That’s the way the cookie crumbles
That’s the way the cookie crumbles
My friend Gina was coming for a visit, and it would be unlike me not to have something to serve.
There on the stove was the cast iron skillet I’d decided I just couldn’t live without after seeing a recipe for Dutch baby pancakes. I made the pancake – once – and then ignored the skillet for many months.
But I remembered a recipe I’d seen on Facebook for a skillet chocolate chip cookie. The photo looked enticing, as internet photos always do, all golden brown in the heavy skillet. And so I found the recipe and got to work.
I’d assumed I’d mix the ingredients in a bowl and spread them in the skillet and bake them, but no. Maybe that’s a valid (and as it turned out, more edible) way to make a cast iron cookie, but I went with this different version. I heated the empty pan on the stovetop, melted a stick of butter in there, then added the brown and white sugar and stirred that.
The recipe turned emphatic, insisting that I “Turn off the Stove!,” which I did, but doing so caused the butter and sugar mixture to turn lumpy, crumbly and stringy.
But, onward. I added the flour mixture to the sugar goo. The recipe warned that this would not be easy but to stay with it because it would “eventually mix together,” but it should have said “someday it will mix together.” I thought about giving up, but I was three eggs into this and they aren’t cheap. So I was committed.
Not sure who would have the arm strength to mix all that dry stuff into the goo in a shallow pan – maybe a boxer – but it wasn’t me. Back and forth I pushed the stuff, scooping and smashing and waiting for things to gel into something that looked like cookie dough. I never lost hope.
I leveled the clump in the pan, tossed the chocolate chips on top and, using two hands and all my upper body strength, lowered the skillet into the hot oven. And now we wait.
Twenty minutes later I pulled the skillet from the oven, wrenching my back because that thing was both heavy and at a weird angle. But the cookie looked like the photo – golden brown with bubbly chocolate bits. The kitchen smelled delicious.
I served each of us a wedge and added a scoop of vanilla ice cream, filled our coffee cups and sat down to enjoy. The air was filled with exclamations of “mmm” and “yum.”
And then, things got rocky. Literally.
My spoon hit something hard – not the plate underneath but the cookie itself. I spread a bit of ice cream onto that piece hoping to soften it but the cookie wouldn’t surrender. I looked across the table to find Gina grabbing her fork with her fist and plunging it into the cookie’s hardened heart. What the heck had I just served us?
My vigorously constructed and well-intentioned treat was turning to concrete. Eschewing the fork, I lifted the cookie and broke off a corner. This was the stuff of which gravel driveways are made.
“I’m so sorry,” I told Gina.
“This might loosen things up,” she said as she poured some of her hot coffee over the cookie.
As I cleared the table, I wondered: Was the recipe wrong? Was it a joke? Did they really mean three eggs?
As Gina said goodbye I asked if she wanted to take some of the cookie home, but she gently declined.
“No thanks,” she said. “But it was delicious … really.”
Next time she comes over, we’ll laugh about the concrete cookie – as we eat the cookies I’ll bake the normal way.