The Parenthood Experiment: I simply must share my diabolical brilliance with you all.

Monday, December 22, 2008

I simply must share my diabolical brilliance with you all.

Although, it's not entirely MY diabolical brilliance. Hubby helped.

So about a week after Thanksgiving, my siblings and I (and assorted spouses) get an email from my dad. Here he waxes eloquent about how worn out Mom was after coordinating Thanksgiving dinner for 28 people. And he opines that Christmas is coming, which is going to be nearly as exhausting, and he exhorts us to do whatever we can to help.

Being the good oldest child, Type-A personality kid that I am, I volunteer to be cookie fairy. Cookies I figure I can do a lot better (and easier) than volunteering to, y'know, do the main cooking. Or even volunteer to supervise the pork roast. I am not the greatest culinary artist in the family, but I can bake, and bake well.

Hubby's a little less than thrilled with this, because he knows me. When it comes to Christmas goodies, I...well...I tend to go overboard. (See any previous LJ entry that was made post-Christmas-Bakefest with Janelle, if you need more proof.) I love baking and making goodies simply because I am so good at it. And Hubby knew that once I got started, I would then want to ship packages of Christmas yummies hither and yon, and I was seriously in danger of burning my end at both candles.

Well.

I had asked for requests when I volunteered my oven. Dad really likes the Peanut Butter Blossoms. You know, the peanut butter cookies that have a Hershey's kiss smooshed into them as soon as they come out of the oven. Knowing how short I was going to be on time (I still baked and created for twelve hours), I opted to just buy the mix that you add egg, water and oil to. I bought four bags...and made them all. I bought a big bag of Hershey's kisses.

As it turned out, I ran short on kisses.

What to do, what to do.

Just make peanut butter cookies, I suppose.

That's when Hubby's first brainstorm strikes. Why not put chocolate chips into the center of the peanut butter cookies? We can tell Dad that the chips shrunk when we washed them in hot water or something.

I realized that I still had some milk chocolate & peanut butter morsels from the brownies I'd made a week before. I dumped 'em out, picked out the milk chocolate ones and put the peanut butters back in the bag. We'll use these instead of semi-sweet chips, I announced.

As I'm getting ready to roll the dough into balls for our shrunken-chips cookies, Hubby looks at me, again with that look of evil brilliance in his eyes. He grabs a pinch of cookie dough and rolls it into a very small ball. "Better yet...make 'em THIS size!"

I smirk, set aside the three balls of dough I've already made, and start rolling smaller balls. I end up with two dozen by the end of the dough.

I watch them carefully, since I have no idea how long they'll take to bake. I pull them out about four minutes later, and carefully stick little milk chocolate morsels on top of each cookie.