Happy Mother's Day!

It's not that I forgot Mother's Day. It was on my mind all week. I pondered and pondered and pondered what I was going to do to honor my mother. I thought about getting a card, but I never seemed to be near a card store and, anyway, that didn't really seem sufficient. I thought about ordering Cheryl's Cookies, but I just did that in March for her birthday and thought she might be sick of Cheryl's Cookies (though under closer scrutiny, that concept makes no logical sense to me). Thus, I dithered.

Fast-forward through my week to Saturday morning. Whoops, no, rewind a bit to early Saturday morning, so early that some consider it part of Friday night. Yes, that's it, 4 a.m. I woke up from a restless sleep and thought "I know, I'll bake cookies for my mother!" I did not, however, get up that instant and start baking; my conscience eased, I was able to go back to sleep just as soon as I reclaimed the covers from the dog.

Still, I got up relatively early and went to the store for baking supplies. I honored my mother in the process by following her rule that if you're going to make one batch of cookies, you might as well make three. Thus, my recipe looked like this (modified slightly from the Betty Crocker Cookbook--the old one that my mother found for me at a garage sale):

1 cup butter
1 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
3 eggs
3 tsp vanilla

Mix together thoroughly. By the way, the bowl on a Kitchen Aid mixer is just right to contain all the goodness that is the final result of this recipe. Add to this (theoretically sifted, but I haven't sifted any ingredients since I moved away from home):

4 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp salt

Now that you have the basic dough, you can add the goodies:

1 1/2 cups pecans, pulverized by the food processor
12 oz package of semi-sweet chocolate morsels
10 oz package of peanutbutter chips (I shorted it slightly from the whole bag)

The recipe says to bake 8 to 10 minutes at 375 degrees. For whatever reason, 11 minutes worked perfectly for my cookies.

Granted that I ate a good deal of cookie dough and taste-tested almost every batch that came out of the oven, something just over 7 1/2 dozen cookies survived my depradations and made it to some kind of packaging or storage. This could easily be 8 dozen fairly good-sized cookies. I packaged up 3 dozen to send to my mom, 2 dozen to send to my girlfriend's mom, and the rest found homes in my kitchen (some of them very temporary homes indeed).

When my girlfriend arrived yesterday, I told her I'd sent cookies to her mom. It turns out I'm the better child, because she still hadn't sent anything (and still hasn't up to a little after 9:30 on Mother's Day). She was getting anxious about what to send. I lamented how easy it was when we were kids, we could just make something in art class. I decided that there would be something absolutely hilarious about receiving a macaroni picture from your 27-year-old daughter for Mother's Day, but maybe that's just me.

Here's hoping all you mothers out there are feeling appreciated! 

tags: mothers day  

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