Cookie Fail

This week is the last week of advent. On Tuesday, my church is having a Christmas day party. It's a sort of potluck and then we're having a gift exchange. So, I decided for my potluck offering, I would try to make peanut butter blossoms (or for those not in the know, the peanut butter cookies with the Hershey's kiss in the middle).

I decided on those because I knew I would be able to find all the ingredients here, plus they are relatively simple to make. I decided to make a trial batch on Saturday to see if I could do it. I started off by going to E-mart (the walmart of SK) to get supplies. I needed measuring spoons (check), measuring cups (could only find the kind for liquids but decided to try it), a wisk (check), spatula (decided to get a rice scoop because it was $3 cheaper) and a bowl (check). I didn't get potholders, which were on my list, but that worked out ok.

Then it was onto the ingredients. Saturdays at Emart are crazy. Lots of people, no order to where they are going, and all kinds of shoving. I try not to go there on the weekends, but I am lazy and didn't go during the week, so I didn't have much of a choice. The upstairs wasn't too bad, but then I went into the food section downstairs and it was like everyone in town decided that was the place to be.

I didn't have a problem finding most of the stuff. Brown sugar here is more granular than ours, and doesn't stick together, but it can't be that much different. Then I ran into a snafu in the flour section because everything is labeled "rice flour" or "wheat flour", but I couldn't tell if it meant "whole wheat", especially since most of them were in brown paper packages (alas, they were not tied up with string). I decided to go for it and got a small bag labeled "wheat flour". Luckily, it was what I needed.

The next issue came out of left field. I was looking for Hershey's kisses, which I know for a fact they have here. I have seen them in my local store, but didn't buy them because they are like $4 for a little pack. Emart didn't have any. I looked all over the candy aisle and some other places too. I almost decided to get abc chocolate, but it's not very good quality, so I got mini Hershey bars and decided I would break them up and put little chunks in the top of the cookies.

Now a little aside about Emart's layout. The store itself is 3 levels. The 1st (street level) floor has clothes and accessories and shoes. The 2nd level has house supplies, appliances, sports equipment etc. The B1 level is where all the food is. One thing that is awesome is that it has flat escalator things so you can go to various levels with your cart. You can check out on either the 1st or B1 levels. The bad part (and which I always forget until it's too late) is that if you check out on the B1 level, you are stuck. You are not allowed to go back "in" the store to take the escalator back to the ground floor. You have to take an elevator. There are 3 elevators but they are constantly packed. One reason is because, in addition to the 3 levels of store, there are 6 levels of parking (3 above and 3 below). I have never seen a completely empty elevator in Emart.

Another quirk (at least to me) is that Emart, in the last year or so, stopped giving out plastic bags. They have paper ones, or you can bring your own. The other option, when you have quite a few things, is to go over to the side and box up your items. They provide flattened cardboard boxes and tape, you go over, put your box together and fill it with your stuff.

Today, I had a full cart. The check out lady wouldn't give me bags and told me to box up my stuff. So I went over to the boxing area and was immediately uncomfortable. There were too many people all around, shoving and grumbling. A nice old lady was next to me and I cut some tape for her and she was very sweet. I ended up with a huge, heavy box and a smaller box and kind of jammed them in my cart. Then I waited for an elevator for not quite 10 minutes. The guy next to me got impatient and went around the back, so I followed him. There were more escalators, unfortunely, they only went down to parking levels. But I had already gotten on one, so there you go.

Luckily, this level also had a boxing station and nobody was there. So I took out my huge box and broke it into 2 smaller ones. Then I snuck into an elevator on this floor (the people on it were not happy) and made it out! The exit is blocked by stone squares so you can't take a cart out to the road. So I had to unload my boxes, run over to cab, put one in and run back to the others. The cab driver was nice though and drove right up next to my apartment building so that I could unload them.

After the Emart debacle, I decided to take a break for awhile and watched some of the Two Towers on TV. Then I started making magic. I actually mixed up the dough with fairly little trouble, especially considering the fact that I don't have a counter and was mixing on my stove top. Then it came time to bake them. I don't have an oven, only a toaster oven. So I could fit about 6 cookies to a sheet. Oh, and as I menitioned already, I don't have a counter, so the toaster oven is on the floor.

The first batch taught me that I couldn't put them in as balls because the tops would burn before the bottoms would cook. These also broke apart some. The second batch got burnt in the back. The next ones were ok, but the chocolate didn't work quite like I'd wanted it to, so I ended up just making peanut butter cookies.

What you can't see is that these are sitting in my living/bedroom on some cardboard boxes because there was nowhere else to put them.

They don't look pretty, but they taste ok. I suppose they could have turned out worse! I decided I would take them to work instead of the party though, because I didn't get that many out of the batch of dough and I realized that they aren't cheap to make!