What chocolate chip cookies should NOT look like

I've made chocolate chip cookies probably a thousand times. Ninety-five percent of them have turned out beautifully: plump, soft, gooey chocolate chip cookies.

The other five percent have been interesting products that deteriorated from either a missing ingredient, a mistaken ingredient, or sometimes the missing element of my own common sense. There's nothing that gets my frustration going more than a ruined batch of cookies, but sometimes I just have to laugh about it.

How I've ruined cookies

 Fishy cookies: 

My dad used to fish a lot, and we had a Tupperware container of flour that was supposed to be used only for cooking fish. Well, it wasn't labeled and it looked just like white baking flour. The embarrassing part is not that I made cookies with the fish flour, but that I did it at least four or five times, never learning my lesson. (See, Mom, that's why you have to check by eating the dough first!) Needless to say, those cookies tasted funny.

Most forgotten about ingredient? Any guesses?

Vanilla. Such a small one, but it makes the biggest difference. Taste a cookie without vanilla and you may as well have just eaten a piece of paper.

The tricky ingredient is the flour (white flour, not fish flour!) because too much or too little throws your cookie all out of whack. Don't use enough flour and your cookies will spread twice their size in the oven. One time this happened and one of my cookies spread out so far that part of it fell off the pan. I opened the oven door to see a tiny fire ignited under my pan of inflated cookies.

I've had a good streak going, having made at least a dozen awesome batches this year. My time was due.

Every year I try to make cookies for my friends' husbands on their birthdays. Those wives can cook for them, but I get to do some of the baking. Well, Luke's birthday was last week and he seems to have found a new baking mistress where he and Heidi live in Florida. Apparently, this chick makes better chocolate chip cookies than I do.

Challenge accepted...

...and I failed miserably. Perhaps I was so nervous about this other baker that I psyched myself out. When I saw my cookies were spreading in the oven, I knew I had failed. First, I checked for fires. I won that part. Then I tried to think back on any ingredients I might have forgotten or misused. Nothing felt off.

Flat, dull, lifeless. Your cookies should not look like this.

A few days later I was still baffled. Mom reminded me of one thing I did differently: I melted the butter instead of letting it soften for a few hours.

She's good.

I never understood why we had to remember to get the butter out ahead of time instead of just zapping it in the microwave for a few seconds. Ruined, wasted cookies. That's why.

When your cookies spread into gook instead of rise into beauty, all the deliciousness is baked out of them. They tasted dull and lifeless. This was not a cookie I could give to Luke, not when being compared to Miss New Cookie. 

Attempt #2

 

Now that's what a cookie should look like!

Nailed it! If these didn't win Luke over, then I was going to have to give Miss New Cookie a call and threaten her for her secrets. He said they were good, but not sure if they were better. I think he's just trying to get me to keep baking him more cookies.