Cookies in the Morning, Cookies in the Evening, Cookies at Suppertime...

Guess what I did today...

I MADE SOMETHING!

Not just something, food! I made something that people can eat. It was outrageous.

Well, it was outrageous for me. I am not a cook. I guess I'm what you'd call a microwaver. Which is like cooking, but faster. That's the real thing I hate about cooking: it takes FOREVER. Maybe not for normal people, but for me, I literally cannot prepare a meal unless I have the entire day off, because the process of cooking is so foreign to me that it consumes my whole day.

Obviously, my husband is the cook. But this morning as I was doing my daily Pinterest cruise, I discovered a recipe that my friend Amy had pinned Easter themed cookies featuring Cadbury Mini Eggs (the chocolate ones with the shell, not miniature versions of the Creme variety). And I don't know why, but all of a sudden I was like "hey, I can do that," which is completely the opposite of the reaction I normally have to a recipe.

I checked the ingredients, and miraculously we had all of them. Well, except for the most important one:

Since I was heading to Walmart anyway to pick up a few other things, I figured I would just grab a bag of these while I was there. Unfortunately, Walmart had other plans for me and decided to carry every other Cadbury product on the market except for these. Not a good start.

After finally finding them at Target, I was able to take out my frustrations on eggs:

In retrospect, I probably should have gone about this a different way. The instructions said to coarsely chop them or something like that. How the hell do you chop a Cadbury Mini Egg? The shells are harder than actual eggs! Plus that sounded like it would take way too long, and my time is precious. So I figured I would just take a meat pounder to the bag. Unfortunately, I didn't count on the fact that beating it with the sharp pointy side would puncture tiny holes in it, releasing the cracked shell dust all over my kitchen. Oh, well. Lesson learned.

Despite my incessant beating, I opened the bag and was horrified to the eggs had barely even broken! I couldn't put those whole pieces in a cookie- someone would end up suing me for chipping their tooth or something.

So I grabbed my chopping board and cut those mini eggs like the pioneers used to do: with a knife. It took FOREVER.

I did realize that once the shells were broken a little bit, it was much easier to sink the knife into the chocolate to cut them in half.

Oh, did I mention while I was doing this, I was also cooking dough?! Well, not cooking it. Preparing it. Mixing it? Ah, whatever, it was being made.

This process was kind of a bitch because it turns out it's very hard to pack 3/4 of a cup of brown sugar when it has somehow taking the form a millions of tiny brown sugar rocks even though you bought the stay fresh container from The Container Store to help it... stay fresh. Fortunately, Domino assumes that idiots like me will run into this predicament and printed special instructions on the bag of the bag on how to soften it. I had to heat it up in the microwave at 30 second intervals with two damp paper towels covering it, wrapped in cling wrap. In between these intervals, I had to take it out and break up the chunks with a fork, and repeat. And repeat. And... repeat. Eventually I decided that it was enough and just tossed it it. By the way, this is the first time I've ever used our KitchenAid. In case you were wondering what color it is if only to make sure you didn't register for it by accident, it's Persimmon.

While Persimmon did most of the heavy lifting, the recipe told me that I had to mix the chopped egg pieces in by hand. I don't know why, maybe they assume that the recipe only tastes good if it has a tiny amount of sweat in it, but regardless, I'm glad I didn't go to the gym today.

Next it was time to make the little dough balls (yes, I can hear you laughing because you just read "balls." Get your mind out of the gutter please, I'm being domestic here). This is the hardest part for me because I always always ALWAYS make them too big and the cookies meld into each other to become a giant cookie blob. Which unless you're going for a large cookie, is a fail.

I made like, four pans of these. All different sizes, just for good measure.

Also, cooking generally takes longer if you have to stop to take artsy photos in between every step. Just an FYI.

I have to say, my favorite part of the cooking process is watching stuff cook. I know, that sounds really weird because of my complaint about waisting time making food. But my favorite thing to do if I do happen to ever put anything in the oven is to turn on the oven light and watch it cook. It makes me feel like I accomplished something more than actually eating it. I don't know why. Back in the olden days when we didn't have an oven light, my mom used to yell at me for opening the oven too much. Apparently it's counterproductive.

This is the part where I get nervous that they look terrible and not like cookies at all. But once I took them out of the oven (ten minutes for the first batch, nine for the second two), the little doughy pillows settled down a bit and started to look like something that people would eat.

So I ended up with a billion cookies. Well it seemed like it, because there are way more than what's in a Girl Scout box. And even though I was really full from the tortellini salad I treated myself to for lunch, I ate one just to make sure they weren't poisonous or anything.

And they were pretty good! Although I have to say, I think I chopped the eggs so small that they almost just taste like regular chocolate chips. And the shell dust I think had pretty much baked in. I mean you could have practically snorted it out of that bag.

But all in all, a very successful experience in the kitchen.

And then I remembered why I really hate cooking:

ugh.