Comfort cookies

With all this wintry mix gloom and doom still lurking, I was definitely in the mood for some comfort food today. And nothing says comfort food like peanut butter, chocolate, and lots of sugar.

Today, I baked. I should have perhaps prefaced this by explaining that I don't bake. When I bake, things happen. At Thanksgiving a few years back, I dropped an entire apple pie upside-down into the open, hot oven instead of placing it gracefully in. The pie tin actually crumpled while I was carrying it and the whole thing just collapsed into the waiting oven. My mom spent hours scraping off the pie, which had become baked on.

This brings me to my current project: flourless peanut chocolate cookies. The best part of this recipe is that it is probably as easy and straightforward as recipes get... one throws a minimal number of ingredients into a bowl, stirs, and bakes.

For me, nothing is that simple. The first problem is that my apartment lacks any kind of measuring cup or measuring spoon or measuring utensil of any kind except an ancient plastic measuring cup that has the actual measurement worn off that I assumed was a one-cup and used as such. This meant some guesstimation and some crossed fingers. The second issue was that I didn't have chocolate chips and had to resort to cutting up semi-sweet chocolate into manageable pieces.

Surprisingly, I didn't screw up too badly and my roommate and I enjoyed the resulting cookies

(as did my coworkers when I brought them to work). The result was perhaps a bit too peanut-y and peanut-butter-y because there is no flour and the dough was essentially just peanut butter, sugar, an egg, and baking soda. Plus, the recipe calls for peanuts as well, so if you don't like peanuts, stay far away. I actually was a bit scared bringing them into the hospital for fear that anyone with a nut allergy within a 25 mile radius would drop dead of anaphylactic shock.

The one issue is that no matter what I do, and ho

w careful I am, I can't prevent the bottom of the cookies from burning. Even if the actual cookie isn't cooked, the bottom burns. Maybe it's the fact that I live in a Manhattan apartment with a bite-sized oven that is definitely not state-of-the-art. Or this is something I'll just have to work on... with Martha's help of course!

Here's what the result looked like: