The oven is cool these days...

...as I renovate my house in order to sell it. I've had several friends purchase their first home recently, and talk about the stress of it all; finding the perfect agent, locating an ideal home, the lawyers, the money, the closing, the moving, the OH-MY-GOD-WHEN-WILL-IT-ALL-BE-OVER?!

Well I'm here to tell you, friends, try doing that, PLUS selling off the house you currently own. Talk about YIKES. And, I don't even own the current house...the manfella does!

You know what though? I'm kind of in heaven. I love renovating; I'm a handy gal who owns her own set of power tools, and am no slouch when it comes to sprucing up the old homestead. Also, the point of this reno is to sell the house and buy a new one that is OURS. This excites me.

This requires sacrifice, however, and as such, my oven has been lonely since we started. No time for baking, no room to do it, and no energy. Sad, but true. *sniffle* Outlook....bleak...


I'm making one special exception this Sunday when I have my (volunteer) Little Sister over for a cookie baking activity; hopefully I will find some time to take and post photos.

Until then, when I'm up to my elbows in drywall putty I'll be pretending it's cake batter or bread dough and dreaming of the new kitchen I'll be baking in sometime in the new year...

Oops!

On Wednesday night, when y'all were out drinking green beer, I was at home making Pfeffernüsse and while the dough was chilling for an hour, I figured I'd make more Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies, since I kind of oversold them (Oops #1).

Since they were so popular I decided to make a double batch, and used the yield calculator tool on the online recipe to double the measurements. I measured out my butter, then my brown sugar, then when I got to the white sugar for some reason I doubled the measurements again in my head (it's like I remembered I was doubling the recipe, but forgot I'd already done the calculations) and poured in 2 cups of white sugar (Oops #2).

There was no way to pull out all that white sugar, so I just decided to quadruple the recipe, and add more butter and brown sugar so that it was proportional. At that point, however, I was frustrated, and it was getting late, and I still had Pfeffernüsse to roll and bake. I covered the butter and sugar and left it to be made up the next day.

So last night, Brownies were on the agenda, but I wanted to finish making up that Chocolate Chip Cookie dough (estimated bedtime: 10:45pm). I put it all in my Cuisinart Stand Mixer (thank goodness for the 7-quart bowl) and 8 (E-I-G-H-T) cups of chocolate chips later (which used up ALL of my chocolate chips [Oops #3]), I had cookie dough. A LOT of it:

There's something odd here...oh yeah, it's the biggest pile of cookie dough you've ever seen. That's what.

ZOOM IN ON THE MASSIVE...uh...MASS OF DOUGH.

Perhaps these photos don't convey the sheer magnitude of this dough, so I plopped the whole thing on my digi-scale to give you a better idea:

ELEVENTY POUNDS (and 1.2 oz) OF DOUGH...and that doesn't count the bits I kept snitching from it. Mmm...chocolate chip cookie dough.

There was a little something inside me that wanted to keep this precious precious five-year supply of cookie dough all to myself...

WAPS, yo! (Wicked-Assed Photoshop Skillz)

It occurred to me that my manfella and the rest of the crew were scheduled to be stuck at work until after midnight, so I baked some off and took them to his work as a "You have to work until midnight and that sucks, but here are fresh out of the oven cookies, and that doesn't suck!" surprise. That's a +1 for me, however I didn't get home until after 10:30pm, and still had brownies to bake (Oops #4).

1/8 cup scoop versus 1/4 cup scoop...

1/8 cup: Good












1/4 cup: Better










At least I was smart and had the batter half made by the time I got back. It was a matter of mixing the flour in, prepping the pans, pouring and baking. Actual bedtime: 12:35pm (Oops #5).

No wonder I'm getting sick!* Duh.






*Don't worry, I always employ proper handwashing procedure in my kitchen. None of you will get sick eating my cookies...although, if you did, it would be totally worth it.