We Are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

My dreams are made on ordinary things. Last weekend it was kittens and cookies. But they were nightmares.

I spend a frustrating Friday making cookies for the book store's annual holiday party. It had to be from a cookbook for sale, it couldn't be something tried and true like Frank's Famous Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies.

So I picked Romeo's Sighs and Juliet's Kisses.

And it was a comedy of errors.

The butter for the Romeo dough was not soft enough, so the dough was dry and crumbly. I microwaved it a bit to melt it. After I had the Romeos laid out on the pan, I realized I'd forgotten the parchment paper. I reasoned that the cookies were so buttery, they wouldn't stick. They looked OK.

I made the Juliets with softer butter. Boy, the recipe was not kidding. They spread a lot. They looked horrible.

I decided to remake the Juliets, using some extra flour. I used parchment paper this time. They looked pretty nice.

Then I decided to remake the Romeos using parchment paper. They looked even nicer. But they were bigger than the Juliets.

By this time I was out of butter, so I had to go with what I had. In the morning I melted some chocolate chips and stuck them together. I did hear from a reputable source that they tasted good.

During the cookie making, I was fending off the kitten right and left.

It's no wonder I dreamed about cookies and kittens. At one point in the dream I had bandaged hands (from kitchen accidents and kitten clawing) and was scrabbling through a giant bin of trail mix in front of Costco, trying to pull out just the chocolate chips for the filling. I was surrounded by a herd of skinny injured kittens.