Night at the Improv, Part I

As you may know by now (if you've been reading this blog for a while, and have paid any attention at all), I'm a big fan of faking it.  Sometimes that just means trying a new ingredient in a well-used recipe (adding cumin and curry powder to Betty's brown rice and lentils was brilliant.  Betty's diverse, but her recipes tend toward the bland and basic), but sometimes I make dinner winging it all the way.

Sometimes, I have no choice in the matter.

This story actually happened last year, but since I knew I'd be hiking by now, I figured it would be a good post to delay until I couldn't be relied upon to update regularly.  The next post is a continuation of the same afternoon in the kitchen.

First, the cookies.

I have this great book for chocolate chip cookies.  All the recipes were culled from a contest to find "the best" chocolate chip cookie recipe, possibly the most subjective idea since Miss Universe (click the link, or you can't really appreciate the joke).  I first liked it because I got it when I was still beginning to learn how to cook and bake, and there was a lot of good information in how the ingredients worked, and enough variety in the recipes to see those theories in action, assuming you eat an awful lot of cookies, which I arguably do.  Since I got the book, I haven't even hit the halfway point in trying all the recipes, but I have found a few very good ones, and this is one of them.  That should come as no surprise; it was a finalist.

Joyous Chocolate Chip Cookies (submitted by Robin Joy Minnick)
3 C flour
1 t baking soda
1 t salt
1/2 C butter, softened
1/4 C shortening
1 C brown sugar, firmly packed
1/2 C granulated sugar
1 t vanilla
2 eggs
1 T milk
3 T dark corn syrup
2 C semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 C pecans, broken

1. preheat oven to 350F
2. Cream butter, shortening, and sugars.  Add vanilla, eggs, milk, and corn syrup.  Gradually add flour, baking soda, and salt.  Add chocolate and nuts.
3. Drop by teaspoon-sized balls onto parchment-paper lined baking sheets (the original recipe says greased sheets, but greasing a baking sheet recently removed from a 350F oven will either be exceedingly painful, or a fire hazard.  Maybe both!  One sheet of parchment paper will last through an entire batch of cookies, and nobody get third-degree burns.).  Bake 7-10 minutes, until cookies are golden brown, and slightly darker along the edges.

I'd made it two or three times before, and didn't think much of launching into it that afternoon, but after I had reached the Point Of No Return on making a batch, I realized that I had a little less then half as much brown sugar as I needed.  And about a third of the corn syrup.

The dark glob is molasses.  Don't tell anybody.

Fine.  I'll fake it!  Instead of a cup of brown sugar and half a cup of granulated, I had almost half a cup of brown sugar, and just used enough granulated to make up the difference.  (Still 1.5 C total sugar)  When I realized I didn't have enough corn syrup, I used molasses for the rest.  I've made lots of cookies with molasses.  It's dark and sweet.  That's sort of like corn syrup.  Plus, it smells nice baking.  Besides, the recipe actually calls for dark corn syrup, and I'd always used the light corn syrup we had, so strictly speaking, I'd never made those cookies right, anyway.

The results were pretty great.  The Chief Taster, who was already a big fan of the original recipe, raved about this batch.  I might even make a note in the cookbook to try this variation again.