Filed under: No good deed goes unpunished...
Two weeks ago I got an e-mail about a corporate fund raiser event. The company I work for has an admirable track record for supporting worthy causes and there is always a run or a walk or a gift basket raffle that you can participate in and/or donate to. Me? I'm more often a donor rather than a runner because, sweating next to your co-workers? Ew. But this particular email looked like something that I could actually contribute to in more than just a financial capacity. The company was holding a bake sale! Now we're talking!
Immediately I looked away from my work and began imagining what grandiose delights I could whip up for public consumption. Pinterest and Instagram were being flooded with pastel colored goodies for Easter and Spring and there were more rainbow sprinkles and glitter than a dressing room at DragCon. Besotted with more ideas than I could ever execute, I tucked a few favorite ideas away and decided that I would choose my treat closer to the day of the sale.
Fast-forward to shopping day on the weekend before the sale and my thoughts turned back to the my potential baked good. As I started to imagine how I would bake and package some of the treats in the little black baking book in my head, the sexier options started to fall away. The treat needed to be sturdy, single serving, easy to transport (anything with icing was out) and it needed to have mass appeal. The goal here was to raise money for charity, not to bake a hazelnut dacquoise masterpiece, dusted with icing sugar and garnished with a brown butter coconut tuille (which hello, you had me at brown butter). So what did I decide on? A chocolate chip cookie. I know, I know not interesting and there would be so many at the sale that they could potentially go un-touched. Nevertheless, I remained un-deterred and thought about how I might differentiate.
I know that when I reach for a chocolate chip cookie, I have certain criteria. First off, I like a cookie that's the size of a dinner plate. If it doesn't look like I am biting into a planet, then why bother? The cookie needs to be brown around the edges and bottom and soft (but not raw) in the middle and the taste of the butter and chocolate need to make my knees buckle. That is the cookie that I set out to make; big, brown, buttery and dripping with rich chocolate.
The packaging needed consideration as well, because these people would be porting treats back to their desks and that thought of an exposed cookie sitting on a napkin set my germophobia alight to the tune of a five alarm blaze. I had purchased beautiful glassine bags at the Paper Source a while back, anticipating just such an occasion and decided that I would put them into play. I purchased gold stickers and a teal colored Sharpie to write on them and had my packaging all set. Simple, chic and most of all, hygienic.
This morning, I awoke with the intent of organizing my bagged and tagged cookies for transport and display. Because my dog is a 70 lb behemoth with 3 foot long legs (no lie, they are as long as baseball bats), I had constructed a wall of boxes and cartons to block him from getting at the cookies that were laid out on the counter. I began to pack all the boxes of mac and cheese and tall cartons of chicken stock back into my pantry. The last item I picked up was a carton of steel cut oats, you know the kind with the Barbara Bush look-alike wearing a Boy George hat? Well, I guess I did not grab it carefully and the top came off and the oats went FLYING. I emphasize the word "flying" because they had to have wings to have reached the distant places in my kitchen and den that they landed. I now know the true definition of "far and wide". I spent 30 minutes vacuuming and moving furniture to get all the little oats that were clearly poised and ready for this jailbreak.
Luckily, the little oat accident did not impact my cookies and they made it to the bake sale and sold briskly, which is what is really important. Not the fact that I trashed my kitchen or the fact that I went with a basic cookie. But really, f#@k a steel cut oat.
No comments:
Post a Comment