Miss. Fields

Natalie and Emily have discovered the joys of baking. For the past few months, one of their favorite Sunday evening activities has been to bake a treat for the family. We have afternoon church this year and after all the craziness of getting everyone to church and sitting through Sacrament Meeting and then doing my "Singing-Time Show" for the Primary kids and then rushing home to put dinner on the table for my starving family I am worn out. All I want to do after dinner is sit down and relax for a while. Unfortunately, what the rest of the family wants is for someone to make them dessert. After constantly being told that I was too tired to spend the evening baking, the girls decided to take matters into their own oven-mitted hands.

The first thing they baked were brownies from a prepackaged mix. They were a big hit and for a while our family enjoyed warm brownies every Sunday night. After a few weeks of brownies the girls wanted to try something else. Emboldened by their success, they decided to move on to something more tricky--homemade chocolate chip cookies.

The first solo attempt at cookies did not go too well. Mark loves chocolate chip cookies and, as the aroma of the first batch of freshly baked cookies began to permeate the house, he wandered into the kitchen only to find a rack of unevenly cooked, hard, flat and odd-tasting cookie-like objects cooling on the counter. Poor man. He was left with a very frustrated sweet-tooth as most of the "cookies" found their way into the trash. But, we weren't as wasteful as you might think. The kids had eaten so much dough before the cookies even made it to the oven that only about 24 of the 5 dozen cookies the recipe usually yields actually got baked.

The next week the girls did much better. The cookies smelled and actually looked like real cookies. Once again, Mark's nose lead him into the kitchen to satisfy the cooking craving that had been building since the week before. But, again, he was left frustrated. The cookies had no chocolate chips. Apparently the girls could not find the bag of chocolate chips and so they had substituted the 2 cups of chocolate chips called for in the recipe with about a 1/2 cup of chocolate chip sprinkles. Not even close to what Mark was hoping for.

Finally, yesterday, after about four weeks of progressively better, yet still sub-par attempts, the girls produced a batch of cookies that met Mark's approval. The recipe still didn't yield as many cookies as it does when I make it. Maybe the fact that I saw Bryce sitting on the counter licking a spatula loaded down with about 1/2 a pound of dough might have something to do with it. But, despite the low yield, Natalie was still glowing this morning as she told me that daddy had said her cookies were just as good as the ones I make. The left over cookies are, at this moment, squirreled away in Mark's secret hiding place on top of our refrigerator so that the kids won't finish them off before he gets home--the ultimate compliment.