I moved in to my new apartment about a month and a half ago. My previous apartment was good, for the most part. It was a studio apartment and had a very tiny kitchen. The stove and oven were pretty unreliable as far as cooking temperature goes, so I rarely used them. And without much counter space, I rarely cooked much at all. I used my microwave a lot and that was about it. But with my new apartment, I can totally cook! I’ve got counter space, a good oven and stove, a dishwasher… I bought a totally awesome uber-powerful microwave…

Anyway, with my newfound space that actually allows me to cook, I’ve found myself slowly cooking more and more. I end up leaving the grocery with more and more stuff that I wasn’t planning on buying. Teriyaki sauce for marinades, flour, brown sugar, white sugar, eggs… I’ve started to actually be able to take care of myself and cook for myself! Hell, I’ve even cooked for Kim a couple of times already. She enjoyed my favorite family dish, Italian Delight, just enough to not say anything bad about it! Hah.

Mixin’ shit up, yo!

Anyway, I’ve felt a bit off the last few days (week?). This past Saturday used to be a very, very meaningful day for me, but it no longer is. That’s sad to me. Additionally, today is the 11th anniversary of 9/11. And there are some other things lately that have dragged me down a bit. So to perk myself up a bit, I decided to bake my all-time favorite cookie: chocoscotch chip cookies! They’re actually just chocolate chip, butterscotch chip cookies. I like to call them by a name a little shorter.

Typically I don’t bake. I tend to consume the creations of others, such as Anne Lamsa. She’s known pretty well in the Guild of Extras for being a crazy-excellent cookie creator. She’ll bake up cookies and bring them to GoE-type events and everybody loves her creations. I do too, in fact. I’ve bothered her for some time about making these very cookies, but it seems I’m the only one that’s creating a demand for them, so she hasn’t been able to make them yet. I figured, why not make them myself?

Normally I don’t blog about cooking or baking. This is a bit of a special occasion though, because I love these cookies and it’s the first time I’ve ever baked anything outside of the baking portion of Italian Delight. So you all get to hear about it! And I’d like to give a shoutout to Olivia Youngers – she blogs practically every day about her life and manages to make her posts themed by some food that she’s whipped up recently. So Olivia, this blog’s for you!

The first batch arrives!

I got all the necessary ingredients at the store. It was a spur-of-the-moment purchase. I didn’t have a recipe with me but I knew that the standard Nestle one was the one that Laura had made in the past that I liked so much – with variations, of course. So I nabbed some Nestle chocolate chips and found the pertinent recipe on the bag. Got all the ingredients and came home. I still needed some wax paper and a handheld electric mixer (hell no was I going to use a wooden spoon and manually mix all that up!), so I got those from Amazon (I wasn’t going to be able to bake these for awhile) and they came in today.

Mixing the batter took longer than I anticipated. I think my oven was at 375 degrees for nearly 20 minutes before I put it to use. But I got it all together and it seemed I’d measured everything properly and mixed it all thoroughly. I put wax paper down on my baking sheet and dolloped fifteen cookies. In the oven they went. The moment of truth came when I took out that first batch. They looked alright. They seemed fine. I let them sit for about 4-5 minutes on the sheet, then I tried to take them off of the wax paper with a spatula… And they wouldn’t budge. For some reason, they still stuck slightly to the wax paper. I have no earthly idea why. And the wax paper had apparently melted some of the wax to the pan, so it was slick and sticking to the pan (not fused, just slick like a piece of plastic would stick to something that’s damp). I figured out that I could slide the wax paper sideways off of the sheet and onto the counter, so I did that.

Got the second batch all done up, put them in the oven. The first had cooled enough that I was able to get them off of the wax paper with a very small amount of elbow grease. No damaged cookies. I tried the first one and…

Putting some away for my coworkers, the poor unsuspecting masses…

Delicious. Simply delicious. Almost as good as I’ve ever had these cookies. Boy howdy if I didn’t bake these suckers up pretty well. Baking’s all about precise measurements, which is great for someone like me – I’m a software engineer. I like things precise. Measured. Accurate. This is why I’m not all that great at cooking – there’s a lot of slack in what you can do when you cook, and I always want to follow things by-the-book. But man, these cookies were awesome. So, so glad I decided to make them.

I thought maybe the wax paper was sticking to the pan because the pan wasn’t properly clean, so I gave it a full wash before putting that second batch in. Additionally, I decided to put them in for one minute less, hoping that they would perhaps not get so cooked on the underside so they may more easily separate from the wax paper. No dice; didn’t change a thing. One other issue I had to contend with was that my oven was just barely deep enough to put the tray in length to the back. I should have measured first and used my medium tray, but oh well. It barely worked.

Vacuum sealed and refrigerated for a special friend.

So I got through all the batches of cookies and separated them out into three camps – one set I’m preserving for Kim, so that one got vacuum-sealed and stuck in the fridge. One set, a full dozen, I’m taking to work tomorrow and will unleash upon my unsuspecting coworkers who think I have culinary skills so bad it causes people to die from hunger after they’ve consumed my food. And the last set is mine, I tell you. All mine! Well, ok, not all mine. Anybody that happens to visit me before I’ve consumed them all will be able to have some. Kenny is coming over tomorrow evening for Buffy, so he’ll get to have some.

So that’s my first adventure into baking sweet stuff. And it was totally, awesomely worth it. If you want the recipe for the cookies, just ask. I’ll give it to you. That reminds me, I need to start compiling my recipes into a recipe book. I now have three. Haha…