Something that may surprise you is the fact that throughout the course of my blog, I haven’t once baked cookies. I know, I know. You might be saying, How could you, Susannah? Cookies are life. Trust me, that’s exactly what I said to myself when I first realized I hadn’t baked them. Because cookies are life. No question.
In case you haven’t heard, I had to rename my blog due to some copyright issues. The recent re-christening of my blog and the realization that I hadn’t baked cookies both coincided at around the same time. Thus, deciding what to bake was both very easy and very difficult. Choice #1 would have obviously been making meth, but for some reason my mom was against that idea. So I went with the second choice: Mexican hot chocolate cookies. They have little to no connection to “Breaking Bad,” but they sounded really good, and Pinterest was raving about them.
According to Pinterest, what makes Mexican hot chocolate cookies different from regular (are these even a thing, normally?) hot chocolate cookies is the addition of about a teaspoon of cayenne pepper. Thankfully, the recipe was very straightforward in that all I had to do was mix the wet ingredients and dry ingredients separately and before combining them. Once I’d successfully completed those steps, I added in the cayenne pepper. Searching in the maze that is my spice cabinet I found a small jar of something bright red and powdery, which I assumed was cayenne. I’m still not really sure, but I rolled with it.
When the dough was mixed, I prepared a dish of sugar and cinnamon to dip the cookies in. The idea was that they would end up like the richer, way cooler cousin who gets all of the cute boys at school (I’m not bitter) of a snicker doodle. While the recipe made this part seem really easy, it was anything but.
The process wasn’t actually too horrible, except that it involved numerous steps just to create one cookie. First, I had to take a spoonful of dough, try not to eat it, roll it into a ball, flatten said ball, cover one side with sugar and lay it on the baking sheet. And then repeat that 24+ times.
If you know me well, which I’m sure you probably do if you’ve been reading this blog since the beginning (if so, let me know because I don’t think you exist and I would be amazed if you do), you know that I get irritated quite easily. If you bother me in the middle of a new episode of “Mad Men” I will most likely punch you in the face, and if I drop a piece of toast peanut-butter-side-down on the ground I will scream. Loudly. I’m also very impatient. These two qualities combined with the fact that dipping every single disc of dough into sugar took 30 minutes made for a not-very-happy Susannah. I was the human incarnation of Grumpy Cat (I will love that meme until the day I die, I swear to you).
Finally, I was able to shove both filled baking sheets into the oven with a loud grunt. My mom was pretty concerned for me and asked if I needed help, but as with everything challenging in my life, I was in it alone. I was a lone wolf, like Julie Walters in “Mamma Mia!”
Leaning down so that I was at eye level with the cookies, I opened the oven door 10 minutes later to check on them. Despite getting a face full of hot oven air, Sylvia Plath-style, it was too hard to immediately tell if they were done, so I stared at them for a few moments. It was like staring into the depths of my own soul. And seeing as I spend most of my time baking for this godforsaken blog, my oven as a parallel to my soul definitely wasn’t too far off.
I took them out of the oven after several minutes of semi-baking, I figured they were done. They smelled both spicey and like chocolate, which are basically my two favorite things, so I shoved one in my mouth immediately.
After taking some time to soothe the burns in my mouth, I took a bite from another cookie. And really, they were slightly disappointing. Having used cocoa powder rather than actual chocolate definitely left them less chocolatey than I prefer. And although the spiciness was pleasant, the lack of chocolate(to match its flavor) made it seem as if the cayenne was thrown in on a whim.
Also, Pinterest lied. The cookies were most definitely not like a chocolatey snicker doodle, but really just something else entirely. Pinterest, I feel betrayed.
Overall, the cookies were pretty meh. The same goes for my baking experience. If I’ve learned anything, really, it would be that the answer is always chocolate. When in doubt, chocolate. When you’re sad, chocolate. When it’s your 17th Valentine’s Day alone, duh. Chocolate.
So what was the most logical thing to do after baking some disappointing cookies? Well, I went and I got some chocolate.
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