Some people pig out in their downtime, I find that me and my best friend Gaye bake. Baking is not really my thing, I prefer fast pace cooking. But when it is 3:00am and you are otherwise bored, baking is perfect. My best friend Gaye -- you have to say the whole thing -- came up with her rendition of chocolate covered strawberries. Tired of the sometimes wilting and rotting variety you find at Godiva, she decided that she could melt some chocolate her damn self. She didn’t use a double boiler or any other fancy tricks you might find in the movie ‘Chocolat’, instead she took a handful of Hershey’s Chocolate chips, tossed them in the microwave. After about two minutes, she had a bowl full of melted chocolate, which she dipped her pre-washed strawberries into. She then put them in the fridge (your standard fridge), on a piece of parchment (the kind you buy in your neighborhood store), until the chocolate hardened -- and viola they were ready to eat(no magic needed). Her chocolate covered strawberries won’t win any awards, but who is looking for international acclaim at 3:00 in the morning.
My act of boredom was less creative, but required more work--I made chocolate chip cookies. I find there is really no need to buy instant dough, because chocolate chip cookie batter take about a 10 minutes to prepare, and 10 minutes to bake. First I had a bowl of wet ingredients: 1 cup butter, ¾ cup brown sugar, ¾ cup white sugar, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract and blended. When that was all gooey, I added two eggs—mixing in one egg at a time-- until the dough seemed a bit ‘liquidy’. In another bowl I put together 2 ¼ cups flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, 2 teaspoons of baking powder and mixed it all together. Then I slowly added the dry ingredients to the wet and blended everything together. Once my dough was done a stirred in the chips and scooped the mixture onto the baking sheet and baked at 375 degrees. After about three Stevie Wonder songs or ten minutes (which ever way you prefer to gauge it), I had my cookies, sans a whole bunch of additives and preservative. I guess it would have been easier to go and buy the cookies, but nothing is better at 3:00am than warm cookies and cocoa.
Labels: Sweet
