It is 1:05 am, and I have finally gotten the kitchen (relatively) clean after a baking session with my daughter. This is not because my daughter is particularly messy or demanding -- it's just because baking is messy. Fancy baking is even messier.
My daughter got a cute little birthday present a few years ago -- an apron and a box of cookie recipes, each on a glossy card with gourmet photos that make the cookies look oh-so-yummy! She occasionally fingers through the box, pulling out different recipes, asking if we can make them. I always mumble something resembling "yes," but then the next thing on the list (usually making dinner) comes up and the cookie project is cast aside. Again.
Yesterday, my daughter asked if we could make some cookies from the cookie recipe box, and I told her, "Yes," and I meant it, so I had to add, "but we will have to plan and make them the next day, because we probably won't have the ingredients." With that, the wheels were set in motion. Cookie baking day was on.
She spent a good half-hour looking through and deciding which cookies to bake. "Can you help me decide which ones to bake?" she finally asked. "Why don't you narrow it down to two or three and then I'll help you." "Hmmmm. Two or three. Okay."
She set to work reading the recipes -- roll cookies, drop cookies, bar cookies -- the possibilities seemed endless. She finally settled on two very chocolatey looking ones. "Here, Mom. How about these? 'Chocolate Coconut' or 'Black Beauties.' We've made the coconut ones before."
"We have?"
"Yeah ... they didn't come out exactly like the pictures, though."
Okay, a vague memory of the Chocolate Coconut cookies is coming back to me now. I must have blocked that out of my mind for some reason.
We decide on the Black Beauties, a chocolate and nut meringue, glazed in a chocolate ganache. I pull out the Kitchenaid mixer (which I have not used much since I got it for myself for Christmas) and am grateful that I have it when I read that I have to make the egg whites turn into stiff peaks.
Somehow, my advice to my kids -- "as long as you try your best, that's what is most important" -- does not apply to baking cookies. Because if you try your best, but you burn the chocolate in the microwave when you are melting it, or you mistakenly put in unsweetened chocolate instead of semi-sweet chocolate, or you have only Hershey's cocoa instead of Dutch-processed cocoa, or you have regular granulated sugar and not 'super fine' sugar ... well, you get the idea ... if you don't quite get the recipe right with a 'gourmet' cookie recipe, the cookies just are not very gourmet.
Tonight I learned that burnt chocolate smells horrendous. But fortunately, it scoops out pretty easily, basically as a solid mass, so the rest of the melted chocolate is still salvageable, avoiding a second trip to the grocery store.
I also learned that it is a very, very, very bad to taste the unsweetened melted chocolate -- melted in a Pyrex bowl over a saucepan of simmering water -- before the corn syrup and sugar are added. It looks like a delicious chocolatey mess, just calling out to me to take a lick, but it is a cruel trick. Unsweetened chocolate tastes terrible. Actually, it's worse than that: it tastes nasty. My daughter agrees: "Ewwww, Mom, this tastes nasty!"
Another thing I learned is that my oven re-sets itself when switched from regular "bake" to "convect bake," and when one's eyesight is questionable and one's kitchen smells annoyingly like burnt chocolate, it is very easy to miss the fact that one has just changed the temperature from 250 degrees to 325 degrees. "Wow, these look burnt," I observe, approximately 45 minutes after I have switched the temperature, and five minutes before I realize the mistake and turn down the temperature (thankfully) for the second batch.
The best thing, although not a new thing, that was confirmed tonight, is that my family is very tolerant of my baking mishaps, and quite happy to try out whatever comes out of the oven.
"Mmmmm. Yummy."
I am Mrs. Lucky. My kids probably should be saying, "Ewwwwww, what happened to the cookies? Are the Black Beauties really supposed to be that black?" Instead, my daughter is happily spreading the ganache on the cookies, saying, "These still taste good." As I look at her now, she seems so mature, and I know that I have stressed her out during our cooking project because, well, she used to think I know what I'm doing and is now old enough to realize that I really don't. But she has learned to forge ahead, as I do, in spite of this lack of knowledge base or skill. And she is spreading the ganache just fine. The cookies look almost like they do in the picture!
Betty Crocker may be able to kick my butt when it comes to baking, but I can live with that. I am more than happy to just be Mrs. Lucky, eating burnt cookies with my smiling kids and Mr. Lucky.
