So this post at Cutting Corners is apparently pretty famous; it’s a recipe for making chocolate chip cookies out of chickpeas, of all things. A friend found it and posted it to Facebook. She made the recipe and, due to a hilarious (to me, anyway) confusion between the terms “blender” and “food processor,” damn near blew out the motor on every kitchen appliance she owns trying to mash up the garbanzo beans.
(NOTE: Garbanzo beans and chickpeas are the same thing. I didn’t know this until two days ago, and I’ll probably be using the terms interchangeably, so I might as well make sure you know too.)
Anyway, as someone who had just mashed up garbanzo beans for his buffalo falafel the other day, I was immediately intrigued. I like chickpeas; I like chocolate chips, and I like weird food. Plus she’d already hilariously screwed up making the damn things, so surely I’d be able to get it right, right? You can’t have more than one I’m a Dumbass posting for one recipe, the universe doesn’t work like that.
Pfah. I forgot the Cardinal Rule of Baking: Don’t.
I’m getting smarter, though: go ahead and read the recipe and see if you can spot the part that’s obviously completely wrong. Seriously, go ahead; I have time.
…
175 degrees, right? That’s gotta be a typo. But the post is supposedly really popular and there’s no mention of the oven temperature being wrong in the comments, so what the heck? Well, we’re making pea-cookies, which is already weird… maybe they just need to set or something and not really cook?
No. No, they do not. After the recommended ten minutes in the oven they looked exactly the same as they’d looked before I put them in the oven. I might as well have spent my time breathing on them. I asked my friend about it and she said that she’d baked them at 350 for ten minutes. She’d also drizzled some honey over them before baking, which I’d also done– which wasn’t in the original recipe. I jacked the heat in the oven up to 375 and left them alone for ten minutes.
No change at all. None. I decided to blame the honey and ditched the first half of the batch– luckily (at least, I suppose it’s lucky) I’d decided to double the recipe so only half of them had gone in the oven. I decided to leave out the honey on the second batch.
It took twenty-five minutes at 350 degrees in the oven before they reached the rather vile-looking half-burnt half-cooked consistency you see above, at which point I decided I didn’t give a shit anymore and pulled them from the oven. Also at this point Lisa realized that the recipe she’d followed wasn’t the one she’d linked to, which apparently just doesn’t work at all, and told me she’d put in slightly more than twice as much peanut butter as I had.
I don’t understand why my oven bakes things that don’t involve batter in no more than a minute or two longer than I expect them to, but whenever I try to make anything involving batter all hell breaks loose. I apparently have terrible luck with recipes but this shit is still ridiculous.
Punchline: as horrible as they look, the stupid little things didn’t actually taste bad. But next time we’re doing 20 minutes at 375 before we even check the oven, or maybe I’ll just cook them with a blowtorch.
We had BLTs for dinner. I was gonna make stuffed zucchini tonight but after the failure of the cookie experiment I wasn’t up for anything I hadn’t done a million times. The wife suggested I make the same remoulade we’d had with our crab cakes a couple of months ago, and I whipped some up. Dead easy– some mayonnaise with about a spoonful each of dijon, horseradish, and sriracha, with a few shakes of Old Bay on top, then mix together. It’s a great topping for wedge fries (which she’d also made) and we used it for the BLTs too.
Randomly, we decided to offer the boy a fingerful or two of it. Now, remember the ingredients: dijon, horseradish, and sriracha are pungent, and I don’t know any kids who are terribly into mayo. I figured he’d run screaming. We were both expecting betrayface.
He spent the rest of the meal loudly demanding “sauce,” which he refused to sully by combining it with any of the bacon or bread or potatoes on his plate, instead choosing to eat it by the fistful.
I don’t understand my kid.
OH YOU STUPID, STUPID ASSHOLE EDIT: As Facebook immediately points out: Celsius. The bloody oven temperature is in Celsius. Jesus. I’d even gotten a hint since she says you need 400 grams of chickpeas; I’d already done the conversion to make sure the 15 oz cans I was buying were in the right neighborhood. ARRRRGH.
