Have you ever had one of those days that you just shouldn't be in the kitchen? Like the kitchen Gods are just telling you to go and get some take out? Yeah, that was me tonight.
All I wanted to do was make something to share with a friend who just had a baby. A nice little casserole, a salad to balance out the carbs, and some baked goods. The plan started out fine.
I prepared a quinoa mac and cheese (which, if I remember to take pictures and mark up the changes I made to the original recipe, I might share on here). I have it ready to go into the oven tomorrow and will take it to her family on Thursday. CHECK.
Salad... well, I bought some bagged salad, and will make a quick Vinaigrette tomorrow, probably while the quinoa is baking. CHECK
Baked goods. Well, I'm a little strapped for time, and I wasn't looking to do anything fancy, so broke out the old stand by - Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookies. I can make these in my sleep, or so I thought. This is where all hell broke loose.
I made my dough, it looked great. First problem. I couldn't find my cookie scoop. Well, I can get by without that. I took that as a sign to shake things up, maybe make some nice big cookies. So, I did... or tried.
After about 10 minutes in the oven, I took a peek... it was NOT a pretty sight. Dark edges, raw middle. What the what?!?!
Okay, so maybe I shouldn't have tried big cookies. After a little more searching, I found my cookie scoop. Take two.
Again, about 10 minutes into the baking process, I peeked my head in the oven. Same thing... dark edges, raw center.
At this point (yes, it took me until this point) I realized that something had gone terribly wrong. It wasn't the oven temp... the only thing I could think was that I didn't add enough flour to the dough (I did halve the recipe, and eyeballed it)... but this was beyond just missing out on a little flour. This was an EPIC fail people!!
I haven't had a fail in the kitchen like this, since the brownie soup incident in high school (that was the night that taught me to never bake after 11 pm).
So, to try and salvage the last half dozen cookies, I added some more flour to the dough, and stuck the last 6 cookies in the oven (this didn't end up working either, in case you were wondering).
Now, I have 2 dozen, tasty yet not very cookie like cookies. I didn't want to throw them out, so I took the mass of cookie bits and piled them into a bowl and started plotting.
2 dozen failed cookies ... piled into a bowl. |
So, thinking back to that, I did what anybody would, and googled up 'chocolate chip cookie butter'. I didn't find anything, but I did find a bunch of recipes for cookie butter made with Speculoos cookies. Taking the idea behind that, I went ahead and made some chocolate chip cookie butter.
I don't have an exact recipe for you, but can give you an idea of what I did. Someday, I might recreate it, and give an actual recipe. I will test the product out on my guinnea pigs at work first :)
Chocolate Chip Cookie Butter
1/2 recipe of EPIC failure Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookies (try making the recipe, with just a little less flour, see if you can produce the epic failure...)**
Vegetable Oil (1/4 cup?)
Water (to thin out)
Cinnamon, just for some flavor
Vanilla (why not?)
Process everything in the food proccessor, until creamy. You may have to adjust the amount of oil and/or water you use (I did find that when my butter sat for awhile, a lovely puddle of oil showed up on the top of the butter... again, when I do try to recreate the recipe, I'll see if I can fix that).
** I'm sure you can also do this with perfectly made cookies, but why would you grind up a perfectly nice cookie??
I'm wondering if the kitchen Gods were just trying to push me to write a blog post, and just nudged me with this cookie fail?
I have never heard of cookie butter... how wise of you to walk away from it, sounds terribly dangerous!!!! So, what does one do with cookie butter?
ReplyDeletebtw... did you remember to add the eggs to the cookie mix? Maybe that was the problem??? Just trying to help you problem solve :-D