Recently I was absolutely craving a sweet but salty chocolate chip cookie. I couldn’t get this treat out of my mind, partially since it had been forever since I made a good batch of them. I tried to replicate the ones I made in April, hoping for that same “best batch EVER” thought as I devoured them. I don’t know what exactly made those cookies so much better than whenever I usually make them, and I still don’t know. It was probably how I combined the sugar and eggs and “whipped” them a bit more than usual, but I did the same thing with these and I just wasn’t feeling it after they were done.
I would love to take a baking science class to learn all about these different reactions and what causes what, but I suppose I could learn the very same things through trial and error and reading up on it online. I just think it would be a fun class to take, knowing me and my love for details.
Before I put anything in the oven I thought the dough itself was really good–just what I was looking for to appease my craving. However, once they came out of the oven they just tasted . . . off. In the moment it tasted like a brown sugar issue, but I wasn’t postitive. This whole not knowing thing did not mesh very well with my usual need to know every tiny detail, so needless to say I was slightly miffed.
You wouldn’t really know by looking at them that I wasn’t entirely thrilled with these cookies, but that’s the truth. They seemed promising in the dough phase, but the final product just did not meet expectations. This dud will also teach me to deviate from my usual Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips. My chocolate chip cookies will never have Trader Joe’s chips in them again. I don’t mind these chocolate chips for other things, but after years of a good thing, why change the combination? While I love Trader Joe’s from the bottom of my heart, I’m just not as huge a fan of their chocolate chips in my tried and true cookies.
However, this chip ban had not quite come into effect before I made the Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars from Two Peas and Their Pod. I really enjoyed these bars, and I’m going to keep them in mind if I want chocolate chip cookies but just don’t want to do all the batches. Another win for me!
They may have taken forever in the oven, but it was well worth it. The edges and outsides were crispy and crunchy while the insides remained chewy and delicious.
The recipe yielded SO MANY BARS. The 24 bars were a bit of an overkill, which I should have thought about before I made the entire recipe. I was still trying to finish off strawberry lemon bars from the week before, and in fact I had to take the fruity bars out of the pan so I could use it for these cookie bars. That should have clued me into the fact that I really didn’t need another 9×13 pan of baked goods. Oh well. What’s done is done and everything eventually disappeared, whether it was by my eating it or pushing it on my friends whenever I could.
Aren’t I the greatest friend? 😛
Oh yeah, GAELIC FOOTBALL WAS GREAT last Sunday! Unfortunately we found out when we got to the field that we had to pay $10 to get in, a fact that was NO WHERE on the website. It’s still a good deal, though, because $10 gets you a hurling game and two football games, if you’re willing to stay there from 2:00 to 6:30ish. We were originally only going to go to the 5:00 game, but we got there so early that we went to the 3:30 game and stayed through the 5:00 game as well. The games weren’t nearly as brutal as I was hoping, but the second game made up for it, being better than the first one.
(Cavan, pronounced “Cah-vahn”)
On another note, one of the men near us (as well as a good chunk of the crowd) was rooting for Cork to win in the second game and even went so far as to say (in his wonderful Irish accent) that “There’ll be Kerry blood tonight!” I was certainly laughing by the end of the game when in fact Cork did NOT win. GO KERRY! It was such a close game at points, and it was absolutely a nail-biter at the end.
(Armagh, pronounced “Ar-mahh”)
Cavan won the first game and Kerry won the second game. The results were rather surprising because both of these teams had slow starts and it seemed like the other teams would win during most of the games.
I’m definitely going back another afternoon, but I’m just not sure when yet. If I don’t go back in August I’m DEFINITELY going back for the games the Sunday after classes start. That’ll be a fantastic afternoon with the teams that are playing. I just hope if I bring one of my friends that I can get her to leave, what with all the young Irish men and their accents surrounding us. I know I was quite pleased with the afternoon based on that fact alone.
Emerald Thunder 