Everything but the chocolate chips

Sometimes it is a good thing when plans fall through. On Tuesday, instead of going bowling, I made cookies. As Dani lounged about talking to Nic and watching Jerry Maguire (why does that movie exist?), I set to scavenging in her kitchen for bake-able cookie ingredients. She shot down my ideas for adding dried apricots and/or nuts (ew, I know, but I wasn't baking for myself and I was hard up). She also rejected my proposal of dried cherries, and refused to let me touch the remains of the peanut butter in her fridge. She also repeatedly reminded me that she had no chocolate chips. Exasperated, I proposed aborting the entire endeavor. She would not have this either.

I sighed, gritted my teeth and returned to the kitchen to get to work. I measured everything very loosely, if at all, so take all the amounts listed below with a grain of salt (baking pun!).

Better Than Bowling Cookies

* 1 stick butter (salted. I love cookies. I was slightly distracted during the baking process, and accidentally melted some of the stick onto the microwave plate in an attempt to soften the frozen butter. I should probably not use a microwave unsupervised.)

* 1 cup + 2 tbsp flour

* 1/4 cup hot chocolate powder (after tasting the first batch, Dani established that the cookies needed more chocolate. She dumped another 1/3 cup of powder or so into the mix and subsequently pronounced the next batch not as good. Make of this what you will)

* 1 egg

* 1/2 cups brown sugar, packed

* 1/4 cups honey (don't really know what I was going for here... Since I lost some of the butter in my scuffle with the microwave, I thought the honey might make up for some of the lost liquid. On the whole I the honey did not harm the cookies, but probably did not add much either. More sugar would have been an acceptable alternative)

* 1 1/2 tsp baking soda

* 1/2 tsp salt

* 1 tsp vanilla

* a handful (or more) marcona almonds, chopped (yum! Best kind of almonds ever. Despite my nuts in baked goods aversion, I was excited at the prospect of including these in Dani's cookies)

* 1/4 cup or so chopped dried apricots (after batch 1, Dani suggested adding dried apricots. I pointed out that I had already put this idea forth, only to be rejected by Dani herself. She chose to ignore this detail and threw the chopped apricots into the remaining dough)

Preheat oven to 350˚ F.

Soften (but don't melt!) the butter. Mix the sugar and honey into the butter. Beat in the egg and vanilla. Add the remaining ingredients and mix until combined (yes. Cookies are clearly the best food in the world). Place balls of dough on a cookie sheet and bake for 7-10 minutes.

Feed to Dani. She might complain and try to alter the recipe, but she will still eat at least 4.

PS. I had no good pictures of the final result, and they looked the same as all other chocolate cookies anyway, so please enjoy the initial shot of a recent attempt at homemade mission dogs.