Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.
The real distinguishing element of cooking (and in this case baking) competitions is the timer. In real life, you bake with leisure. It is not your job. It is maybe a chore, or something you enjoy. If there is a deadline looming over you, it is one of your own creation. Maybe you agreed to bring something to a potluck, or want to make a cake for a friend’s birthday. But those deadlines aren’t real. No one will be mad at you, actually, if you don’t make them. They can be late.
No, most of cooking and baking is for either survival (where the deadline is only your stomach rumbling) or pleasure. Often, I make bread from my sourdough starter. This is a leisurely process. I leave it to rise overnight. In the morning, when I feel led, I turn it out and shape it. Sometimes, I forget about it for too long. That’s fine. The only real consequence is that sometimes the bread is a little flatter than I would like, or a little nicer than I expected.
But in the tent, in this game we subject ourselves to every fall, the clock is our master. The ominous time ticks down lower and lower. The list of things to do, hopefully (but not always), ticks down too. There’s a built-in tension to that dwindling time. You cannot help but dart around because you know that every second is precious, and when the last ones tick down, you will dream of having more of them. This is how it goes every week. This is the fate we have resigned ourselves to.
Each year, I forget that Biscuit Week is one of my worst weeks with the timer. How long does a little cookie take to bake? I know it is not long. Fifteen minutes? Forty minutes if it’s a cookie cake? Not long! So it always feels as if time will not be an issue during Biscuit Week. I should know better. The body, they say, keeps the score. And this is our fourth Biscuit Week. Would we do better this week than we did in 2022, when we were destroyed by Custard Creams? Would we do worse than last year, when we made perfect little mint chocolate domes?
This week, the task was presented to the contestants with glee. “Hobnob,” the judges said. “Dunker,” they repeated. The contestants all knew what these were. The British are so strange with all their little flavorless treats. But we are not British, and we do not know what “hobnob” or “dunker” mean. Still, we had to make Prue Leith’s Chocolate Caramel Hobnobs. And, well … we tried.
Kelsey McKinney: Well, Chris. Welcome to Week 2 of the tent. I will say that I began this week feeling very optimistic. This turned out to be the wrong feeling.
Chris Thompson: It’s tragic, is what it is! For some reason, I could not find my mojo. I never got into any kind of positive or even neutral frame of mind. I tried all my usual tricks—purple apron, spooky music, a moderate dose of THC—but nothing worked! I was dreading the biscuits, and this state of dread persisted all the way through the bake.
KM: I think for me, part of the problem was that we baked in the morning this week. I am not built for mornings, so I found this part stressful. My brain is always slower, and I had not even had a whole coffee yet when we began. That’s not ideal!
CT: I think that is true for me, as well, about morning bakes. I am not one of these Maria von Trapp-ass, When you wake up, WAKE UP people. I am always very slow and at least lightly frazzled in the morning.
KM: I read this terrible interview with the fitness guru Tracy Anderson last week where she said that actually, you only need two sips of coffee to get all the benefits. And I’ve been mad about it ever since! Maybe if you’re a millionaire! I need hundreds of sips! At a minimum!
CT: There is also something sick and wrong about cooking these ultra-sweet caramel-and-chocolate-coated cookies at 9 a.m. on a Monday. I do not want to be eating this volume of sugar in the morning, and so I also do not want to be cooking this volume of sugar in the morning.
KM: Yes, cookies we were forced to bake by Prue Leith had both melted chocolate and caramel on them. This is not what I crave, especially at 10 in the morning. On top of the cravings problem, I was also tired. You and I both went to NYC last week for the Defector party, then I also had the Normal Gossip show on Friday and Defector at the Ballpark in Philadelphia on Saturday. Now I feel like my legs have been filled with sand.
CT: That’s a lot! We are out here suffering and sacrificing for our small business!
KM: It’s a lot … of excuses!!!!
CT: Kelsey, what do you make of these Hobnobs?
