Although I like to pride myself on my fantastic cooking abilities, I have not always been an especially excellent cook—or baker for that matter. For the first twelve years of my life there were only a very select few things I knew how to cook. I could make oatmeal (boil oats in water), scrambled eggs, toast, and pancakes (from scratch, thank you very much). I would add cold cereal to the list, but I don't think that even counts as cooking.
The only thing I truly excelled at, or so I thought, was making cookies. I could follow a recipe fairly well and make almost any kind of cookie, but my specialty (yes, unoriginal, I know) was chocolate chip cookies. I'd make double batches of them and have a huge bowl full of cookie dough.
I would also be very careful to taste my cookies at every stage of their development (which sometimes makes me wonder about myself). I'd try the cookies when they consisted of sugar and brown sugar and butter (which should have been gross, but really only tasted sweet). Yes, I tried them after I'd added the egg, the raw egg. I tried them after I added the flour and baking soda, and then I tried A LOT of them after I added the chocolate chips. I really didn't even need to eat cookies by the time I got around to putting the cookie dough on the sheet I'd had soooo many calories.
The true problem with cookie making came after they were made (and delicious, and thoroughly tested) and it was time to put them in the oven. I'm not sure why it was such a struggle for me to set the oven correctly, but struggle it was. Most ovens have a temperature knob you can set them to, or some digitized something or other. Our oven had a knob that pointed to different pictures. There was a picture for broiling and a picture for cooking. One of them (the broiling I think) had a picture of a heating element on the top of a square, the other one had a picture of a heating element on the bottom of a square (apparently cooking). For as many times as I cooked cookies I could never remember which picture represented which cooking method.
You would think, since there were two pictures, I would have a 50/50 chance at getting the right one, however, somehow I was talented enough to pick the wrong picture every single time. With this knowledge in mind did I watch over my cookies religiously to see if they were burning instead of cooking? —No, I didn't.
I consistently burned my first batch of cookies in the oven every time I made them. I'd pull out my cookie sheet with twenty small charred, circular-ish bricks baked onto them. What I should have done was to throw them away and learn from my mistakes. What I did do was lay the cookie sheets out on the table and complain to my mother that I always burned my first batch. Then, because my brothers were boys, they would eat my charred cookies for me. By the end of my cookie charring days they'd become so accustomed to the burnt cookies that they even expected them. Some people break their cookies in half and then "have to eat them" because they are ruined—my brothers decided that my broiling the cookies did the same thing for them. I suppose I could even blame myself for the rampage of cinder toast they went through because they got used to the flavor of char. For several months they were so obsessed with cooking their toast that they wouldn't accept it any way but burned until it was black and would start crumbling when you tried to pull it out of the toaster.
I later learned how to properly use our oven and now I don't burn my first batch of cookies. My brothers have become accustomed to the taste of chocolate and sugar again instead of burnt grossness, and I now consider myself a much more accomplished baker.
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