Cookie Saga

Last night the girls were going to have two friends come sleep over. These two are part of the homeschooling group of friends that we have, so our schedules don’t often mesh (meaning the girls were very excited about the upcoming sleepover). “Let’s make snickerdoodles for dessert for when J &F are here,” said Impera. “Sure, we can make cookies if you want, but I’ve found this recipe for homemade Thin Mints—you wanna try that?” I asked.

So we did. She helped me mix the batter, then we flattened it into a disc and put it in the freezer for 20 minutes, just like the recipe said. First mistake. Either other people’s freezers aren’t as powerful as ours, or the recipe designer meant refrigerator. When I took out the disc of batter, it was solid as a rock! That kind of turned off Impera, so she deserted me to go read a Parenting magazine she had borrowed from the library. I pushed, and pushed, and finally our marble rolling pin got the batter thin enough to cut out the shapes. (I’m not sure I got it down to 1/8-inch, as the recipe required, but close enough!).

They baked up very easily, they cooled every easily, and then it was time to glaze them with the peppermint-chocolate coating. The recipe called for one pound of chocolate. “That is too much!” I thought, so I only used 3/4 pounds. Second mistake. We still had so much left over that I made some mint chocolate pastilles to snack on later. (But that really belongs at the end of the story.)

The melted chocolate was really too thick. The recipe said you were supposed to coat each one separately, bring it out of the melted chocolate on a fork, and tap the fork on the side of the bowl until the extra chocolate dripped off (now maybe I understood how a whole pound of chocolate could be used). But the beauty of Thin Mints, to me, it the thinness of the chocolate coating. So I cursed a bit, and the Consort came into the kitchen to help. “It’s too thick!” I cried. “Here, let me thin it with some milk,” he offered. I thought that was a dandy idea. Third mistake. It seems that when one adds milk to melted chocolate over a double boiler, one gets fudge. Hmmm. I cursed some more, blamed the Consort, scraped out the batch of fudge, and started again with more chocolate (good thing I had purchased an extra bag of chocolate, “for next time”).

I really didn’t feel I had the time to spend ten minutes per cookie (in a batch of 4.5 dozen) tapping and tapping until each was covered with a thin coating. So I improvised and coated only half of each cookie. Eureka! After I was done, I went and gave the Consort a kiss and apologized for blaming him for the fudge mishap, since I had no idea the fudge thing would happen, either; I called the kids and gave them a plate of cookies to take back upstairs to eat as part of their 21st century D&D game (spies and Martians rather than trolls and orcs); and I settled down to eat my own serving of homemade thin mint cookies.