Cursed Cooking Pt. 2: Babby's First Cookies

If you need some context for how clueless and inexperienced I am with baking and cooking in general, I wrote about it on my last post heh heh..

I thought I'd attempt some cookies today as a pick-me-up—didn't expect for it to turn into a 5 hour long venture.....

Because anything I make would only be consumed by me and my parents, I seeked out a small batch recipe that could be made in a toaster oven..... I simply wanted to try out making something with whatever we already had in the house and I saw that some people on the internet successfully substituted cocoa powder with hot chocolate mix so decided to try that.... and also I didn't have the specific types of sugar and salt that the recipe listed so substituted those too orzzzz and don't have vanilla extract or chocolate chips so skipped those..... LOL BASICALLY I SET MYSELF UP FOR CURSED COOKIES; I knew from the start. Had no expectations and it still managed to surprise me.

I really shouldn't be allowed to make food without supervision.

A bit trivial but some things about the ingredients used that contribute to how cursed my baking ventures are. I have no idea what kind of flour or sugar I'm using. They are in jars with handwritten labels on them in Chinese which I can't read LOL. And to make it worse, my parents keep the [assumably brown?] sugar in the fridge so it's extraordinarily clumpy. If I ever decide to try improving at baking, I'll have to make a big grocery run but I don't really like the idea of buying things that'll sit around unused, sigh.

Okay now to put it all together... In short, the ingredients I ended up with were overwhelmingly powdery so the batter turned out SUPER dry and crumbly HAHAHAHA.

Left: The non-dough that resulted from the recipe + my substitutes + skipped ingredients lolololol
Right: After adding some additional butter and chilling in the fridge.

HAHAHAHA....... I consulted with my friends who suggested adding another egg (also milk but we don't have any) for moisture, but before doing that I decided to try baking one """cookie""" just to see what would happen 😂

Note: Oof we don't have baking sheets so just had to use foil...

I baked a Pile of Dirt!

I actually quite enjoyed its texture as a crunchy cookie crumble, BUT OMG IT TASTED LIKE ASS LOL.............. Way too much salt and/or baking soda and not enough sugar, plus it probably needed the vanilla extract :c

(is it bad that honestly I would absolutely eat this again if it were sweet..?)

Left: The additional egg now rendered the batter too wet orz
Right: After adding more flour and sugar and whisking... over and over..... for 45 minutes o<-<

The "dough" was still gloppy but at this point I was set up for failure every step of the way and manually whisking is tiring so I gave up! /o/ At least it's an improvement from the first iteration of the batter I think?? lol

Hm.................. LOL. Hm.

First of all, I should've pressed the dough balls down and made them thinner.

Second of all..... hm.

I mean............it looks similar to the batter's appearance....... I guess I don't know why I was surprised....... I was never meant to make "normal" cookies.... They're like wannabe brownies but dry and not fluffy on the inside AND still not sweet even though I thought I added a lot of sugar this time. :(

Honestly not sure if I'll attempt baking again anytime soon because the amount of sugar and butter that goes into these things is a little alarming LOL we'll seeeee. It's pretty fun trying new things though.