Ahhh!!

What an embarrassing Secret Recipe Club reveal! And of course, had I not waited until the last minute to try my recipe, I could have tried something else. But life has been so busy for us lately. Sometimes in life, it just is what it is, right?

It’s been no secret since Day 1 of this blog who the one in our home is that can cook. I don’t sugar coat and everyone who knows us well knows that when it comes to the kitchen, Chef John rules.

But there are a couple of things …

Now, he will tell you that he can’t make spaghetti as good as mine. Well, you see, that’s because when you go off to college and don’t really know the first thing about cooking, you eat a lot of spaghetti because it’s easy and good. So I’ve had plenty of practice with spaghetti.

When I was telling him all about my big fat fail for this reveal, he confessed that I also make better scrambled eggs than he does. So I make two things better than him. That’s truly about it.

It’s okay. It doesn’t bother me. He enjoys cooking a lot so it totally works for us.

When I first joined the Secret Recipe Club last year, I was excited about the fact that it would force me to start experimenting a little in the kitchen once a month. I did want to start trying more recipes and trying to cook a little more … and I’ve really enjoyed it. Chef John will tell you that it has really helped me come a long way. I used to follow recipes verbatim. Now I will adapt where I feel comfortable doing so, or with his advice and sometimes assistance.

Most of my Secret Recipe Club reveals have been successful. There were the crepes that didn’t turn out so well …. They tasted great, but needed more practice getting them thinner. I have yet to find the time to perfect the crepes technique.

This month though …. Almost a totally and completely, utterly embarrassing failure (my kids saved me from total embarrassment)! Now, let me introduce you to the blog which I was assigned and be very clear that the my experience with the recipe from this blog had zero to do with the author of the blog or this particular recipe.

My assignment this month

My blog for this month was Sweet as Sugar Cookies, written by Lisa. I’ve always loved the name of this blog, because while I am not a big cookie eater, I have always loved sugar cookies. I’ve also always loved chocolate chip cookies, and if you do, too, then you must check out Lisa’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Quest.

Now, the recipe I chose for this month’s reveal was a recent chocolate chip cookie recipe that she has published since that quest. I will be trying one or two more of her chocolate chip cookie recipes from this quest soon. I say possibly two because at the end of her quest she had two recipes that basically were a tie for the winning recipe.

A NYC Bakery Copycat Recipe

The recipe I tried for this reveal is her Levain Bakery Copycat Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. I discovered it within minutes of visiting her blog for my assignment, and I knew right away that this was the one I wanted to try. My MIL makes the best chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever had, and I decided I wanted to find a recipe for our family to enjoy until we can convince her to share her recipe with us.

Obviously, I will need to hone my cookie making skills quite a bit before we I (well probably we since Chef John was not home to taste my cookies and I am 100% certain he would have agreed with me on taste) will be enjoying cookies I make! Because of my lack of experience in the kitchen overall, baking isn’t a strength of mine either. And I honestly don’t have the time or the patience at this stage in my life to make it a strength anytime soon!!

But I do know enough about baking to know the importance of exact measurements. I’m not sure what happened to that knowledge while baking today, but for some reason it escaped me! And I realized this not long after pulling the first batch of cookies out of the oven and immediately knowing something had gone terribly wrong.

They looked terrible! And then the taste test confirmed it …. they tasted terrible! Now, my children disagreed with me, shockingly, but I am still trying to figure out if this was because they are so “sugar deprived” that anything with the slightest sweetness they adore or …. well, I’m truly stumped. I am exaggerating on the sugar deprivation, but truly we do not eat a lot of sweets.

As I tasted them, I knew that the taste issue was because of the flour I had used. Chef John says it was a whole wheat flour but we had thrown the package away and stored it in a container, so I can’t remember exactly what kind of flour it was. But I will never use it again for cookies. That’s a fact!

As far as the appearance, once I realized that I had not been as precise as I normally am with the measuring and leveling off of the ingredients, I knew that was where the appearance of the cookies had gone wrong.

Visit Sweet as Sugar Cookies for the original recipe and more

I had decided to halve the recipe because my MIL had just brought us some of her cookies and I only wanted a good taste of this recipe this first time I made it. It’s a good thing!! I’ve decided to just direct you to Lisa’s blog if you want to try this recipe the correct way for yourself. Because from her description of it, I am sure if I had not ruined it they would have tasted great!

I may make them again some day myself. My next chocolate chip cookie recipe to try will be one of the two that tied in her Quest which you can check out here!

Thanks, Lisa, for so many chocolate chip cookie recipe options. I’m sure now I can find one that I will enjoy along with my children, since they don’t seem to yet have experienced enough pallettes to distinguish a nasty chocolate chip cookie with a truly yummy one. 😉 At least my fail does not have to go to complete waste.

Check out other reveals here for some great recipes!