Stepping away from my creative crafty side, I want to talk about other things. Too much has been whirling in my mind and I need to purge.
Baking has been my oldest hobby. It certainly became my therapy in recent years. Although lately, since being diagnosed as a diabetic, I don't eat any of my baking. Thankfully, with my husband's job, I have hundreds of greedy mouths to pawn off all my creations. I mainly stick to cookies, but I'll do brownies or muffins and such for a change.
In my eagerness to try something new, I decided to make some no-bake cookies. I remember making some as a teen over at a friend's house. I remember pretzels (or chow mein noodles -- something crunchy like that), peanuts and melted chocolate and butterscotch. I remember there was no oven. And I certainly don't remember a stove. I remember melting the chocolate in the microwave.
However, when I went searching online for some no-bake cookie recipes, every last one of them involved boiling a sugar mixture on the stovetop.
I have several issues with this:
1. While technically this is a no-bake recipe, it still involves cooking. I thought the idea was to not heat up the house while making these???? {for the record, I call these recipes 'cooked cookies'}
2. Cooking sugar to the soft-ball stage is tricky, and certainly not for the beginner candy-maker.
3. All the sites bragged about this being a kid-friendly cookie recipe. I wouldn't let kids near a stove with boiling sugar. This mixture can cause some serious burns.
Anyway, I selected a recipe and proceeded to combine the ingredients for the boil. The recipe said to combine it all in a small saucepan. Without thinking, I immediately pulled out my 1 quart saucepan. I got the thing going and as soon as I got the little bubbles starting to form on my sugar mixture, I realized my mistake. This pot was going to boil over. This type of candy boils up big. I remember from my lollipop making days that sugar forms lots of foamy big bubbles. If I was to do this again, I wouldn't use a 2 quart pot either; I'd go big...like 3-4 quart, which I consider to be a LARGE saucepan. Small saucepan...who wrote this recipe?
After dealing with the boilover and trying to recover as much as I could, I was finally at the 'mix all the ingredients together' stage. It was hard to stir. Very hard. When I got it completely coated, I dumped it all in a lined cake pan. I wanted to cut this into bars. So I spread it out and left it alone to set for the recommended 30 minutes. Two hours later (because I get distracted easily), I went to de-pan my cookies and cut them into squares. However, my cookies weren't set. They were still the ooey-gooey mess they were when I dumped them in the pan. I tried chilling the pan; no good. I went back to the web and searched for a way to save my cookies. Nada. Most sites let on that all you could do was dump the goop in the trash. Not this chick. There's a lot of chocolate, oats, sugar, peanut butter, etc. in this mix. I don't habitually throw money in the trash. Being at a loss, I packed the mixture in an airtight container and stuck it in the fridge until I could figure out what to do with it.
Fast forward one week. I'd been thinking about it all week and finally decided that since all the ingredients in this no-bake cookie recipe were basically the same as a regular cookie recipe minus a few, I could add the missing few and just make a regular baked cookie. I pulled the container of goop out of the fridge and it was still as gooey as it was when I put it in. I mixed it all with another stick of softened butter. Added two beaten eggs. Then I added 2-1/2 cups of flour with some salt & baking soda. Mix till blended and I scooped and baked for 10 minutes. They came out delicious. I had saved my disastrous no-bake cookies. I will feed them to my cadets tonight and I'm sure they will enjoy the chocolaty, oaty, peanut buttery cookies.
I doubt that I will attempt that no-bake cookie recipe again, but I know that if I did and failed again, I know how to save it. Too bad I can't contact others who have had unlucky no-bake cookie flops before they chuck it in the trash, but perhaps somebody will find my blog and be rescued.
