I spend a lot of time reading cookbooks, cooking magazines, cooking blogs and websites. I frequently come across a recipe that appeals to me, and I say, “I’ll have to try that”. And off I go to the kitchen…where I find that I’m short at least one key ingredient. This is exactly what happened today.
Now, according to the Costa Rican government weather website, there is a massive low pressure system over us, and we can expect torrential rains to start at any moment. In fact, when I wandered into the kitchen, it had already been thundering for an hour or so, and as I looked out my window, the pavement was steaming from the first few drops of rain. So when I discovered that I had no white sugar, and only a small amount of peanut butter, the idea of jumping on my scooter to see if I could beat the rain seemed silly. I decided I would just have to be creative when it came to making these Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip cookies, taken from one of my favourite blogs: SmittenKitchen.com
Before I begin cooking a recipe that I’ve found on the Internet, I go to the comments posted by other people who’ve tried the recipe, to see what they’ve got to say. It always makes me laugh to see the degree to which a recipe can be modified and still yield a satisfactory result. So what if the sausage and mushrooms are replaced with tofu and zucchini? Or the ricotta is replaced with mascarpone, or béchamel? The recipe still works! Baking can be trickier though, because there’s a little more chemistry involved, and the ratio of liquid to flour to fat can be unforgiving. But in this case, I was really craving peanut butter and chocolate together, so damn the torpedoes! I’m a professional! I'll wing it!
I only made half the recipe, because that’s all the peanut butter that I had. And half a recipe calls for half an egg, which is just silly, so I threw in the whole thing. So then I skipped the tablespoon of milk. Since I had no white sugar, I used all brown sugar, instead of half and half. (Costa Rican brown sugar is quite dry and coarse, so there’s no such thing as measuring out a ‘packed’ cup, and it never really dissolves at all). And finally, I used only chocolate chips, because I’ve never seen peanut butter chips in Costa Rica. As I got to the last step on the recipe and added the chocolate chips, I had one of those Homer Simpson “Doh!” moments. Because as the dough split into a nasty, greasy mess, I realized that I had tried this exact recipe about a year ago, when I last had a craving for something with chocolate and peanut butter, with exactly the same result. And that time, I hadn't made any substitutions (except for the peanut butter chips). There’s something about Costa Rican butter that’s different from North American butter, and my pastry recipes frequently give me funny results here. Last year, when the dough was such a mess, I continued experimenting with other cookies, and that's how I ended up with the Double Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream Sandwich that's on the menu at Ginger Restaurant. However, this time, the finished product was none the worse for the dough splitting, and the cookies were beautiful. And delicious!
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