Kitchen Fail: Molasses Cookies

Not every cookie can be perfect

Lucie’s recipes often list “flour” with no measurements as if to say “If you know what you’re doing you should be able to figure it out”. At first this really freaked me out. After a couple of successes by adding just a cup at a time, I was comfortable with it. Maybe a little cocky.  

Then Molasses Cookies happened.

This recipe called for “enough to roll”, which meant I was to cut them out with a cookie cutter. Challenge accepted. But after four cups the so-called dough was the consistency of a mud pit. In went more flour, which merely bumped it up to spackle.

 “But it says you have to roll it out!” I whined to the voice in my head telling me to give up. If I tried to roll this monster out it would just smear like newborn baby poo on skin.

By this time I was committed. I was going to roll out this freaking dough. In the end I think I added 10 cups of flour. I’m not sure because at some point I gave up and just started pouring flour straight from the bag, muttering my disbelief.

Finally I was staring down a mountain  of taupe-colored dough that would have been better suited for a science fair project than cookies. But when I was a kid, whenever something I was learning in the kitchen didn't turn out (more than a few times), my Dad always implored my Mom and I to cook it anyway. After all, we lived just outside Cereal City, where everyone knew the story of how Dr. Kellogg’s kitchen fail led to the first ever Corn Flakes™. So I put those buggers in the oven and cooked them.

What came out was no eureka . It was edible, if a bit floury. Thankfully my kids aren’t too picky when the word “cookie” is involved,  so the flop wasn’t a total waste. Even when you aren’t perfect, someone might just appreciate it anyway.