KM: Hobnob is not my business. I don’t know what to make of them because I’m still not really sure what they are.
CT: Yeah, confusingly, the instructions that we were given refer to them both as “dunkers” and as “hobnobs,” but otherwise don’t really tell us anything about them. My wife, who helps us with this dumb project by watching the technical bakes for us and passing along the ingredients and instructions, said that most of the contestants on the show were already familiar with “hobnobs.” British shit!
KM: It’s pretty incredible to me that after all these challenges, there are still weird British treats that just appear, and every British person seems to know about them. How many of these damn treats are there?
CT: I think that, too, is probably part of why I could never get settled. The words “hobnob” and “dunker” do not mean anything to me. Frankly, never say to me “dunker” unless we are discussing hoops and the subject is big huge jams!
Ingredients and Shopping
KM: Chris, did you have all the things we were supposed to have for this bake?
CT: About that: I sincerely thought that I had everything that I needed for this bake. There are two ingredients on the list that can be puzzling, but I thought I had them covered. The first is golden syrup. We had a golden syrup thing last year, and I think I made some from scratch? At any rate, I have a jar of homemade golden syrup in my pantry, so I felt great about that.
KM: Wow! I’m impressed that you both remembered you had made the golden syrup and then actually used it. Where did you put it? Next to the sugars? How did you remember this? Our brains are so different.
CT: Yes, it’s up near where I store my sugars, at the very top of the pantry.
Here’s a gross story, which I will probably regret sharing: Last year, we had a minor ant infestation in our house. The ants were mostly in the front entryway, but it seemed like they wanted to round the corner into the kitchen, and I had to fight to keep them on the other side of this imaginary line.
Anyway, back in April we moved to Sicily for three months, and in advance of this adventure, I took all the flour and all the sugar from all the baking stuff and jammed it into my fridge, and then cleaned the bejeezus out of the pantry. It had been a couple months since we’d seen ants, but I thought they might return while I was away and round the corner and capture the kitchen. So we got home in July, and I was restocking the pantry and discovered, to my horror, that there were little piles of dead ants all over the place. They hadn’t been poisoned, because we hadn’t left any poison out. What had happened was, they’d been starved. The exterminator guy said that they’d almost certainly been in the pantry already before we left, and that that was how they’d sustained themselves in the house, but by cleaning down the pantry and emptying it of food, we’d basically starved their entire colony to death. Sad and gross but also … no, mostly just sad and gross. Gross!
KM: OMG not ants! You stole their food! Incredible strategy! OWNED! But so in this process of moving things to destroy the ants and their food supply, you re-discovered the golden syrup?
CT: Yes! Sorry. The little jar of golden syrup was up there with the sugars, and I would not have remembered it except for The Pantry Incident.
KM: What I did was read the words “golden syrup,” decide that’s not my business, and determine that I already have “golden syrup” in my house and I call it “honey.”
CT: A brave stand! I think honey is a fine substitute. The other challenging ingredient was “caramel chocolate,” which was needed for the chocolate coating phase. I’m not honestly sure what this is. Is this sold in chip form? Where does one acquire 200 grams of caramel chocolate? What did you think of this item?
KM: Like you, I also did not know what this is. I could not find caramel chocolate chips even though I went to two different grocery stores and a bodega. At the bodega I did find homemade baklava by the grandma of the bodega owner, though, so that was very exciting.
CT: Oh man, baklava.
KM: It was honestly, so good. I loved it. Because the baklava was delicious, I became distracted and decided that instead of continuing my search for caramel chocolate chips, I would just use the extra caramel and mix it with white chocolate and that could be “caramel chocolate.”
CT: That was a good and sensible decision. I decided to buy a bag of butterscotch chips. I realize this is a long way from “caramel chocolate,” but I like butterscotch and they’re my damn cookies.
The other thing I did not have, or buy, was 7-cm round silicon moulds. We’ve run into lots of annoying equipment issues over the years, and have always tried very bravely to overcome them with ingenuity and, uh, tin foil, and I was not about to buy 12 silicon cookie moulds, because that is obviously fucking ridiculous.
