My prize-baking efforts of Tuesday evening ended up making better comedy than documentary. I suppose I did end up with a tasty final product, but that result was continually up for debate throughout the entire process.
On Monday afternoon, Brooke (who was much too kind in her version of this story) and I agreed that she would come over and pick up her prize on Tuesday after work.
On Tuesday afternoon at about 4:00pm, I finally dug out the recipe and began pulling out ingredients. Oh stink. I used the cake mix I've had on hand for apple crisp a few weeks ago. All three kids were home and happy doing whatever they were doing and I really dreaded hauling them all out to the store at this busy time of day when they're running out of steam anyway.
(Keep in mind that any outing this time of year requires getting coats on four people, buckling two kids into 5-point harnesses, unfolding the wheelchair ramp, pulling the wheelchair carrying the third child up into the van, fastening the four tie-downs to the chair without bashing my head on any of the hardware attached to the chair, fastening the seatbelt around said child when you can't see where the seatbelt buckles without standing on your head, folding the ramp back up into the van, and finally getting in myself. Then you do the whole thing backwards when you get to the store. Then you do it all over again to head home, and then do it all backwards again to get into the house. That's if you only have to go to one store. One outing with all three per day is usually all I can handle!)
Oh yeah, and wouldn't you know, I had already been to the store that morning! That's what you get for procrastinating. Now what am I going to do?
At 4:15, Brooke called to provide an ETA (she's such a considerate friend). I mentioned casually that I was missing a key ingredient for the cookies. She found this highly amusing but volunteered to pick it up for me. So now I had to make the cookies while she knit (knitted? hmmm) happily instead of having them ready for her when she arrived and being able to knit too. (OK, so they wouldn't have been ready anyway since I didn't start until 4:15. Stop it! I already confessed that I procrastinated!)
I wandered around the kitchen looking for ideas for dinner and didn't come up with anything. It had been a busy day and I needed something quick. (Yes, I had procrastinated about that too.) After watching the Food Network on Sunday, I was in the mood for foods I did not have in the house and didn't normally buy (like steak).
Brooke arrived around 5pm, cake mix in hand. She suggested that we order take-out, volunteered the use of some coupons for a local hot sandwich shop, and when Scott called, he took no convincing. (We only get take-out about once a month, if that, so it's a real treat.) I was lept at the idea because juggling dinner AND cookie-baking AND washing all the dishes by hand didn't sound like a fun evening. (We haven't had an automatic washer since our oldest child was born.) This saved dishes AND time.
I began mixing the cookies, and everything went well until I mixed the wet and dry ingredients together. The dough was supposed to get smooth. After several minutes in my mixer, it still resembled coarse corn meal. The recipe called for 2 sticks of butter. I was supposed to melt one in the microwave, then cut the 2nd into 1/2 inch slices and mix them into the melted butter. After letting it sit for a couple minutes, I was then to whisk them together until it was all smooth. I did exactly that. This problem had nothing to do with procrastinating.
Now Brooke was really enjoying herself. Apparently watching me bumble about my kitchen and fumble through problem after problem was quite entertaining.
I gradually mixed in little bits of hot water until the dough finally combined, though it was really thick - like pie crust. I didn't want to deviate from the recipe too much though, so I quit and started filling my cookie press with the dough. All the while, I knew that if the dough wasn't just right for the cookie press, it would either refuse to adhere to the cookie sheet or it would ooze out uncontrollably and hold no shape.
My dough was too thick. It was incredibly difficult to squeeze it through the press, and I had to detach each cookie by hand. I finally got my first pan into the oven about the time we needed to get dinner. By the time we all settled on what we wanted to eat, I realized I had failed to set a timer! Now I was stuck baby-sitting the oven until the pan was baked, and even then, a few of the cookies were a little over-done.
Fortunately, Brooke's current job is training people to value diversity, so she was very accepting of this first pan of cookies.
I called in our order, adding a few customizations (hold the olives on this one, no cheddar or mozzarella - I want bleu cheese instead, and no special sauce please), and off we went to pick it up (Scott had arrived home by now).
This was a newly-opened restaurant, so can you guess how well they did with our custom order? Yup. Pretty poorly. The only thing they got right was no special sauce. The one sandwich was drowning in olives. The other one had both cheese we asked to remove, and none of the cheese we asked to add. Oh well.
After I ate until I was so full I knew it would be hours before I could sleep, I decided to complete a few cookies (baking wasn't the last step), just to make sure that adding water hadn't ruined them. This required me to melt semi-sweet chocolate, drizzle it over the cookies, and then sprinkle them with chopped almonds. Sounds easy!
My semi-sweet baker's chocolate was several years old. I checked the box and found no expiration date, so I decided to try it. It was a bit drier than normal, but it tasted fine. However, because it was too dry, it didn't melt into a drizzly consistency!
I tried mixing a little water in, but then I wondered if water mixes well with chocolate. So then I kept adding more and more milk until it finally got runny enough.
The test batch of cookies was a success! So I started to refill the cookie press for another pan. The dough had dried during the course of dinner and the test cookie prep. It absolutely would not budge. I had to dump it back into my mixer and add more water. This time I got to a much more workable consistency and had a little less trouble with the cookie press. I also remembered to set the timer for each pan of cookies.
I continued to have trouble keeping the chocolate at a good drizzling consistency. It cooled off in between batches, so then I had to warm it back up in the microwave. I should have just set the bowl of chocolate in another bowl of really hot water to keep it warm and runny. But of course, I didn't think of that then!
Miraculously, the cookies did turn out. They look half-way decent and they taste great, if I do say so myself.
So Brooke, let's have no more complaining about how some people who won Knitting Olympics prizes didn't earn them! Surely the effort I put into this prize counts for more than some huge company donating a few balls of yarn!
(I did find it interesting that though I had at least 200 visitors from all over the world on my blog when the announcement went out listing who won Knitting Olympics prizes, not one person left a congratulatory comment on my blog. Knitters apparently still need to learn about sportsmanship.)
