When life is intent on squashing you like a bug, sometimes you need some levity to distract from how your entire body feels like a crackling exoskeleton. Sometimes, that takes the form of a cargo ship blocking up an important trade route and the veritable explosion of memes (and surprisingly well-written fanfiction) that follows. Sometimes, it’s taking a moment to laugh at yourself and your many, many culinary failures (fun fact: don’t cook gluten-free noodles made from beans in a crockpot to make mac and cheese unless you’re really into cheesy bean paste). Sometimes…sometimes it’s in finding your limit in an entirely different way and having a long, loud laugh that could also either be screaming or crying depending on the angle.
The setup: I like glitter. I am self-conscious about this sometimes but most of the time, it’s a personal choice that I enjoy and occasionally like to inflict on the rest of the world at large. I like shiny things and I’m fine with that. I also like chocolate chip cookies. So when Nestle presented the opportunity to combine the two things…well, I had to take it, really.
My first feeling was disappointment. Not every chip had the edible glitter promised, and those chips that did…well. The glitter just wasn’t very good. And it smelled kinda like Hershey’s Kissables but after they changed the recipe and made them more sickly-sweet and yucky. Not only that, but the recipe on the back of the package was for a chocolate cookie dough that you then roll into balls and dip into the chips, and I really just wanted classic chocolate chip cookies with them, so I decided also to improvise a chocolate chip cookie recipe off of the given chocolate cookie recipe. I was feeling less and less confident about this decision by the moment, not least because the aforementioned catastrophe with the gluten-free noodles had happened in the same day (plus a similar incident with trying to make a chocolate chip cookie in a mug by modifying a brownie in a mug recipe had gone catastrophically awry just the week before), but what can I say, the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, and Mama raised a fool.
Having learned somewhat from my mug baking failure, I swapped the cocoa in the cookie recipe out for more flour (because as it turns out, when you swap out cocoa for more sugar, it turns your mug cookie into caramel without more dry ingredients to balance it out), picked out the glitter chips, and added in the normal chocolate chips. Dough was pale, because I didn’t think to add brown sugar, but the consistency was right and it tasted fine. I pressed glitter chips into the top of my cookie globs, and popped them in to bake.
They baked for a little longer than expected, and came out pure white, but that wasn’t totally terrible. The sickly-sweet Hershey’s Kissables smell was much stronger, and though it filled me with trepidation, I waited for them to cool, and picked one out to take a bite.
It tasted exactly like it smelled—like a beloved candy gone wrong. As it turns out, I have both a sweets limit and a glitter limit, two things I wasn’t sure I had in me. The attempt wasn’t terrible, by any means, but it’s definitely not something I’ll be trying again any time soon.
Sometimes, the things we love smashed together…does not mean the experience as a whole is going to be good. But at least there came a story out of it!