Comparing Apples to Oreos I

The month of September ended with a trip to BJ's to have dinner with my brother and cousins. Sam and I weren't terribly hungry - we had had a big breakfast or lunch or something, so all we ordered to eat was an appetizer of chili fries to share. I heard Ciara and Arielle talking about dessert, and felt like I was in the mood for something sweet. But, oh, if only I knew the trouble it would cause.

I ordered an Oreo Pizookie for Sam and I to share, and when it came, I took a bite of the warm chocolate cookie with a dab of cold vanilla ice cream and instantly felt the urge to battle my dear husband for control of the spoon. Subsequent weeks found me heading straight back to BJ's for more Pizookie goodness, until my wallet groaned with the weight of all these somewhat expensive meals.

Faced with a very rare, but very powerful chocolate craving, I turned to the next best thing to giant Oreos in pizza pans - brownies. But, alas, brownies are the bane of my baking existence. Since long ago, I have had trouble with these chocolate fudgy cakey things, even when out of a box. My first attempt (a "safe" box mix) was a disaster because I somehow misread the amount of water I was supposed to put and dumped in a whole cup more. Oops! My second box of brownie mix proved to be a success, but after the gooey brownieness was gone, I felt the need to make "real" brownies - ones without high fructose corn syrup, ones that would leave flour dust on my clothes! As always, I turned to my cooking hero, Alton Brown, for guidance. Cocoa brownies? I could do this! But apparently I couldn't. I had decided to measure by weight rather than by volume (Isn't weight supposed to be better than volume?), and this resulted in very chalky, hard brownies... Damn you, brownies...!

In an attempt to squash my still persistent chocolate kick, I decided making my own Pizookie couldn't possibly be that hard, could it? After several searches on the internet, I came upon a recipe for homemade Oreo cookies on a wonderful food and cooking blog. The gorgeous pictures made my mouth water with anticipation, and I decided I must - MUST - try this recipe.

The recipe is really quite simple. You dump all the dry ingredients together, mix, dump in some wet ingredients, mix that as well, and you get cookie dough! Except, my "large" eggs from Ralphs were really quite small (And expensive! Good Lord.) and didn't wet the dough well enough, so I added another half an egg. And my poor little electric hand mixer and little hands aren't strong enough or well suited to mixing things thoroughly. Add to that a slightly wonky oven that burned them for anything longer than 6 or 7 minutes, and the taste was a little off. Good, but... not spectacular. And, really, homemade Oreos should be nothing less than incredible.

The filling, however, is perfect. A little butter, a little shortening, LOTS of sugar, and a bit of vanilla, and you have yourself something that tastes exactly like commercial Oreo filling. Mine was also a little on the dry side (What was it that day? Nothing came out wet enough!), so I didn't add all the powdered sugar. But it was great! Not twistable, but flavor-wise, it was excellent.

Baking all the little cookies in batches and putting them together was a chore, but perhaps now that I have a food processor and a better idea of what I liked and didn't like about this recipe, maybe I can give it another go as it gets closer to Christmas. Until then, I think I'll concentrate on pies and good ol' chocolate chip cookies.

(In the next installment... pie!)