that will be left over, to save dishes. So, for the 2 1/4 cups of flour I needed for this, I used a quarter-cup measure, instead of using both one-cup and quarter-cup, or guesstimating a quarter of the one-cup at the end. Make sense? Except that I somehow managed to measure out my flour, and then my salt, and then my baking soda, and mix them together, before I realized I used a third-cup measure instead of a quarter. And then I couldn't remember how many scoops I had measured out anyway. I ended up throwing out a bowlful of flour one step into the recipe.

This was a sign. It said "Stop."

But I pressed ahead. Now, I was using the Tollhouse recipe, which is the only recipe I've ever used for chocolate chip cookies. If I'm honest, they've always come out a little bit flatter than I'd like, but never quite enough to warrant seeking out a new one. This time, though - whether it was the slight variations in ingredients (as a side note, English dark brown sugar has a serious molasses kick going on), or that I was baking on broiling pans instead of proper cookie sheets, or that the dough could tell it was in an oven set in Celsius and decided to rebel - well, I got these:

How depressing are those?

I tried sticking the dough in the fridge to chill for an hour. I tried doubling up the pans to mimic an insulated sheet. No difference: air hockey pucks, each time.

Sad.

Now, were they bad? Of course not. They were flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and vanilla, crisped up in an oven. They couldn't be bad. But neither could they be the sort of quintessential mouthful of thick, chewy Americana that I wanted to offer to my poor deprived coworkers. Believe me, I tried to convince myself. I tried to convince myself five or six times. And then maybe four times, stacked together. But they just did not cut it.

Of course, that left me with this:

I hate wasting food. I hate it even more when, regardless of its performance in an oven, said food tastes exactly like unbaked chocolate chip cookie dough is supposed to. Despite my best intentions (well, you know where the road paved with those leads to), I ended up with bowl in lap, milk jug in hand - glassware was too classy for this situation - and, ten minutes later, serious pain in stomach.

A lot of the dough did end up in the trash. Just not as much as should have.

Oh well. I'm only human. And tomorrow is another day.