KM: Oh yeah. I didn’t even consider trying to get 7-cm round silicon molds. That’s not my business. Also, I do want to say, in our defense, we are on kind of a tight turnaround. We only have like 24 hours between the time your wife gives us the recipe and when we bake, so we can’t actually go and find things like this without destroying our lives. Also, I didn’t want to.
CT: Right, I mean I could go scampering around to every conceivable shop in the county, but that would not be reasonable, and also despite being a Business Owner I am unfortunately accountable to the other people here for how I spend my time. I can’t go on a damn cookie mould safari every freakin’ week!
KM: Yeah! We have other blogs to write!
Stage One: Making Cookie Dough, Cutting Cookies
CT: The first instruction for this bake was one word: “Bake.”
Kelsey, how did you start this bake? We were given two hours, which initially felt like a very long time to bake 12 cookies.
KM: I decided not to be stupid this week and actually start working immediately and quickly. I threw my sheet tray in the freezer and pre-heated the oven to 350 degrees. Then I creamed the butter and sugars and “golden syrup” (honey) in the KitchenAid, and mixed together the dry ingredients with my hand and added them to the KitchenAid. When it was all mixed up, it was rather sticky. Is this how you began?
CT: Almost! The first thing I did was scratch out some notes on a notepad. This was a thing I picked up from you last season, and it served me really well when we did the opera cake. Weirdly, the fact that we had instructions this week was actually a source of stress? And I felt like I needed to organize my efforts a little. So I wrote out the steps for making cookie dough, and then I wrote out the steps for making caramel. Then I did basically exactly what you did: I put wet ingredients into the stand mixer and got them going.
Then I got dry ingredients into a mixing bowl and whisked them together, and then I mixed the dry things with the wet things.
KM: Wow! Okay organized! I did that after my cookies were in the oven because I just assumed they needed to go in there fast. The problem was, the dough was so sticky. My initial instinct was to roll the dough out and stamp the cookies out (I had a single cookie cutter to serve as my silicon mold). But it was too sticky to roll! So what I ended up doing was dividing the dough into 12 sections, smashing it flat with my hand on a silicon mat, and then stamping the cookie out of that. By doing this, I ended up with 14 cookies! Two bonus cookies!
CT: Hey, I like that! That was a neat solution.
I found my dough to be very crumbly, and I was sure that I had already fucked up real bad.
But I didn’t want to take a second crack at it, so what I did was I dumped the dough out onto a sheet of parchment, and kind of bundled it up with my hands, and then put a second sheet of parchment on top of it, and rolled it out under there.
It cracked a lot, and I still felt very bad about the texture, but at least I was not making a gigantic mess. I used a tall slender drinking glass to stamp out the cookies. I would dip the rim of the glass into water between cuts, to prevent too much sticking. It turned out I’d panicked for nothing, but this was my state of mind throughout.
KM: Oh, that was so smart! I never even considered double parchment paper! Between seasons, I did steal some baking supplies from my late grandmother’s home and this included a bunch of circular cookie cutters. Huge news for my kitchen.
CT: Yeah I’d love to have one nice circle-shaped cookie cutter. For some reason I have two different Santa-shaped cookie cutters, but no circles.
I see you went with 350 degrees. I agonized about this, because my oven is not very reliable at all and tends to run hot. Eventually I settled on 375, but I used the High Bake mode to preheat the oven, which is always terrifying because sometimes that turns my oven into Krakatoa.
When I felt like it was very hot, I switched over to Convection Bake, which has done OK for me in the past.
KM: I remember this drama with your oven! There was something else that I did the minute I put the cookies into the oven: Throw the rest of the fondant fancies away and wash the platter so it could hold my new bake. Goodbye, fondant fancies!
CT: Go to hell, you pink abominations! How were you feeling at this point in your bake? Did you seem to have things mostly under control?
