Finally: A moment of peace

I will never catch up. Between Maria's frantic baking to: 1) escape the silence of a house temporarily without Julia; and 2) to "get ahead" while she went to Washington D.C., and my apparent inability to do any baking due to: 1) college visits; and 2) an inordinate number of errands, I have fallen tragically behind. I also like long sentences. I don't even know if that last sentence is gramatically or puncuationally (is that a word) correct.

I made the Chocolate Chewy Cookies. I made them last Sunday, in the brief moment I had between doing errands and picking up Natalie and Rachel from the water park. I even brought extremely fresh cookies with me to the water park pickup so Natalie and Rachel could eat them on the way home. They both declared them delicious.

Unlike my furiously baking sister, I love meringues in every incarnation except when they are crunchy all the way through. I especially like meringues which are hard and crunch on the outside and nice and chewy and soft and melty in the middle. That is exactly what these cookies are.

I didn't make any changes to the recipe -- and I did use the TJ's pecans recommended so highly by Maria. If I had not used those pecans, I do not believe my time on Sunday would have allowed me to make these cookies, because using pre-chopped pecans cut at least 10 minutes off my cooking time. I was a little upset with Maida because she says "I find these are best when baked one sheet at a time." Hmmph. That meant 30 minutes of baking rather than 15. Also, I measured by tablespoon-full as she said, but I came out with 18 cookies rather than 12. And my cookies were very puffy and lumpy and unattractive looking, whereas the line drawing which accompanied the recipe showed flattish attractive looking cookies. Thus the beauty of line drawings. . . Maybe the next recipe which comes out unattractive looking will be adorned by my own line drawing.

I did like these cookies very much. Even though I made them on Sunday, they still are quite tasty, sealed in a Ziploc bag. I have eaten almost one a day since Sunday, and the girls have taken them for lunch.

We're coming up on the weekend. What with golf lessons, soccer games, and volunteering for the MS Challenge Walk, I think I will need to get up at 4:00 a.m. to make that coffee cake. But I intend to catch up to that sister of mine! I already have the ice cream maker chilling in the freezer . . .