Whipped Into A Frenzy

Originally published November 2, 2023

These things always start with the best of intentions. My friend had just had surgery so I wanted to make a nice meal for her and her family. Homemade soup sounded like it would hit the spot. And, because everyone needs a sweet chaser after dinner: oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. You know, the kind with the instant pudding mix in the batter? That soft and chewy texture, warm from the oven, would probably be enough to heal her incision.

I planned to share the cookies with my family, too, so I doubled the recipe. I grabbed my 6-quart stockpot to allow plenty of room for mixing.

The softened butter and sugars whipped together easily, and the addition of eggs and vanilla made the mixture downright soupy. Why had I worried about having enough room for mixing?

Four cups of flour and four cups of old-fashioned oats later, the plot thickened, and so did the dough. I recalled my mother-in-law cautioning that her Christmas Butter Cookies recipe produced a dough so thick it broke more than one of her electric hand mixers. As a young newlywed, I laughed at the story, not realizing God keeps a record of such hubris and delivers a comeuppance decades later.

There was no place to go with this humongous lump short of sterilizing an industrial drum. And buying one first.

I beat the mixture on low to combine the dry and wet ingredients and gradually increased the speed. By the time I dumped in the chocolate chips and chopped walnuts, the dough began setting up like concrete. Thank goodness for my new 9-speed mixer. Crank it up!

I nudged the mixer from side to side, hoping to prevent all the chips from winding up in half the cookies and all the walnuts in the other half, with little success.

You know how military planes take off from aircraft carriers by accelerating from zero to 200 in two seconds flat? I’m not saying my mixer became airborne, but random bits of dough did. And the beaters became every bit as noisy as military aircraft. The off switch did nothing, so I yanked the power cord out of the wall before the whole thing went up in smoke.

The beaters had literally whipped themselves into a frenzy, completely twisting around one another. Sort of like two coworkers who had labored side by side for years until one day they got so overheated, as it were, they launched themselves into each other’s arms right there in adjoining cubicles and were caught en flagrante.

I managed to untangle and remove the sweaty lovers beaters, but the motor persisted in its ungodly noisemaking. A total loss. Very disappointing after only a year of service, especially after my mother’s basic three-speed model did everything we asked of it for her entire life and most of mine.

Ah, well, the whole incident marked another entry into the annals of my culinary disasters, joining the Great Chinese Fiasco of 2013. We had kept cornstarch and confectioners’ sugar in identical, albeit labeled, jars in our lazy susan. For a Chow Mein recipe, I hastily grabbed confectioners’ sugar instead of cornstarch and accidentally invented Teriyaki. To celebrate, I laid my paperback cookbook on a still-hot ceramic burner and nearly lit up my own kitchen. FYI, the egg rolls and sweet and sour sauce were to die for, but burning down the house, not so much.

In the meantime, I’ve vandalized a few other recipes. Before fusion restaurants became popular, I reached for curry instead of cumin while making White Chicken Chili—hey, they both start with C—and gave the soup a distinctly Indian vibe. My family was lucky I didn’t reach for cayenne and send them all to the ER.

There was also a Popover incident my husband won’t stop whining talking about. How was I to know the eggy mixture would super-glue itself to my aluminum muffin pan? The middle of each roll—easily extracted with a fork, steak knife, and a reasonable amount of upper body strength—was delicious. But the pan was a total loss.

A lot like the Flan that destroyed my mother’s ancient saucepan—a pan that had survived 80 years of constant use, until Mexican Week at my daughter’s elementary school. Moral of that story: Don’t walk away from caramelizing sugar.

Despite my culinary misadventures, I love cooking for company. And I still have some of that enormous blob of cookie dough in the fridge. Want some? They come with either chocolate chips or walnuts, but rarely both.