Change of Pace

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.