You know how it goes, late night surgical case, you are shooting the breeze with the CRNA, they start telling you about the cookies they baked with their kids that were so easy and so fun. You say interesting. And they text you the recipe.
No?
Just me then. Okay.
For those who might be worried, the entire exchange took less then three minutes as they were just bursting to tell the department cookie lady about the cookies that they made.
But that got my brain thinking. After the initial ew, no reaction.
When I got home one of my friends had sent me an email of a baker making nearly the exact same cookie. Their recipe allowed for more creativity.
I decided to theme June as cake mix cookie month.
Baking is often seen as elitist. Because baking is very demanding of attention to detail. And precise measurements.
Unless you want to experiment.
I do like an experiment. See also the entire reason that Cookie Thursday still exists and has been going strong for over ten years.
The email from my friend laid out how to be experimental. Within the strict bounds of baking.
I started making lists of combinations of cake mix flavors and mix-ins I could do. A pairing, if you would.
It didn’t hurt that the cake mixes were on sale that week.
I did a quick math in my head. Each recipe takes 1 stick of butter and 2 eggs, plus the mix. Normally in a month I would use 2 pounds of butter as a recipe usually takes 2 sticks. There are 4 sticks in a pound of butter which means I normally go through 2 pounds per month. Butter is still egregiously expensive and is running around $5 a pound. This makes the butter cost of each CTIAT $2.50. The butter cost of these cookies will be cheaper IF I keep the cake mixes under $1.25.
The buy one get one free cake mix deal was looking pretty good. Even better was the coupon I had. AND the place where I bought them doubles coupons with a face value of $1.
The cost of the eggs is the same as a normal batch of cookies takes 2 eggs, just like this recipe.
Not only that but in the scratch and dent produce section, where they sell soon to be expired food stuffs, there was an entire bag of pink chocolate shavings, like you use on cake frosting for decoration. For $1.00. You cannot get chocolate chips for anything near the price.
I used half of the bag in the cookies.
My first thought as I was mixing these up is that there isn’t enough liquid for the amount of solid.
Spoiler alert- there was. Also the 1 tsp of vanilla was helpful.
I will delay judgement on what I really think of the cookies until week 4.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 