Cookie Catastrophe...almost

On Saturday, Holly & Jason, Maia & Ad, and Sandor & I hosted an engagement party for the lovely Julia and Joe (the Byrd-Dukes as we like to call them). I was in charge of desserts and Maia had found this delicious recipe for 'Key Lime Double Chocolate Chip Cookies', so I set off to make them on Friday night. Now, you would think that after the pudding experience last fall that I would have learned my lesson about making a recipe for the first time when you have promised to bring said results to a party...however, I have not. So, off I go Friday night to make the cookies (this of course after a necessary nap because of the crazy workload I dealt with at the end of last week...thus starting the cookie making at around 8pm). I mix them up, plop them on the cookie sheet and throw the cookie sheet in the freezer to re-freeze the butter solids (random tidbit I learned from the recipe actually, and had confirmed by my Food Network crazed parents). Then put the cookies in to bake for 11 minutes and when the timer went off looked in to see if they were browned. Well...they were browned, however, I didn't find the 'cookies' I was really looking for.

this is what the recipe said I would find after 11 minutes of baking:
this is what I actually found:
Needless to say, not an acceptable product to take to an engagement party. So, I started adding flour, and kept adding flour, and made the dough colder and colder and colder. And eventually at about midnight I found some cookies that looked like cookies, except by that time I had run through my double batch of cookies and only had about 20 acceptable ones to show for it, so I had to remix another batch and continue baking. In the end, at 1am I headed to bed with a bowlful of cookies on the table - which after seeing that first batch looked pretty good!

HOWEVER, the next morning I found out that I had really had a wonderful evening compared to the hosts of the party - Jason and Holly. They found at 10:30 that their washer had decided to blow up and start draining water all over their house. Thankfully their neighbors have 2 shop-vacs, so they ran over and grabbed them out of their garage, came back and started trying desperately to deal with the small pond that was their downstairs. As Jason was standing in a puddle of water getting ready to plug in the shop-vac, he said to Holly 'everything I've ever learned about this is wrong', and she said 'I don't care, plug it in'. Thankfully there was no electrocution - there was however, the unfortunate experience of having the shop-vac on blow instead of suck, which wet an entire extra section of the carpet that had previously been not wet. Eventually after dumping the shop-vacs over and over and over, walking over every towel they had to fill it up with water, running every fan they had and could buy, and renting a dehumidifier the next morning, by the time of the party it was actually very dry.

So, in the end the cookie (almost) catastrophe was really not all that bad. Nothing like putting things in perspective!