KM: I felt okay. I put the first six cookies in while I stamped the other six (eight). And they ended up taking about 16 minutes total to get to a color that I thought was nice. At this point, they had expanded a little in the oven, so I stamped them again to make them the right size while they were still hot.
Mostly, I did this because I wanted to eat some of the cookies and this gave me little slivers to eat, but unfortunately, they weren’t even that good! They kind of tasted how I imagine a dog treat tastes.
CT: Shit, that was really smart. I wish I’d done this. I did not taste my dough at this stage, but the smell was Basic Cookie.
I also felt pretty chill at this stage. My dough was very crumbly, and my raw cookies were very thin, but I felt pretty good on time and my kitchen was still in order.
Also, believe it or not, the part of this bake that I was least worried about was the making of caramel.
KM: Wow, I was also not worried about making the caramel! We’ve grown so much.
Stage Two: Making Caramel
CT: What was your approach to caramel-making?
KM: I heated the sugar in a pan and the heavy cream separately in a little pot. I sliced the butter into cubes. Once the heavy cream was hot (not boiling) and the caramel was amber, I combined them by stirring pretty rapidly with the whisk. And then I stirred in the butter cubes one at a time and voila: perfect caramel.
What did you do?
CT: My method was different, and I think I did slightly outsmart myself. After my cookies came out of the oven—they were in there for around 12 minutes, and survived—I also put the sugar into a saucepan. But to the saucepan I also added two tablespoons of water. This is a way that I’ve made caramel sauce before, and because the recipe had cream and butter I was just thinking of it as a sauce. So I made a heavy syrup, simmered that down to a golden caramel, then stirred in the butter until it was melted and hot, and then slowly stirred in the cream until it was nice and thick. I also added two pinches of salt and a tiny splash of vanilla. It came out great, if a little thin.
KM: Hell yeah!
CT: To us, caramel is NOTHING.
Stage Three: Coating Cookies, Melting Chocolate
CT: This is where things went completely to hell for me.
KM: Unlike the caramel making and the cookie making, the cookie assembly made me wanna die.
CT: Truly, this was one of my worst moments of the three-plus years that we have been doing this, and that includes the caterpillar and the vertical tart.
The instructions say to pour caramel into the 7-cm circle moulds and then to lay the baked biscuits on top, so that as the caramel cools and congeals, the two merge together into a caramel-topped cookie.
You can see how lacking the appropriate-sized moulds would be a problem.
KM: Yeah this seems like it would be really easy to do, but in FACT it was not. I tried putting the caramel into my cookie cutter and then putting the cookie on top.
This did work for one cookie, but then when I removed the cookie cutter, it all spooled out from under the cookie on the sides, so instead I began what would be about an hour of working with the freezer. I put the cookies in the freezer so they would be so cold. Then I would spoon caramel onto a silicon mat and smush the cold cookie on it. This did work, but the caramel did not make a circle on the bottom of the cookie.
CT: I imagine that moment when the caramel just spread out from the bottom of the cookie was very low. Very traumatic.
KM: Yeah, also at this point, even though we had an hour left, it was very clear that that was not going to be enough time because there were many things to melt and decorate and it felt very impossible. I did not feel good about my method, but it was a method and I just did it and put all my cookies in the freezer, and moved on.
CT: In all my little dipshit note-taking at the beginning of this bake, I never really considered this step, which turns out to have been The Key Moment of the entire technical bake.
When I realized that the silicon moulds were not for shaping or baking cookies but were for holding molten caramel, a chill ran down my spine. I ran over to the cupboard and pulled down a huge stack of silicon muffin cups, but it was obvious immediately that these were entirely the wrong size and shape for the job. I would need something very nearly the size and shape of the cookies I’d baked, and it would need to be something that would not stick to the caramel. Obviously I had nothing even remotely appropriate for the job.
So, like a complete asshole, I pulled out a roll of aluminum foil.
