C is for Cookie, and that rhymes (loosely) with "I'm turning 23."

It seems like the teachers often bring in some sort of cake or treats when it’s their birthday, so for my birthday I thought I should do something too. I still don’t think all of them know who I am, so I figured it would be a good way to remind people I’m around. I wasn’t sure about making, buying, or even carrying enough cake to school for all the teachers. It’s complicated enough to change trains twice and walk 20 minutes to school every day with just a backpack, and I didn’t really want to add to my load by bringing enough cake for 80 people. I mentioned this to Isabel and she suggested baking cookies.

That’s not a bad idea, since you only really see cookies around Christmastime or something like Chips Ahoy, etc. And since my family loves cookies it was just another way to do something "American," I guess.

The idea was to keep it cheap and simple. Cheap it was, simple it was not. Here’s my recipe.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Recipe is halved to be sure it would fit in my mixing bowl.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. *375 F =  190.555555 degrees Celsius. Eyeball 190 on the dial as somewhere between where 170 and 210 are marked.

• ½ C softened butter. 1/2 C = 113.4 grams. Eyeball 113 grams on a cube of butter marked in 50g increments.
• 3/8 C white sugar + 3/8 C packed brown sugar. *brown sugar is impossible to find = substitute with another 3/8 C white sugar.
• 1 egg
• ½ tsp. vanilla extract sugar. *vanilla extract is impossible to find. Google how to substitute vanilla sugar for extract. ½ tsp vanilla extract = 2 tbsp vanilla sugar. Technically, you're supposed to subtract the same amount of regular sugar to make up for the amount you're adding, but really? I'm trying to whip these out.
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda baking powder. *baking soda is impossible to find. Google how to substitute baking powder for soda. ½ tsp soda = 1 ½ tsp powder.
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 1/8 C flour. *first batch flattens out too much in the oven. Increase to 1 ½ C flour.
• 1 C chocolate chips. *chocolate chips are impossible to find. Chop up a Milka bar instead.

1. Using an electric mixer wire whisk, cream butter and sugar until smooth. *Usually, you have an electric beater. But then again, usually you have a kitchen where you don’t hit your head on the ceiling while you do dishes, and your stove isn’t a two-burner hotplate. Substitute with wire whisk and cereal spoon.

2. Add vanilla extract vanilla sugar and egg. Mix until smooth.

3. Add dry ingredients, mix until smooth. *At some point very quickly, the batter will become too stiff for the whisk. Switch to cereal spoon. Alternate arms frequently. Maybe think about working out, you big weenie.

4. Add chocolate chips chopped up Milka bar. Mix until evenly distributed.

5. On a cookie sheet 9x9 cake pan, scoop out spoon-sized balls of dough spaced evenly. You should be able to fit around 12 4 cookies on each pan.

6. Bake for 10-15 minutes, until golden brown.

So. In a normal oven, you could reasonably expect to bake up to 24 cookies at a time. In my little oven, you can clearly only reasonably expect to bake 4 cookies at a time. Each set of cookies took between 11 and 14 minutes to bake, sometimes longer if I looked at them after my timer went off, decided they needed a little longer, sat back down, and then forgot about them.

I think I made around 100 cookies, so that would be 25 x (13 minutes in the oven + 2 minutes to cool) + about 20 minutes to make the first batch of dough = 395 minutes = 6hrs 15min. If you add in the time used when I forgot about the cookies in the oven or was otherwise interrupted, it’s probably closer to 8 hours. 

In gallon-sized baggies, I could fit them with my school stuff into my big backpack, which I usually use for laundry or traveling, and get it all to school. I had just enough time to leave them out on the table where I usually sit in the teachers’ lounge before I had to run off to class. When I got back, a few teachers who sit near me were eyeballing them, wondering what these giant bags of cookies were for. “It’s my birthday so I made cookies do you want one?” Of course they do.

Word spread a little bit, but funnily enough, not even a full bag got eaten. I ended up taking one of the bags along to the teachers vs. 13^th grader soccer match, and after unsuccessfully trying to convince the teachers on the team that they had to eat them, gave them to the 13^th graders. Left the half-eaten bag on the table at school, and brought the last container along with me to my birthday dinner with my friends that night. I still have around 2 dozen cookies I have to eat myself. If I ate them at the rate it took me to cook them, it would take me an hour and a half. And I'd still want to throw up.

Had to leave for my table tennis class at the university, and
the mixing bowl is too large for my fridge.

15 minutes' worth.

That night, I met my teaching assistant friends downtown for dinner and drinks. That was fun. They were properly impressed and sympathetic with my cookie-making efforts. We went to a different brewery for drinks than our usual, just to try something different. We sat outside, which was quite pleasant, but the Kölsch didn't seem to be quite as good. It was nice to have some time to catch up with everybody, since it had been a while. We talked about how little time we have left (7 weeks, actually!) and all the things we still have to do before then. My calendar is full, but I'll tell you more later!