Sunday, October 24, 2010

Cookie Time with Lex

Lex has kitchen issues.

Oh, he can find it just fine. It is, after all, located on the way to the bathroom.

And there's stuff in it that he likes which requires no prep other than tearing off a foil lid and grabbing a spoon. He's good at that. He can also make meat on the George Foreman grill and we even have a meat thermometer so he can check to make sure the internal temperature is hot enough to not kill him via food poisoning. He can mix up a satisfactory cocktail and open up a bottle of wine (he taught me, don'tcha know) and operate the whirly-pop.

Since we moved in together, I've taught him how to make one of his favorite dishes - a Mediterranean style concoction I accidentally threw together one night - so that he has something to impress the ladies if such an event were desired.

But baking is beyond him.

I think it's that he doesn't like all those steps...all those directions...all those things just telling him what to do. He's kind of...obstinate that way. He likes to be the boss of him and doesn't like other people to be Bossy McBoss-Alots when it comes to what he's supposed to be doing.

However, he also has a penchant for a particular kind of treat that I particularly hate to make. I know, right? Me! Hates making a treat.

Nonetheless, it's true.

The treat he most particularly likes is a no bake chocolate, oatmeal, peanut butter cookie. These are, I believe, his most favorite treat of all time.

And I hate to make them *le sigh* (that's French for *sigh*. You totally didn't know I was bilingual, did you?).

I don't know why I don't like to make them. They're just...ugh. Super sugary sweet and they are also VERY messy. Which bugs me. Plus, they require an extraordinary amount of counter space - something I lack entirely. But whatever.

However, he's been asking me nicely for quite some time to make them. Instead, I struck a bargain with him and told him I'd "help" him make them. In that I mean I would hand him the ingredients, tell him how much of which, and then he was on his own to form the dough into cookie bits.

This afternoon then, we did just that. And he did great! He did exactly as I instructed him and I even held the pot for him so that he wouldn't have to manage the pot and the spoon and the wax paper sliding about.

His first cookie, he spooned out the batter onto the wax paper and then cleaned up the edges so that the cookie was perfectly round like so:




The perfectionist did not last long however. His spoonfuls soon became sloppy ladle-sized blobs of chocolate-y goo like this:





To his credit, he took a 3-dozen yield recipe down to 1-1/2 dozen. Less mess, less counter space, and less wax paper, to be sure. He also, unintentionally, created a chocolate, oatmeal, peanut butter Rorschach test...which was kinda awesome.

Especially when he, The One of Agnostic Beliefs, began assigning Biblical imagery such as Noah's Ark to the blobs.

Thus, the no bake chocolate, oatmeal, peanut butter cookies are now known as the Biblical Rorschach Cookies evermore.

Have I mentioned how much I love Lex?

I totally do.

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