Wednesday, June 3, 2009

there is no enriched flour in a creemee

Sometimes it is necessary to eat slice-and-bake chocolate chip cookies. For example, when you go to the creemee stand at 9:10 on a Friday night to have your first creemee of the year and find that the delinquent teenage employees have closed early. After shouting at the delinquent teenagers through the locked creemee window, you go to the fancy natural-foods store looking to satiate your sweet tooth. You are staring vacantly at the selection of Ben & Jerry's and tofutti ice cream when inspiration strikes: slice-and-bake cookies. But the natural-foods store does not stock the Tollhouse or Pillsbury slice-and bake cookies you were hoping for: Instead they carry a $7.49 tube of Vermont-made cookie dough. Skeptically, you buy it. On your way home you think about how much these cookies are going to suck, because you're a negative person and because you are scared to trust after you got burned by the creemee stand.

At home you find the dough is nearly impossible to unwrap -- the little story on the label says that the couple who started the company couldn't decide whether they should go into the frozen burrito business or the slice-and-bake cookie business, so they packaged their cookie dough like a burrito. This story is so asinine you almost throw the unwrapped cookie dough across the room, but instead you persevere, finally making it through the outer wrapper, the foil, and the inner wrapper.


This perseverance required scissors, however, and it turns out you've cut through the directions, which are absurd. Steps 2, 3 and 4 read (I shit you not), "Break the disk in half. Invert the two pieces 90 degrees so that the rough edges face up. Press the base of the two pieces back together, leaving the rough edges on top. You now have a tall ball of dough with a rough top -- a cookie rose." You reread and consult the diagrams, pausing to thank god you are not stoned. Ultimately, you work harder preparing these cookies than you did assembling your Ikea furniture.

When your slice-and-break-and-invert-and-press-and-bake cookies are finally in the oven, you look over the ingredients. You remember reading somewhere that enriched flour is what is making Americans fat, and you wonder how many of the other ingredients, many of which have names that sound like chemicals, are derived from corn. You change your mind and wish you were, in fact, stoned.

When the timer finally goes off twelve minutes later, you open the oven, your expectations low. And it's no creemee, but it'll do.

3 comments:

  1. That cookie turd ("cookie rose" my ass) is the most esoteric dessert anyone I personally know has ever consumed. If it were me, I would have done a piledriver on it soon after Step 2, and then starved. Thankfully this happened to you, though, and I get to laugh my ass off instead.

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  2. i happen to be in love with vt cookie love at the moment. have you tried mother's love (butterscotch chips & chocolate chips) or puppy love (peanutbutter chips & chocolate chips). just ignore the ingredients and the directions. everyone already knows how to bake pre-made dough and everyone already knows that it's not good for you...

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  3. Mojie just pointed out to me that I make the cookies sound gross, but I thought they were pretty tasty, especially for slice and bakes. And you're right, Q_Monroe: When I'm eating slice and bakes, I don't expect high quality ingredients (except maybe when I'm paying $7.50 for them), just like when I'm eating creemees I don't expect high quality ingredients. The cookies won't burn if I actually slice and bake them instead of trying to form the dough into a flower before I put it on the pan?

    I almost bought the peanut butter kind and will definitely give them a try -- peanut butter and chocolate is one of my favorite food combinations (which is why your smoothie sounds so appealing), but I found out recently that this is an American thing. Apparently Europeans think it's really odd and a little gross to combine peanut butter and chocolate. Just like I think it's really odd and completely fucking revolting to make sausage out of blood (which the British call black pudding). But Europe can claim most of the best food in the world, and America invented the Twinkie, and then fried it, so I guess I can't throw stones on the bl*g where Fry Fest was born.

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