It's All Macademic, Anyway....

I’m interrupting the regularly-scheduled Blog program – the recent discussion of frozen meals as analogous to dirty secrets – to relate to you the sorry saga of my most recent holiday cookie test-bake.

My husband’s family doesn’t cook at all, which makes me the Julia Child of my particular clan of hairless apes. More particularly, it makes me the Pillsbury Dough Girl of the group, as the idea of baking cookies or anything trickier than Poppin’ Fresh dough leaves them prostrate. A series of events over the years – starting with me being too poor to buy Christmas gifts for anyone, coupled with my disbelief that my in-laws could celebrate Christmas sans Christmas Cookies – have conspired to make me the official Baker of Christmas Cookies for all of my husband’s family (and in recent years a few of my own, too). The net result is that we make 120-130 dozen cookies each December, which despite my moaning here, I actually enjoy.

This year, about a month ago, I was chatting with my good friend Barbara Grace the Canadian. I’ve always liked her, but now I suspect that there is evil in her heart, which I’ll get to shortly. I told her I’d been less-than-thrilled with two of the cookies I’d made for Christmas, 2004. Barbara Grace told me that White Chocolate Chip Cookies With Macadamia Nuts have become very big in Canada. Ohhhh, I breathed when she told me – that sounds luscious. So, happy idiot that I am, I decided to do a test bake for these cookies, to see if they would be good enough to be included in the Annual Sacrifice of butter, sugars and flour to the Food holiday gods.

I won’t bore you with the brain-damage of actually trying to find and purchase real white chocolate chips – or white chocolate of any kind. This delectable treat has apparently been replaced in large part by something called “white confection,” which not only doesn’t taste the same, it doesn’t look the same and it doesn’t cook the same. Nonetheless, for the purposes of just testing the cookie, I scored some Hershey’s White Whatever chips. And, lo and behold, a bag of Mauna Loa dry roasted macadamia baking pieces (bless their hearts) had – what else? – a recipe for “Macadamia White Chocolate Chip Cookies.” Cool! I was set, all good to go.

I fluffed the butter and sugars. I beat the eggs and vanilla. I blended in the flour, baking soda and salt. I noticed that the dough was stiff-ish, but I ignored that; I have a standby holiday cookie with a very stiff dough that is a fabulous finished product, so I wasn’t worried. I added and stirred the nuts and the white-whatever pieces. I spooned out the teaspoonfuls and baked for 10-12 minutes. I checked the cookies at 10 minutes, and they were doughy, whitish and the bottoms were barely browned. I checked at 12 minutes, and decided I’d best defer to the destructions, and took them out.

The second sheet, I cooked longer, trying to get at least a semblance of browning to the tops of the cookies. This rather amateurish production continued through 5 separate baking sheets of cookies, trying to find the right balance of crunch on the outside coupled with gooey, soft interior. Finally convinced I had it (a 16-minute-no-peekie cookie), I triumphantly slid the last of the cooling cookies onto a plate and announced the results to my husband (the Trusted Annual Baker’s Apprentice and Dough-Stirrer). I mean, just take a look at those babies – don’t they look like perfectly yummy, tempting cookies to you?

Looks are deceiving!! Those delightfully tawny things aren’t what they appear to be – they are WMD - Weapons of Macadamia Destruction. A mere hour after the last of the test bake cookies had cooled, I sauntered by and popped one into my mouth. Imagine my horror when I realized I couldn’t bite down! Those *&^% cookies hadn’t cooled…they had hardened with cement-like consistency. Even the scary-looking ones from the first sheet – the whitish, non-browned ones – had turned into hockey pucks that you could substitute for the interlocking pavers in your driveway. To eat them, you either have to dunk them into a liquid or nuke them until they soften. Of course, if you allow them to cool at all post-nuking, they regain that enviable consistency of tempered steel.

Obviously, that recipe is off of my Christmas cookie list. But that’s not the worst of it.

When I told Barbara Grace about the dreadful hockey puck cookies, she laughed. For some reason, she thinks the idea that the cookies should not be pasty white is hysterical, and that they turn into Moon Rocks is even funnier. Why is it not surprising – in hindsight – that a Canadian would think that a pasty white cookie is perfectly normal? She claims she buys and eats one of these along with her coffee from her local General Store every morning, and I believe her. Why do I believe her?

Because by afternoon, no one could eat one.



Next Wednesday: Back to our discussion of frozen food!!