The Cookie Conundrum

For as long as I can remember, my mother and grandmother and aunts and just about every other female (plus a few male) relative has done quite a bit of holiday baking.  As my mother's only daughter, and thus easily obtained slave labor, I was drafted into the holiday baking torture very early.

Disclaimer: I don't like cookies (but I love raw cookie dough), nor do I like cake.  Really, with the exception of pie, I'm not particularly a huge fan of consuming baked goods in general. 

BUT! 

I love to bake.  It's the perfect stress-reliever/mood-lifter for when I'm feeling out of sorts, or even when I just want to pull out my fancy stand mixer and whip out a batch of ginger snaps or create a triple layer red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting. 

So, every year, I make a pilgrimage to Sam's Club, buy enough flour, sugar, eggs, chocolate chips, and vanilla extract to feed cookies to not one but six small countries for the next year and a half.  And, that's when the real fun begins!  I make fudge, brownies(two different kinds), banana bread, sugar cookies, ginger snaps, oatmeal raisin, no bakes, peanut butter, monster cookies...

And of course, the chocolate chips.

While I think my peanut butter cookies are my best ones--Hello? For me, the peanut butters never fail.  I once started scooping powdered sugar into them when I wanted flour, realized my mistake AFTER the mixing began, so was only able to scoop out about half the sugar and replaced it with flour, and they still came out PERFECT!  I swear I could put a pound of arsenic in a batch and they'd still be great...er...not that I'd ever do that. I may be mean, but I'm not that mean. I swear!--wait. where was I? Oh, yeah. Talking about my best cookies.

But, anyways, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted.  I think the PBs are my best cookies, but the ones that everyone and I mean everyone is always requesting more of is the chocolate chips.  So much so that every year I have to make two TRIPLE batches of chocolate chips just to have enough to go around.  Yeah, that's a lot of cookies.  And, (not that I'm bragging or anything, because this is TRUTH here), my chocolate chips always, always, always turn out light and fluffy and just the perfect size.

Until this year.  The first batch fell flat, and I mean FLAT.  I still don't know what happened.  So, I shrugged it off.  So, what if they were ugly cookies?  The flavors were there.  I'd just make up the next batch and put the ugly cookies underneath the better batch I was about to bake.  No one would notice, I told myself.

Until the next batch did the exact same thing!  This was just not right, people.  Do you realize just how many ugly cookies I made???? Do you?  Over eight dozen.  ONE HUNDRED UGLY ASS COOKIES!!!!!

At my wit's end, I decided that there would be no more making of the chocolate chips.  Hell, I was so upset, I thought about just chucking all those ugly cookies and just not including them in my holiday cookie boxes.  But, last night, I got a second cookie wind.  It may or may not have had something to do with the fact that I kicked major ass at Jeopardy! and it wasn't even a kids version.  I kicked adult Jeopardy! ass, so I was feeling pretty damned invincible.

And, those chocolate chips were going down!  Bitches.

Moral of this Christmas cookie story: Determination is key, minions.  Not just in baking, but in life...and of course, writing.  Without it, I would still be wallowing in my catastrophic cookie misery.  Hmm...so that means I should get to work and power through the mini writer's block I've been experiencing the last week, huh?  Good idea, Karla.  Now let's put it into action.

Karla, over and out!