Some of us just weren't born to bake

Once you have shipped your life across the ocean, you get occasional cravings for the comforts of home. You miss your friends, you miss your family, and in this particular case, I missed my mom's chocolate-chip-oatmeal cookies, circa 1984.

After a quick phone call home to retrieve this heavenly recipe from the sacred recipe box, tucked somewhere between the Fruity Jello-mold and the scandalous Sex-In-a-Pan, I set about my nostalgic little project. The local grocer (bless you, oh local grocer who stays open late on Sundays) proved very fruitful in terms of late-night baking supplies. The only absentee was the chocolate chips, but it was decided after much debate over the quality of the chocolate in a smartie, that a large, bittersweet dark chocolate bar would be an apt substitute.

Everything was going great guns, until I decided to halve the recipe. I'm not sure what happened, I can only chalk it up to using a liquid measuring cup and table spoon for the entire process, alongside my, devil-may-care "I can just approximate all the measurements, you can't screw up chocolate chip cookies!" attitude, but the cookies looked more like fried pancakes then cookies. Plus, I consumed WAY too much chocolate and cookie dough in the process, so that the mere thought of a chocolate chip cookie right now makes me want to gag.

I'm left with a plate of chocolate-chip-oatmeal cookie bits and pieces, bashfully hiding beneath a thin layer of Tesco plastic wrap, like one of those baking experiments you did when you were 10 and decided to mix tabasco, sugar, peanut butter and oregano, just so you could watch your brother gag.

I'm slightly narcissistic enough to attempt another batch tonight, but perhaps I should just leave the fond memory of my mom's cookies intact.