My Toastmasters club doesn’t meet the last two weeks of the year, so I didn’t have a meeting this morning – instead, we went to the JCC and worked off the cookies we sampled yesterday to make sure they were OK to give to our neighbors.

We didn’t give all of the cookies to the neighbors, though; we had two left over. They didn’t survive the afternoon.

We also braved the crowds at the grocery store – we could have waited until tomorrow, I guess, but we found a parking spot and took our chances. We only had to wait behind one person to check out, so I think we won.

The weather forecast called for rain most of the day, but there was a nice long break during the late afternoon. We took advantage and got a walk in before things got messy again.

Happy Festivus!

I made chocolate chip cookies today, mostly to give to neighbors. I followed the official DoubleTree Cookie Recipe with two changes:

• I omitted the walnuts in case of allergies
• I only put in 2/3 of a cup of chocolate chips instead of 2-2/3 cups – after I added the first 2/3 cup, I somehow forgot the entire bag of chips I was planning to add next!

I had trouble getting the dough to cohere properly while I was mixing it – I’m not sure what was wrong. I’d left the butter out for several hours, so it should have been plenty soft, but the butter and sugars didn’t seem to combine well in the first mixing step (and the mixer kept ejecting sugar from the bowl even though I had it on low speed), and I had to mix longer than I expected to get everything combined at the end. I think that’s why I got distracted and forgot to add the rest of the chips.

In the end, the cookies came out fine (though light on chocolate), so we gave them to our neighbors with a clean conscience. I have plenty of chips to make another batch, too!