DIY: How to Never Lose that Recipe Again! And Other Stuff.

As if this is what it looks like when I sit down to enjoy a cookie or four. Shoot, by the time I actually get to the table, I've gotten a cookie and a half crammed into my gullet. I am convinced that eating while standing doesn't count. In fact, I'm pretty sure in Weigh Watchers-land that'd be considered negative points. Bonus points, maybe? Extra credit work. That's it.

What you are about to read involves a recipe by yours truly. I know, I know. I probably should have allowed a little more time to lapse between near foot-amputation via a food processor and a blog post of cooking tips. But this here cookie recipe is too good not to share. In fact, hubs, who is a sweets aficionado, calls these his favorite and requests them often. Which is kinda a problem because I'm a flippin unorganized disaster that misplaces this recipe constantly. So I decided to perma-ize it on to a tea towel and a thrifted platter. 'Twas easy, lemme show you how.

Are you checking out those ingredients? You know anything that involves a stick of butter, sugar and chocolate has gotta be good. In fact, these cookies simply taste like chocolate butter. Which would be the best invention ever. And if you don't think these cookies are amazing, than, I'm sorry, but something is seriously wrong with you. I hate to be the one to tell you. Maybe your taste buds are broken. I heard once that you can get Taste Bud Transplants (actually, I've never heard that). In which case, you'd come back to me all apologetic like raving on and on about how incredibly wrong you were and how incredibly incredible the cookies are. Which, after TBT surgery would probably sound something like, "Oh my Dod, Cathie! Theeth cookieth are tho delithith!"

(Did I just insult people who may or may not have had Taste Bud Transplants? Er, if you exist, thorry).

Because my hand writing may be a touch difficult to read, here are the ingredients for a small batch of 12 cookies: 

• 3/4 cup of flour
• 1/4 cup of unsweetened cocoa powder (I use Hershey's)
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 stick of unsalted, room temperature butter
• 1/2 cup of sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 tablespoons of steel-cut oats (really any kind of oatmeal is good, we just prefer this)
• 1/4 cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips
• Small amount of coarse sugar (like the raw stuff) in a bowl
• Handful of cocoa nibs, if you got 'em

Oh, but back to the tea towel. So I used some linen-esque cotton I had in my stash. I cut it to 18" X 24" and began the entirely-too-long process of creating those light blue loose-leaf-paper lines. I set my machine on zigzag and zipped along. Once finished with that, I added the light pink vertical line and serged the edges out of pure laziness. 

Once you've russell up all the ingredients, do this:

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.  By the way, always check the inside of your oven before turning it on or you might discover that the crusty food on those dirty dishes you put in there when the in-laws were coming over is gonna burn and stink to high heaven. Not that I would know anything about that.  
2. Mix the first 4 ingredients into medium sized bowl.  Using an electric mixer, beat the butter in a large bowl until fluffy. Ummm, fluffy butter. 
3.  Add sugar and vanilla to the butter and continue to beat until blended. 
4. Add that floury stuff from the first step and attempt to beat. It'll be a little tricky because that stuff is about to get thick and clumpy. Which is usually never a good way to describe someone's cooking, but stay with me, the cookies are worth it. 

I used a fabric pen I picked up at the local craft store to write the recipe. That was a pinch tricky as the ink of the pen liked to bleed a bit so I just wrote a little larger than normal. By the way, did you know that they no longer teach cursive writing in elementary schools? This seriously bums me out. When I was a kid, we didn't have art class so those purple ditto cursive writing sheets were the closest thing for me. And I totally rocked 'em. Couldn't do long division or pass a spelling test, but you give me one of those hot-off-the-presses smeary purple sheets and I'd cursive write it all the way to Peru. Not the country. Peru, Indiana. The town next to the one I grew up in.

5.   Mix in oats, chocolate chips and cocoa nibs (which are totally optional. We just happened to have a stash and I add them for their crunch) with a spatula. 
6.  Shape a big ol' tablespoonish amount of the cookie dough, roll it around in that bowl of coarse sugar and kinda flatten it onto a cookie sheet. That's if you even get this far because, if you're anything like me, you're going to have consumed nearly half of that cookie dough before it even hits the sheet. Which is a good thing because this cookie dough doesn't contain raw eggs and thusly won't give you worms that crawl out your back door in the middle of the night (you know, call me naive, but I'm pretty sure most recipes shouldn't include the worm-crawling-out-yer-butt visual. Sorry).
7.  Bake them bad boys for about 10-12 minutes, let 'em cool for five seconds and drop 'em in your mouth like the hot-as-coal-from-a-grill chocolate buttery goodness that they are. Don't worry about those silly burnt taste buds. After all, you can always get TBT.

 For some reason, I got it in my heard that the recipe-emblazoned tea towel just wasn't enough. So when I spotted this giant platter at the thrift store, I decided to glaze the recipe onto it as well. I filled  one of those fine metal tipped glaze bottle thingies with black glaze and then I set to work transcribing the recipe.

Which makes the whole process sound much easier that it actually was. Because of the heavy glaze already on the plate, the surface was super slick and hard to write on. And the glaze liked to do this coming-out-in-clumps thing which was totally awesome. After doing some serious writing, wiping off and rewriting, I found that the best thing was to drag the metal tip of the applicator across the surface as I was writing. The above is how it looked before firing...

And here's the after. Which looks exactly the same.

Cookie and platter close up. Look at that prettiful hand-writing, would ya? All that hard work, it pays off. Just don't ask me to do any of that long division nonsense, ermkay? By the way, I know it looks like there are raisins in cookies. There isn't. It's just what happens when you wrap freshly made cookies in layers of Saran wrap and stick 'em in the freezer. More on that later.

Yay! Hub's fave recipe immortalized! The end.

Okay, not really The End. I just had to share this with you. This is how hubs keeps his extra stash of cookies: in 13 layers of Saran Wrap and a zip lock baggie in the freezer. You know, if some coke fiend came to our house, lookin' for coke in the freezer (cuz that's where one keeps coke, right? I don't know about these things and I'm afraid to google it for fear that "angel dust in freezer" will most assuredly get me fired. Again.) they'd find these instead. Which, being jacked up on coke, they'd be able to wrestle through those 13 layers much faster than me (I'm pretty sure one shouldn't curse and break into a sweat as much as I do before enjoying a cookie.) Now that I think about it, I wonder if those layers aren't meant to keep these cookies Cassie-proof. Hmm...I just might have to have a cookie or (one, two, three...) eight! in order to figure this one out. 

Until next time, go make yo'self some cookies! And then come back and tell me how amazin' they are!

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