What a Mess

If you look at all the great cookies recipes I have shared on this blog, you might get the idea I am an expert and alway make perfect cookies. Not so. Thursday, I had a cookie catastrophe. I took the recipe for Chewy Oatmeal Cherry Toffee Chocolate Chip Crisps. I made them exactly by the recipe except that I substituted three cups of cooked quinoa (left over from cookies from two weeks ago) for the oats. The original cookies needed to be flattened a bit before cooking. These spread out and ran together, almost forming a sheet cake. Even when I let them cook long enough that they were dark brown, they were still soft. When I scraped them off of the parchment with a spatula, they came off like putty or clay. I put them in a big Tupperware in the refrigerator where they formed one, big, amorphous blob. There they sit, teasing me with the challenge of coming up with something to do with it. I quickly made up a batch of Tad’s Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies to take to the hospital.

Lesson learned: you can’t just substitute quinoa for oats.