KM: Not the aluminum foil, our salvation of choice!!
CT: I spent a stupid length of time cutting strips of aluminum foil, and then I spent an even stupider length of time cutting strips of parchment. My plan was to put a ring of parchment around each cookie, and then to put an outer ring of foil around that, to hold it in place, and then to pour liquid caramel onto each cookie, hoping that most of it would not just immediately flow out the bottom. Obviously, in retrospect, this was an insane idea, but the clock was ticking and I did not have a lot of time for developing alternative theories. My hands were shaking and I was sweating and cursing and feeling like total shit.
When I tried to form the parchment rings, the stupidity and hopelessness of this plan became inescapable. But I did not have an alternate plan, and so I threw away the parchment and just made foil rings. But because I did not have time to really finesse these stupid things, I ran back to my office and grabbed a handful of binder clips, as a way of keeping them ring-shaped around the cookies. I then tried to use my fingers to mould the foil to the shapes of these uneven cookies.
KM: Oh NO! I’m dying at the introduction of binder clips.
CT: I’d stored my caramel in a pitcher-shaped measuring cup, and it was still very warm. So now I put that into an ice-bath, and ran my cookies down to the basement freezer, because even if the stupid foil rings worked the caramel would never set in time unless it and the cookies were VERY COLD before the end of the bake. But there was no time for this bullshit! I’d spent a solid 20 minutes making these stupid foil contraptions, and I still had to melt and temper THREE different chocolate things, and to coat and decorate my stupid hobnobs. I knew that I was dead.
KM: One thing that really annoys me about the Bake Off is that often the technical challenge is so separate from the theme week. This challenge, for example, had about 18 minutes of actually making “biscuits,” and the rest of the time was spent making caramel and melting chocolate and trying to decorate them. I don’t like this! I don’t care for it one bit!
CT: Yes. This drives me crazy. And though I have no real right to this complaint, it bugs me a lot when a challenge breaks down to a question of whether or not you possess a very specific piece of otherwise stupid and useless kitchen equipment. I have nothing but disgust and contempt in my heart for any contestant on the show who was given all the things they would need and did NOT make good hobnobs.
KM: The other thing I have contempt for with a challenge like this is the dishwashers they have. I do not have a dish person to come wash for me. I am the person who washes all the dishes. So being forced to temper three different things in different bowls and use a ton of pans and spoons is all hell.
CT: This was an incredibly messy bake! People who want to make Prue’s damned hobnobs should be warned that this is the messiest possible cookie.
At this point in the bake, that was an abstract, distant issue. I had not started on the chocolate because I was still thrashing around on the middle step of coating my cookies in a layer of caramel. After 10 minutes of ice-bath time, it became clear to me that there would not be time to get this right. I had to move. I grabbed up those silicon muffin cups and poured liquid caramel into twelve of them.
Obviously, my cookies would not suddenly fit into the muffin cups just because I had become maximally desperate, but I urgently needed to portion my caramel and to get it cold. I ran these cups down to the freezer. I figured maybe if I got the caramel cold enough, I could spoon it onto the cookies in the stupid foil rings and somehow salvage at least that part of the bake. I had 37 minutes left on the timer.
KM: Because I had entirely given up on the molds, this was less of an issue for me. I really thought I was in great shape because my cookies were frozen with their caramel bottoms on the silicon mat and I still had 40 minutes left. I even got a little cocky. I was tempering my chocolate. I was tempering the caramel chocolate. I was going to make my beautiful little cookies!
I started with the caramel ones, because the caramel was already hot.
CT: It’s really something that your solution of just putting blobs of caramel onto a sheet and mashing your cookies on top was somehow the correct improvisation.
KM: Yeah, it kind of worked fine? I don’t know how. I think my caramel was also somehow thicker than yours though because it wasn’t very runny. It just kind of sat there in a blob.
