ÜberJoy

My Nieman Marcus cookies from TJ Maxx

I'll get to the meaning of my title in a bit. So here's the deal.....I don't like to bake because anytime I bake, I screw it up and it is gross. Let me share what I mean exactly.... I love cooking, with cooking you can always do some "doctoring" as I call it. Add a little more salt, pepper, butter ect to finish off a dish. However, baking you have to be precise, if it says to "sift dry ingredients" you better do some sifting. One time, I made a red velvet cake from scratch and it tasted like a huge ball of flour. I really think it was because I skipped over the sifting aspect of the recipe. With my hectic kitchen, what I mean by hectic is it is not a quite place of solitude, it is hard to concentrate. My kitchen is in middle of everything else going on in our family.
Here begins my latest disaster. On Sunday, my friend Shannon shared some of the ABSOLUTE best cookies I have ever eaten. I drilled her about how she made them and she begins to say,"It is a very simple and easy recipe". She may have even added "that you can't mess up". I'll have to ask her about that later.
She said it is the Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookie recipe. Well, that peaked my attention enough that by today I had looked up the recipe and headed to the store. I said to myself, how hard can cookies be, seriously? Every child needs to remember their mom making homemade chocolate chip cookies. See the pressure!
After the kids were fed, I thought I will go ahead and get these done so the boys can have a little treat before they go to bed. Now if I was a "good mom" I would have let them help me. But I thought, I can't risk them messing up my yummy homemade cookies. Hindsight is 20/20.
I swear I read that recipe 3 times over, used my pointer finger to go over each line of the ingredients and the measurements. To make a very long story short.... In the first batch I realized I left out 1/2 cup of brown sugar. I thought I had my 1 cup measurer out, not so much. So, I take my second dozen that I had not put in the oven yet back in my mixing bowl and throw in the sugar and "re-mix" it, this is probably considered a baking no-no, I would imagine. I am literally praying over my kitchen-aide at this point. (Yes, I have a fancy mixer that I use to screw up all my baking concoctions, I'm sure it is embarrassed to be sitting out on my counter.)The second dozen goes back in, they look better and seem to be cooking well. I glance over the recipe again and realized I left out the salt. At this point all bad words to say have even left my mind. I am dumbfounded and am laughing to myself. I pictured myself sprinkling salt over them as they came out of the oven. My sweet, Marschall, who was none the wiser as all this was going on said my cookies were good. He has a whole dozen he can eat by himself. My positive spin is that they are healthy, they have 1/2 the sugar than regular cookies and less sodium!
So back to my title, I love TJ Maxx. However, you know how you will find a great name brand dress that looks perfect on the hanger, however when you try it on you realize the belt loops are empty because the sash is no where to be found? Yeah, just like my cookies, a little something is missing.