OCG's Florida Cookies: in which I learn a lesson about patience and pride

These cookies have been a long time coming. I must have printed out the recipe months ago. They're a few of my favorite things wrapped up in one cookie: orange, pecans, oatmeal cookies...sounds great, right?

I finally got a good opportunity to bake them for a school event last week, and they turned out delicious! Chewy oatmeal cookies with a good orange-flavor punch, crunchy and buttery pecans, and just a touch of creamy white chocolate with every bite.


However, the process was less than delightful, and actually made for an interesting self-study in my character flaws.

First, I wanted to use up these quick-cooking oats that my mom had left with me when she last visited, instead of the old-fashioned oats I usually use for baking. Despite Alton Brown's prattle about how the more quick-cooking and instant the oats are correlates to how much more broken down and pre-cooked they are echoing in my brain, I thought, ah, how much difference could it make?

Despite my outward nonchalance, the seeds of doubt spouted and grew like weeds as I proceeded. With growing worry, I took a bite of still-warm cookie from the first batch that came out of the oven. It melted into porridge-consistency in my mouth and held only a trace of the flavor I was expecting from the smell and previous experience from OCG's cookies.

I panicked. For the first time in months--no, years--I had botched up a cookie recipe because I made a poorly-chosen substitution.

It was late in the evening. Should I abandon ship and bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies to save my reputation? Or should I risk feeding mediocre cookies to the attendees? Or should I just give up and not bring anything?

All sounded like bad options. I loathe throwing away food; I'd rather have frozen the whole batch and try to salvage it to make some kind of crumble topping than to just dump them. I'd told people that I was bringing cookies, so to come empty-handed would be, I'm afraid to admit, an admission of failure that my pride would not stand for.

Michael interjected, "These taste fine, don't be so hard on yourself."

I looked dubiously at him. Not that I didn't trust his palate, but one of his better qualities is his ability to not be picky about food.


Somewhere between despair and hope, I decided to give the cookies the benefit of the doubt and waited until they were fully cooled before making a final judgment.

Meanwhile, I was trying to melt white chocolate with some orange zest, and for whatever reason, the white chocolate I was using did not melt into liquid ivory for me, but instead became a fragrant paste that destroyed my Ziploc-bag-turned-pastry-bag when I tried to pipe it out onto a cooled cookie. So I took to using a spatula to spread the chocolate on top of the cookies, which actually worked out well.


So what happened in the end? The cooled cookies settled and firmed up, and the flavors intensified as well. The resulting cookie was chewy, dense, fragrant, and did not melt into porridge in my mouth. The bits of oats were smaller than I was used to, but it was a barely-perceptible nuance in texture that unsuspecting eaters would not notice.

The cookies tasted great.

And I learned to not judge a cookie (or myself) too early.