CT: Yes. That little bit of water that I put into the caramel—the thing in my mind that told me to make a caramel sauce—fucked me up, because it really was more of a sauce, like for pouring over ice cream, than a thing that could ever congeal into a coating. It was delicious and perfect! But also wrong.
KM: Soon we will get to my mistake with water. But not yet.
CT: Oh no! I didn’t realize you were also undone by water!
KM: I became confused at this point because the directions … wow. Actually looking at the directions now, I didn’t even do this right. I thought the directions said that six of the biscuits were caramel with and six chocolate both with white chocolate decoration. So this is what I tried to do. In fact, the caramel ones are supposed to have chocolate decoration.
Anyway! It said that the decoration needed to be feathered. I wasn’t really sure what this meant, but because the cookies were round, I made the white chocolate in a spiral and feathered this.
That made my cookies look a little bit like spider webs, but that felt fine. The caramel cookies turned out pretty good.
CT: Jesus, you were so incredibly far ahead of me. I hadn’t even put the caramel onto the cookies yet!
I eventually grabbed the cookies and the caramel cups from the freezer, but now I had just 19 minutes left in the bake. I hadn’t wanted to start on the tempering because it’s an extremely finicky process and you absolutely cannot walk away from it at any point, but also once the stuff is melted you kind of need to use it quickly or it will start to congeal again. So I ran back upstairs with my shit, saw that the caramel was still just straight up liquid, and considered ending it all right then and there.
KM: No! Not liquid!!!!
CT: Oh, also, when I tried to arrange my cookies, all the stupid foil things started warping and falling off. So that had been entirely a waste of time.
Without any other options, I just started spooning caramel onto the cookies. To speed this up, I overturned some of the muffin cups onto the cookies so that they would start draining.
By the time this was done, I had about 14 minutes left, and I needed to melt three different chocolates, and to coat all the cookies, and to decorate.
KM: Oh my god, dude. That’s insane.
CT: I figured I could further chill the cookies and caramel now, by just putting them into the fridge, so I did that.
Stage Four: Assembly
CT: I did not have time to temper all the chocolates (well, two chocolates and one butterscotch) one at a time, so I prioritized. I knew that I would have to mind the white chocolate very closely, because I have been OWNED TO HELL by white chocolate in the past. So I set up two saucepans with simmering water, and started on the white chocolate, while also putting the dark chocolate into a metal bowl over the other saucepan, and only sort of distantly watching it out of the corner of my eye.
KM: This is the point where I got owned to hell. I tried to decorate my caramel cookies as fast as possible, which worked, but then I stopped looking at the white chocolate in the double broiler which somehow (despite being over hot water) solidified into a kind of dough consistency right as I was ready to do the chocolate ones.
CT: Fucking white chocolate!
KM: So what did I do? I added water. MISTAKE! But at first it seemed fine. The white chocolate melted again. I moved it to a piping bag, thinking all the while how I am glad that most of my fingertips already don’t have heat sensitivity. Otherwise I would have lost it trying to get the white chocolate in there.
CT: Oh my God. The couple of times that I have allowed water and white chocolate to mix have been complete catastrophes.
KM: I made the first chocolate cookie okay. It looked good! And then … the white chocolate hardened inside the bag. It exploded the bag. All the white chocolate had the texture of insulation.
CT: Absolute nightmare. Hell on earth.
KM: At this point I had no more than five minutes left because it had taken so long to reheat and destroy the white chocolate and move it into the piping bag and destroy it. So I ended up just coating the cookies in dark chocolate and plopping some sad little blobs of white chocolate mush on top. I am filled with self-loathing.
CT: No!
I managed to melt the white chocolate without incident, and then to stir in some reserved chips to bring down the temperature. I also pulled this off with the dark chocolate, despite not really watching it at all.
KM: Wait, is that what I should have done? How was I supposed to make my white chocolate melty again?
CT: What I remember from previous attempts is that you only put half the chocolate over the double boiler, and then you use the residual heat to melt the rest of the chocolate? This never exactly works for me, in the sense that I almost always have to reapply heat midway, but I’ve gotten decent enough at it.
