To Please The Masses

Cookies. Gotta love 'em.

I was calmly making lunch when one of my brothers recently suggested a cookie baking afternoon. Unexpectedly, a huge wave of some indefinable something washed over me and I had a Need to make cookies. Right then.

Maintaining with difficulty my calm exterior, I inquired if we had the proper ingredients for baking. I ran over a mental checklist of the requirements for concocting my favorite recipe. Then I decided that we had everything we needed except shortening.

With butter for a shortening substitiution, I figured we would do very well. My brother, who had been scurrying about the kitchen searching for ingredients, asked--again--if cookies would be the order of the afternoon.

I shook my head in denial and got out the bowl and mixer. My Need was to be satisfied immediately!

Butter. Sugars. Eggs. All was well.

Baking soda. Salt. Baking powder. Uh, baking powder?

It was not to be found. Lost amid the still-looming towers of boxes that characterize our lives.

I searched online for an appropriate substitute. I was rather too deep into the recipe to turn back. Deciding that cream of tartar and soda would make an adequete substitute, I turned back to the bowl. For the first time, though, a doubt entered my mind as to the perfection of my final result.

My doubts only intensified when I realized that I couldn't find vanilla either. Nor was I exactly comforted by google's #1 hit on the search "substitute for vanilla." These were the words that met my eye....

"Vanilla extract is the simple, everyday kitchen something that you should have on hand for adding flavor to baked goods and desserts. There certainly is nothing simpler that you are likely to have on hand to take its place."

A little further research suggested substituting maple syrup. Unwilling to leave out the flavoring altogether, I grudgingly measured the syrup, wishing it were not too late to reduce the sugar in proportion.

The saddest of all my reflections, having appropriately mourned some of the flattest cookies known to man: I don't even know which substitution to blame for the failure.

It doesn't much matter. I mourned, after all, alone. No one in this corner of the world is inclined to grumble at anything that starts with a C., ends with an E., and has chocolate chips in it.