Cooky Failure: Good intentions, poor results

I suppose it could be worse; I could have applied this methodology to something actually important, like running a business. That would have been bad. In my case, I was just making cookies on the fly.

My daughter wanted oatmeal for breakfast. Nothing fancy, she said, just oatmeal with toppings. Toppings meant, in this case, sliced banana, cream, and cinnamon sugar. So, fine, I made her oatmeal, and she ate it. But I made a little too much oatmeal, and by the time I thought to sit down and have some myself, it was looking…. unappealing. It had congealed in the pot. I could have added more water and run with it, no harm no foul, but instead I thought, “You know what, I was going to bake today, I’ll just bake some cookies with this.” I could have baked bread, but no, cookies.

So I thought about it a little and went to work. I added to the pot some dark cocoa powder, some regular cocoa powder, some vanilla powder, some coconut oil (instead of butter), and some water: I let this cook a few minutes and stirred to let the congealed oatmeal break up. “Making pudding?” my daughter said hopefully, peering in to the pot. “Cooky batter,” I said.
Then we added an egg, once the mixture had cooled, and combined it with flour, some baking soda, some baking powder, some coconut, and sugar. The batter looked nice, it smelled chocolatey, and I was feeling optimistic. Not very optimistic, mind you, but decidedly more optimistic than pessimistic.

I baked the cookies and it was, sadly, clear to me by the time the first batch had baked that these were just not what I’d had in mind. The cookies puffed nicely, and looked dark and rich;  but when I tasted a cooled cooky, it was just deeply uninteresting. I quickly realized that I should have put in a lot more sugar — like, a cupful more. It’s a sad thing when chocolate oatmeal coconut cookies don’t turn out well. These are so bland that even my daughter won’t eat them. The ten leftover cookies have been put into a plastic bag; in due time, I will whizz them in the food processor to make chocolate crumbs to use in making other things (and they’ll be useful in that context, I have no doubt).
In the meantime, we are without cookies, which is not good. I will probably bake something tomorrow, and when I do, I will follow a nice recipe from one of the zillion cookbooks I’ve got on hand. Right now, I’m focusing on the brisket I’m doing in the oven…. for which I prepared by reading five recipes and then more or less ignoring all of them. Wish me luck….