I bake. Therefor I am.

Ok, I don't really mean that. But I do enjoy baking. Here and there. And mostly, the stuff I attempt to bake turns out quite yummy.

So, I guess what happened to me just goes right along with how my month has been going. At least one person in my family and usually two at the same time have been sick for the entire month of December. Now, there are still approximately 8 days left of 2007 (and of December) so it's entirely possible that we may be well by then. But I'm not a betting woman, so I'm going to say that it's not going to be a safe one to put your money on. At least I'm hoping we will get well soon. I'm not going to go into the specifics, because it kind of makes me ill just to think about how hard it has been to be sick, Christmas shop, and then take care of sick kids also. It's not good times.

Anyway, since all is nearly said and done, I thought I would bake a little. I tried fudge. That nearly went to the crapper. It was overly soft. And my apologies go out to those who were recipients of my mushy fudge. It usually firms up better than that. I tried cookies. Big mistake. HUGE. I've never in my life encountered an incident such as the one that had occurred to me on the other night. I think I should have just stopped when I realized that I did not have any "fresh" baking soda.

I did however have a box from the fridge. Normally, I would not have taken it out and used it. But I was thinking to myself, how bad can it be? I had just purchased that box a couple weeks ago. Ok, maybe about a month ago. But it wasn't old, honest. I mean, the only thing wrong (if you could say wrong) was that it came out of the fridge. Besides, the fridge keeps things fresher, right?

Apparently not. You are apparently not supposed to use cold baking soda. Cold baking soda that had been sitting in my fridge for a month, it should not be used to bake chocolate chip cookies. Well, the dough came out nicely. It looked and smelled nice. I plopped the little cookie blobs on my non-cookie sheets. You see, even though I love to bake, I do not have the correct bake ware necessary. Anyway, I used an 8 x 8 pan and two cake pans. That should have worked. Except for my fatal error in using that baking soda.

I placed the cookies into the oven to bake for about 11 minutes at 375 degrees. Seems pretty simple, 'eh? Well, when I went back to check on the status of my cookies, I found a scary sight. It appeared that they were melting, and burning all at the same time. The dough completely ran together in the pans, the centers of the cookies looked like blobs of raw dough and the edges looked as if they were on the verge of burning. There were holes in the center of the cookies where no holes should be. They were all flat and looked just plain wrong. My eyes filled up with tears as I broke in to hysterical laughter. I summoned my two year old from his bed with my shenanigans. He came to the kitchen and looked at me with his puzzled two year old intense face. He said, "What you doing Mommy?" I cried, "Laughing baby. Mommy's laughing." He wanted to eat the cookies, but I couldn't explain to him that mommy had killed the batter. I went on to laugh for a good 10 minutes. And when I called my sister, I went on laughing some more. I have never in my life seen a more pathetic batch of cookies.

So, what did I do? I photographed them of course. Before I pitched them down the sink, I had to snap a few shots to share with the masses. Or just you few who read my blog. So here are my cookies, which drove me to buy refrigerated cookie dough just a few days ago. Don't laugh, this really happened!

Oh yes, and the squares in the middle look a little scary. But what's scarier is the fact that the chocolate chunks (which is what they were) failed to melt in the oven at 375 degrees for 11 minutes. Seriously! I really do know how to make chocolate chip cookies. And someday, not in the near future, I will attempt to make them again!