What were they supposed to look like?

This morning, while working my way through the posts that accumulated in my RSS reader overnight, I came across a post on my friend Nicole's house's food blog. The post dealt with the making of Afghans, a type of cookie that is popular in New Zealand. Immediately upon reading the post (and the linked recipe) I decided that given the limited number of ingredients required I would give them a shot.

The first problem that I encountered was that the recipe that I had called for ingredients to be measured by weight and I did not have access to a functional kitchen scale. After a little searching I found a few recipes online that seemed similar in ingredient proportions to the one that I first examined. Eventually I settled on something of a hybrid of a few of the recipes (strangely I didn't choose the one that was entirely in units that I could actually measure).

After a few minutes in the mixer it was clear that the dough that I was in the midst of creating was not turning out like other cookie doughs that I have made. The dough seemed particularly heavy on sugar and butter and light on things like flour (or other ingredients that would diminish the 'melting' effect). Of course this effect was likely compounded by the fact that I, almost consciously, confused ounces as a measure of volume with ounces as a measure of weight (a problem that contributed to to the imbalance between the butter and the flour).

Given my unfamiliarity with the recipe I decided to just trudge along and bake the dough that I had in front of me, even though over-melting seemed like a very real possibility. I guess at this point I could have added a little more flour to stiffen things up, but I decided not to as it seemed likely that this batch of cookies was already beyond repair (it is rather unfortunate when you have written off a baking project before anything has even been put in the oven).

Not surprisingly, my greatest fears about the outcome of my cookies were confirmed when the first tray was removed from the oven. The cookies, which were supposed to be ball-shaped, melted into thin disks that were unmovable while hot. Given my lack of access to magic and my unwillingness to resort to additional flour, when the second tray came out of the oven it exhibited similar problems. Fortunately, once cooled, I was able to get most of each cookie from the trays to a cooling rack (though all cookies showed at least some signs of damage).

Sadly, or maybe happily, the icing I made to accompany these cookies turned out quite nicely. Of course because of the brittleness and poor quality of the cookies I didn't ice all of them, or even most of them.

So now I have most of a batch of good(ish) chocolate icing and similar portion of a batch of poor chocolate cookies. I guess the final upside is that our contribution to this week's compost collection will be larger than it otherwise might have been (though as I am sure that we are the apartment that contributes the most already this additional contribution won't be much appreciated by our neighbours).

Amazingly, though I am not sure if it is because of or in spite of today's failure, I am quite tempted to try Afghans again. The original blog post (and that the recipe calls for corn flakes) is still tempting me as much now as it did this morning. Hopefully in round two, if there is a round two, I will be wise enough to at least use a recipe that provides quantities of ingredients in units that I can create rather than units at which I have to guess. I guess the other thing that I could do is try to convert this motivation to bake into a desire to bake bread (as we all know that stuff is almost impossible to screw up, or at least be in a position where a fix isn't possible).