What We Bring To The Table

I have mentioned my lack of baking skill before. Due to a few missteps (the final one being an inadvertent use of twice the amount of butter called for in a cookie recipe), I had come to believe that it was something I would never be any good at.

Over the past year or so, though, I've been trying to improve in that area -- with some success. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm home now and feeling like I should be doing something productive with my days or what, but I've been baking a lot (and eating a lot of what I bake, which is another post entirely). Recently, I baked four pumpkin loaves. (Two were excellent, but something went wrong with the other two -- they failed to bake all the way through. I initially blamed the oven, but I'm wondering if the recipe I worked from had the wrong bake temp -- I may have instinctively set it to 350 when I baked them, which would have been the logical temp, whereas I told P to bake the other two at 300, which was what the recipe called for, even though it seemed too low to both of us.)

This week I baked the cookies pictured above. P wanted plain toffee cookies, which sounded really boring to me. And I had trouble finding a recipe for plain toffee -- they all had oatmeal or nuts or chocolate. I finally found one and baked them. But they seemed boring. So I made one sheet of plain toffee, but then added chocolate chips to the remaining dough. I then made a sheet of those. I still had enough dough left for a dozen more cookies, so I added chopped walnuts. Needless-to-say, P preferred the ones with the nuts and the chocolate chips.

My MIL and her husband, as well as Ps grandfather, enjoyed all three kinds when they came that night to see Harry. After previously being told that we didn't need to bring anything to Thanksgiving, my MIL called after trying the cookies to ask if we could make the sweet potato casserole. And some cookies. Did I just need to prove myself?