Cookies???

I baked the rest of the peanut butter cookies this afternoon.

You like how I said that?

All nonchalant-like, as though there were nothing out of the ordinary about the whole affair?

Yeah, not so much.

To back up just a bit because, as usual, I am about 63.5 miles ahead of myself. . . .

Our nine-year-old nephew, GodzillaBoy, spent the day with us, because he's off school (recovering from a hernia repair on Tuesday, doing pretty well, going back to school Monday) and all his parents are working today.

He's rather a picky eater, and we have no "kid food" in the house, so I was a bit concerned about what we'd feed him.

(Although we were pretty sure it would involved a trip to McDonald's for McNuggets.)

Last night, I was thinking that he might enjoy some cookies (after all, who doesn't?) so I took the leftover peanut butter cookie dough out of the freezer to thaw.

His dad dropped him off around 8:15 am, and not long after, we had the following conversation,

Aunt Whozat: "Did you have breakfast already?" (Thinking this was sort of rhetorical, because of course his father would feed him before dropping him off, right? Wrong.)

GodzillaBoy: "No."

W: "Oh." (cautiously) "Are you hungry?"

G: "Not really."

W: (Whew!) "Well, for later, we have . . . . " at which point I proceeded to list pretty much everything that we have in the house.

G: "No thank you. . . . No thank you. . . . No thank you. . . . No thank you. . . . No thank you. . . . No thank you."
(He's nothing if not polite, while rejecting my every suggestion.)

W: "Ok, well, we'll think about it later when you get hungry."

About thirty minutes later:

G: "Aunt Whozat, would you have some kind of treats to eat, like something sugary?"

W: (Hopefuly) "How about peanut butter cookies?"

G: "No, the only kind of cookies I like are chocolate chip."

W: "Oh, well, we don't have any chocolate chip cookies."

G: "When you said you don't have any chocolate chip cookies, do you mean that you maybe just have a little bit of chocolate chip cookies?"
(What an optimist!)

W: "No honey, I'm sorry. How about, when Aunt Shrike gets up (she was sleeping in because she works tonight) one of us can go to the store and get you something."

G: "How about you could go now? I can handle myself."

So, I woke Shrike up to let her know she was "on duty" even if she was still asleepish, ran to the store and got him some Pop-Tarts, while he handled himself quite nicely.

On the way home, I zipped through the McDonald's drive-thru, only to find out that they don't sell McNuggets at 9:30 am.

Shrike went back later for the McNuggets, of which I think he might have eaten one.

He did, however, eat 6 Pop-Tarts before he left around 3:00 pm.

After he and Shrike were gone, I thought it best that I go ahead and make the cookies.

You know, since the dough was thawed and all.

It turns out that the recipe probably makes more like 1 1/2 dozen, not 2 dozen, but I figured I didn't need to be eating big cookies anyway, so I made up a dozen small ones, popped them in the oven, and set the timer for about five minutes (because they are very teeny).

When it went off, they were starting to look more like cookies than dough, but were still very soft, so I set it for another 2 - 3 minutes.

When the timer went off again, I walked into the kitchen and immediately saw the smoke coming up from the oven and out through the stove burners!

ACK!

I think there was a tiny dot of not-burntness right in the middle of each one, but other than that?

Totally fucked.

Dammit.

Since I hated to throw them out, I broke them up and added them to an existing bowl of frozen homemade doggie snacks.

Sidebar
The last two times that I've made pot roast (The most recent being last night, which was, thankfully, uneventful. Also, delicious.) after trimming off that big slab of fat that you often find on one side of a roast (plus a little meat that you can't avoid), I've cut it into bite-sized pieces and cooked them up for the dogs. Then I tossed them into a bowl and put them in the freezer. Frozen, meaty fat-chunks. What could be better if you're a dog?!

So, the burnt cookies are (sort of) salvaged, but what about my needs?

My tastebuds are all set for peanut butter cookies and they will. Not. Be. Denied.

Aha - we have more peanut butter and sugar and fake-eggs.

I shall start from the beginning!

I figured 18 cookies is probably a bit more than we need to eat tonight (Because? We I will eat them all tonight.) so I decided to make a half-recipe or so.

And, what the hell, let's try it with the Splenda this time.

(See above note, re eating them all tonight.)

Except? We have no Splenda.

Well, we do have a Splenda / brown sugar mix, which is "twice the sweetness of regular brown sugar."

Hmmm, so do I go with "twice as sweet" or "half as much volume of something-that's-not-peanut-butter-to-make-them-sort-of-cookie-like?"

I think we all know the answer to that question.

I ended up using about 2/3 cup each of peanut butter and brown sugar / Splenda, as well as a couple of splashes of not-an-egg (to equal, in theory, about 2/3 of an egg).

I'm not sure how this happened, but I still only got about 10 smallish cookies out of the deal.

(Ok, it's possible that I might have eaten a tiny bit of dough. But not half of it! Really.)

So, I put my sad little cookie-lets in the oven, set the timer for five minutes and went about my business.

I checked them when the buzzer went off, and they were still quite dough-like, so I set it for another two minutes (being very careful to go in tiny increments this time).

Two minutes later: still dough.

What the fu. . . oh.

Q: What's the first thing one does when one discovers a smoking oven?

A: Evidently, one turns it off.

Oops.

So, seven minutes in a sort-of-cooled-offish oven equals how long at 375 F?

I turned the damn thing back on, set the timer for five more minutes and crossed my fingers.

They were still soft but making progress at that point, and a couple more minutes (watching like a hawk the whole time) did the trick.

Of course, I had to test them once they were cool, to make sure that everything worked out ok.

I can't tell the difference from the ones with real brown sugar, so that's a good sign.

I've put the other nine away and hope that I can stay out of them til Shrike gets home.

If this post mysteriously disppears later this evening, you'll know it's because I couldn't, and this never happened.

(Cookies? I don't know what all those comments on my blog about cookies mean. Oh look, honey, a shiny-thing.)

Oh, and the first batch?

I gave a piece to each of the dogs.

PerfectPup spit it out.

Spit. It. Out.

It couldn't have been too awful, though, because BigGaloot gobbled up both his and her rejected one.

On the other hand, BigGaloot eats dead things.

And shit.

And the shit of dead things.