The Smell of Baking Cookies...

They're sort of experimental.  I needed something to ready me for my evening.  Maybe, maaaaybe, I'll even update this post later with a final picture.

Until then, there is just the smell.  You know, the melting chocolate smell.  Not chips though.  This is my second time using chocolate bars that somehow ended up mine...but not something I'd eat.  Dark Chocolate with Orange?  Not my thing.  Milk Chocolate Hazelnut?  Ehhh.  I am picky I guess.  Give me a just plain dark chocolate, you know 60-70% dark?  Yeah, that's my vice of choice.

I looked up "chocolate bar cookies" with the naivete of someone whose idea of cookies are the round things that fit in my mouth and make me go yum.  Silly rabbit, cookie bars...I knew of their existence, I have yet to dive in.  Probably because cookies already come in serving sizes and though I will stand there and chop chocolate bars by hand instead of zipping them through the Cuisinart, I am kinda lazy.

Also, it's not part of my cookie making routine...if there is one.  It's not exactly a positive thought here, but I will consider myself blessed beyond reckoning if I ever gather around me friends who know what my cookie baking actually means.  I stress bake.  But it's even more than that, it's as close to an identifiable OCD-style routine I have.  If you've stalked me on this blog thus far, you know I'm rather borderline.  Or maybe I'm just kidding myself and am really one that holds papers showing my citizenship in that world. Where was I? Right, the routine.  In my more manic states, it's what talks me off the ledge, as it were.

Read, parse the recipe, measure, read again, measure again, chop, separate, read it one more time, beat together, it isn't hodgepodge stew, this is baking, chemistry required.  Logic to realign my scattered head, magic to sustain my being.

The world will not end if they don't come out.  And sometimes?  I don't even have to get beyond the dough point. (Cookie dough freezes, people, oh yeah.)  And once you have a basic chocolate chip cookie recipe down?  It really is about how I can make chocolate bars and left over coconut...and possibly some powdered butterscotch "chips" that I was not going to use for ice cream again...come together and make someone happy. (Office mates? Happy Friday!)

No idea how these will taste....but the smell...yeah, I needed the smell of baking cookies in my apartment this evening.