Mish Mash Cookies

No dessert last week; I was getting my recommended yearly allowance of sun in baking Corfu.  I landed at five in the morning, after a sleepless flight through a lightning storm, arrived home at six and promised my dad that I would make him cookies to take to Cirencester.  After a shower, I watched The Great British Bake Off for a bit of inspiration, and then searched through a couple of recipe books.  I soon realised, however, that there was a problem, and it was a truly severe one.  I had no energy to put on shoes, open the door, lock it, walk for five minutes and actually read food labels, so whatever I used had to be in the house.  Armed with a basic chocolate cookie recipe from Next’s Simply Chocolate recipe book, I hunted through the cupboards and produced: some shrivelled raisins, quite a few slightly dry mini marshmallows, a half-full bag of white chocolate chips and a handful of milk chocolate chips.  I made the mixture and impulsively chucked the lot in and cooked them.

 I don’t have much luck with cookies.  They always seem to spread out into a monster cookie, determined to engulf the baking tray and then The World, or they go crunchy, as in overcooked, and these were no exception.  Luckily they didn’t try for world domination, but unless the photographer was setting them next to a small bucket of coffee, they were definitely bigger than the ones in the book .  When I gave them a prod (with my squeaky clean hands), they were very soft so I put them back in the oven for a bit, until they were firm, and left them to cool, during which time they went very crunchy.  Despite these slight hiccups, the mish mash of ingredients tasted pretty good together; the marshmallows returned to a tasty gooey state, the raisins loosened up a bit, and chocolate chips in chocolate cookies cannot go wrong, even when left in the hands of a sleep-deprived amateur.

Besides all this, Dad liked them; I asked him how they went down and was informed that “I scoffed the lot”.  It seems, therefore, that much like ketchup on toast (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it) and Captain America, this was one experiment that worked out well in the end.