The Criscuit Saga

The name will make sense if you read the (admittedly very long) post, okay?  This was a long and traumatic experience and the things that came out of it were... well, they weren't cookies, that's a fact.

It all started quite a while ago, actually.  A few friends and I were craving real, home-baked chocolate chip cookies, because the closest things you can get to that here are uber-crunchy Chips Ahoy.  We didn't get to try to make the cookies until last weekend, though (not the one that ended yesterday, but the one before that).

First of all, it's impossible to find brown sugar in Boondocks, Morocco, or really anywhere outside the US and probably Canada, apparently.  Maybe you can find it in the UK.  I don't know.  Anyway, the point is brown sugar cannot be had for any price here.  Neither, apparently, can vanilla extract or baking soda.  After over an hour of wandering around the local market, we finally were forced to come to the conclusion that we were not, in fact, going to find real vanilla or any variety of baking soda.  Thus, we trekked back to campus to begin our preparations.

Fortunately, there's no shortage of recipes for chocolate chip cookies without brown sugar.  Without vanilla and baking soda, though, is a totally different story.  It seems that in order to make chocolate chip cookies without baking soda, you need brown sugar, and vice versa.  We had to improvise.  I'd used Coca-Cola before to make stuff rise a bit, so I figured we could probably use that.  (Note the use of the word "figured.")  We were already basically making everything up as we went; what was one more little substitution, right?

Once we finally got all our ingredients together, we realized we had no real dishes to bake or mix in except a tiny saucepan (dirty), two soup spoons (also dirty), and a basting tray (disgusting).  In an uncharacteristic stroke of luck, I happened to have dishwashing liquid, so we were saved from having to make food with other people's germs on it.  We also had no real oven; just convection ovens.  It was at this point that we began to seriously question our plan, or lack thereof.

First we had to break the chocolate into chunks, because there's no such thing as chocolate chips here.  That took the longest, but it was tasty.  Since I don't tend to document anything well, it didn't occur to me to take pictures until well after the chocolate phase.  Oh well.

When we were done, we had a ton of chocolate chunks.  We guessed it was probably in the vicinity of maybe two cups.  (Note how certain we are at this point about measurements.)  I then realized that all the measurements in the recipe were in cups, not grams or liters.  Great.  Fancy math must happen.  Fortunately, there exist on the internet converters for cups of XYZ substance--butter, for example--to grams.  The flour conversion really didn't seem right, though, so we started guesstimating based on the ratios in the recipe.  (Yes, this process was highly scientific and precise and accurate measurements were used at every juncture.)  We piled everything into the saucepan just in time to realize that it might not fit.  Stirring was a very interesting exercise and resulted in multiple flour puffs.

After much ado, we decided it would be easier to take the batter out of the saucepan and knead stuff into it instead of trying to stir it, which was rapidly becoming a messy and inefficient modus operandi.  We now knew for certain that any sort of traditional cookie was completely impossible, so we basically were just trying to make something edible.

Once we had gotten most everything kneaded into the dough (it was definitely not batter at this point), I realized I'd forgotten the Coke and vanilla sugar.  I made a little brew in the bottom of the saucepan, and back went the dough.  It ended up looking like this:

(Those hands belong to my lovely friend who was also part of this venture.)

Basically looks like batter after we added the Coke, right?  It would have been much more like batter except that it had Paula Deen-worthy amounts of butter in it, in spite of the fact that everything in the recipe was measured relative to the butter.  I still have no idea how that worked.

At long last, we got the cookies into the convection oven, after Googling convection oven and regular oven differences and trying to figure out how to turn the dangnabbed contraption on.

At first we turned it on what we thought was low, just to make sure we didn't torch the cookies, because apparently that's a distinct possibility in a convection oven.  Turns out the little picture that looks like it should mean low actually means just the bottom element is on.  Guess what the cookie tray was sitting on.  Yes, that would be why only the bottom of the cookies looks like it's cooking.

It took us a few minutes to figure this out, so we had to move the cookies up onto the top rack to cook the tops, too.  The top element heated unevenly, so we also had to spin the tray around every now and again to at least attempt to cook everything the same amount.

Just before the Last Trump, after about two hours of toil, the cookies were done.

That's my hand to the left, for scale.  Those of you who know me in real life know that I have rather large (basically man-size) hands.  That should give you an idea of how big those "cookies" were.  They were also about an inch thick in the middle.

Of course, it's now abundantly obvious that those monsters are not, strictly speaking, cookies.  Neither are they biscuits or scones, though, so another friend dubbed them criscuits.  Surprisingly, they were pretty tasty, though they didn't quite taste like regular chocolate chip cookies and obviously they didn't have the right texture, either, seeing as they lacked baking soda and had an overabundance of butter.  Oh well; it momentarily satisfied the comfort food craving.  Nom nom nom.

Thus ends the criscuit saga.