KM: Wow. that does make sense. I wish I had remembered this. Honestly, if I had had a dishwasher I would have just put another bowl on there and melted more white chocolate. But the thought of another bowl to clean was too much, so in a way I made this hell for myself.
CT: I ran into trouble with the butterscotch. Where the white chocolate and dark chocolate got nice and smooth and then stayed that way, the butterscotch, as soon as it started to cool, turned into a peanut-butter type thing. Also, because I was moving so frantically at this point, I had gotten the measurements wrong, so I had twice as much melted white chocolate as required, and half as much butterscotch, which I was using as a “caramel chocolate” substitute. I didn’t consider this a major issue, because at this point I knew it would take a miracle for me to even finish before the buzzer, with any configuration of chocolate.
KM: This all seems great to me! I’m amazed you did all of this in essentially 30 minutes. That’s so many things to melt. How did you handle the feathering? Did you?
CT: Well. I had something like 150 seconds left when I started coating my cookies. My work playlist had made its way to this bizarre, fucked-up Ian Lynch song from the soundtrack to the delightfully fucked-up movie All You Need Is Death, so I was in a very special mood. I could not afford to be precise. I just grabbed up a bowl and a spoon and just dumped chocolate down onto the cookies, where it immediately heated and blended with the caramel, which had never really congealed.
KM: Holy shit.
CT: I then very quickly and messily spooned the butterscotch—which I had to reheat in order to make it gooey again—into a condiment bottle, and then just like sprayed it all over the fucking place.
KM: CONDIMENT BOTTLE? God. This is incredible. You’re an athlete.
CT: Inside the final 30 seconds, I grabbed a toothpick and tried to do some feathering, but the butterscotch had already started to congeal again and so I was only able to get some effect on a couple of the cookies. I gave up with just a few seconds to spare. I was absolutely miserable.
The Finished Product
KM: Show cookie?
CT: Here are my terrible cookies:
KM: Oh my god. I’m cackling. They remind me of those cookies you can get at the grocery store that are incredibly pillowy and have that giant slab of icing on top with sprinkles.
CT: Yeah, they look like the iced sugar cookies that they serve in the lobby of literal Hell.
Show cookies?
KM: Here are my cookies:
As you can see, things really went south with the chocolate ones.
CT: Oh wow, they look great! But yes, I do see some sad chocolate ones. That one guy looks like a frowny face drawn by Picasso.
I really like that they have a kind of spiderweb thing going on? It is, after all, drawing close to Halloween season.
KM: I was really happy with how spooky they were looking before the chocolate ones looked like shit. I will probably try to use this technique for some kind of spooky cookie!
Ultimately, however, I did not like how they tasted. Just like last week, there was almost no flavor except for SUGAR.
CT: These are more to my liking than were the fancies, which I found absolutely repulsive. But yes, this is not something I would make again, even if the method were much simpler. My small child liked her chocolate cookie a lot, but four-year-olds would eat nothing but handfuls of sugar if left to their own devices.
I do feel that I could’ve made good hobnobs if I’d had those FUCKING moulds. I guess we will never know.
KM: Hysterically, my dog, who is very well-behaved and never ever steals food even when it is sitting right in front of her, did steal the hobnob when I left one on the table to go run an errand yesterday. I was stunned! She ate it right off the plate. So I guess someone liked them!
CT: Whoa! Cookie thief!
KM: Special Rare Sugar Milk Bone.
CT: Happy Halloween, buddy! Kelsey, have you dared to look ahead yet to next week?
KM: OMG. I have not. Please tell me it’s something good.
CT: It is! It is my favorite theme of all: Bread Week! Please, for the love of God, allow us to bake bread for Bread Week!
KM: YESSSSSSSS! I swear, if they make us make some weird little dessert that isn’t bread, I’m gonna lose my mind. I want REAL BREAD.