Some recipes just aren’t meant to be played with.

I’ve been trying to keep  myself busy as I patiently wait for my spinal injection to begin relieving some of my back pain. 

Okay, who am I kidding?  Patiently?  Truth is I’m growing more and more impatient as the seconds tick by.  I feel like a two year old who desperately needs a nap: this girl is cranky and fussy most all of the time time.   I think I may need an intervention.  lol

Pinterest is always a nice distraction when I’m icing my back.  Yesterday I was flipping through the recipes and came across an interesting one for cute little crispy cookies that involved using Earl Grey tea.  Tea and cookies in the same sentence?  Yes, please! 

I immediately did what I always do when a dessert captures my eye like that:  I scanned the recipe to see what I could substitute and/or eliminate in order to decrease the calorie count.    These cookies didn’t have many ingredients to begin with and of course I already had the tea. I thought to myself, ‘Okay, I’ll just use applesauce instead of butter, decrease the sugar by a quarter cup and substitute half the flour with wheat flour.’ Simple!  Once I was satisfied with my ingredients list I worked out the math and figured each cookie at 48 calories each. 

I know.  I should have suspected something was going to go wrong right then and there.  But I persevered.     

My husband came home from work and immediately asked me what I was baking in the oven.  I always hesitate at this point to tell him anything because I don’t want to get his hopes up.  Still, I could tell he was so excited about the possibility of having a homemade dessert in the house that I answered his question by cautiously saying, “I’m trying out a new recipe for the blog so this is really just an experiment.”  He knows his wife well; from his past experiences with black beans in brownies and soda in his cake, he always remembers Rule One – regardless of how good it smelled, there was only a 50/50 chance that something edible was going to come out of that oven. 

12 minutes later the timer went off and out they came.  Craig and I stood there comparing my cookies with the beautiful picture of the cookies on the blog from which the recipe came. 

Have you ever seen this hilarious photo around the Internet?

Yeah well, the bottom photo – that’s kind of how my cookies turned out. 

In the world of healthful baking, I am ridiculously optimistic.  I am constantly reworking recipes in order to make them diet-friendly.  Unfortunately though, an impressive calorie count means very little if your finished product ends up in the FAIL pile – which by the way, is here:

In the countless years I’ve been experimenting in the kitchen I am confident in sharing with you this statement:  these were the lousiest cookies I have EVER made.  To prove my point, take this photo for example:  how many cookies have you seen that are flexible?  

Look at Brulee.  Even HE doesn’t want to have anything to do with them.  Sigh.  Back to the drawing board. 

On a brighter note, I am painting again.  I figured if I waited for my back to improve my paintbrushes would probably get dusty so I’m taking OTC pain meds which allows me to sit for small spells at a time.  I’m working on a commission piece – a lone Eastern Bluebird, and let me tell you it feels so good to be back to creating again which just goes to show:  if you want something bad enough, you find a way to make it happen.  Well, except maybe cookies without butter.