Love Me With a Cookie

Bubaloo asked to mark this Valentine’s Day with a cookie. A cookie for his one true love and enduring crush: the girl who likes Golden Oreo Cakesters. Actually, he asked to take her out to dinner and a movie, but we didn’t quite feel that was a good fit for a kid in grade 5 so we put forth a counter proposal that would have him woo her with his baking skills.

Bubaloo and Golden Oreo Cakester girl have been officially boyfriend and girlfriend since early January. Funny thing though, she has two boyfriends. Both with the same name. Bubaloo goes to school with her every day and gets to play on the computer with her and share snack time treats. The other boyfriend with the exact same name apparently lives quite far away. Bubaloo doesn’t care one bit that he’s the second boyfriend. He’s totally smitten.

To mark this monumental Valentine’s Day, Wifey committed to a baking project. My Wifey is brilliant in the kitchen – only as a cook, and definitely not a baker. She can intuitively mix and meld, fold and blend, and tease out flavours in food. She lives by the dollop and the dash. She knows when a pinch of salt or a squeeze of lemon is required. She can tell by smell what each and every unlabelled spice on our counter is.

What my Wifey is not good at is being precise and following directions in the kitchen. She can’t measure. And therefore, she can’t bake (well).

To compensate for this weakness, she bought a partial pre-fab cookie mix. All that had to be done was to add an egg and butter. This should have been easy for her to do, and it should have been easy to incorporate the kids into the process.

Admittedly, baking followed a tough day and rough night with the kids. They’re all sick with that horrid two-week-kick-your-ass bug that’s going around.

It all started off well and good intentioned.

Bella got out the cooking sheets and placed the parchment paper on top. Wifey emptied the contents of the package into a bowl. Then she melted the butter. Bubaloo was called over to crack the egg. Due to a ridiculous repeated questioning that the recipe couldn’t possibly require only one egg he was swiftly relieved of his baking duties. Sidelined, he couldn’t let the one egg only go. He just kept on stating that there needed to be more than one egg.

With exasperation, Wifey took completely over. She began to mix the batter. With a whisk. She was trying to cream together the butter and egg with the flour/chocolate chip mixture with a whisk. The butter was all stuck on the inside of the whisk, she’d try to move it around faster to get the butter out, there was butter flying across the kitchen. It rivals some of the funniest baking incidents I’ve ever been privy to.

When I finally got around to clarifying that whisks were for whisking (don’t you love it when kitchen tools are aptly named!) and that other instruments were better suited for stirring, she was done. Balls of dough were quickly dropped on the cooking sheet and the trays went into the oven.

The only bit of love Bubaloo had been able to pour into his Valentine’s treat was his fear that the cookies would crumble without two more eggs. It didn't matter to Golden Oreo Cakester girl. Bubaloo was rewarded for this thoughtful efforts with a phone call.