No-bake cookies or no-bake chicken feed?

I’m not one who likes to make cookies for Christmas. Or for any other occasion! Cookies are just too time-consuming for my taste.

Well, this year I [Marilyn] have a somewhat different outlook on cookie baking.

A friend of mine from church seldom has an opportunity to splurge on such things as ingredients to bake cookies. She asked me a few weeks ago if she and I could bake some cookies for Christmas.

Since it was for her, I bought ingredients for several types of cookies and some fudge. Last Saturday morning, she came to my house and we made cookies. We had a great time visiting and making cookies and fudge.

One of the recipes was “No-Bake Cookies.” I’d made these cookies many times in years past, and knew they were easy and delicious! I measured out the ingredients and mixed them. We then took spoonfuls of them and dropped them onto the foil.

I was rather mystified when the cookies didn’t hold together well. They seemed rather dry. So I added a tad more milk. They were still dry, but we continued making the cookies.

When all the baking was done, I sent home tons of goodies for my friend and her husband, with plans to give most of mine away at work on Monday.

After our family had Sunday dinner, I gave my brother some of the cookies we’d made the day before.

That afternoon, I decided to try one of those funny-looking no-bake cookies. I bit into half of the cookie, quickly spitting it out! I thought, “OH NO! What did I do wrong!” I got the cookbook out and read the directions more carefully.

“Well, I had the ingredients correct… let’s see here… OH NO. NO WAY!” The recipe said to heat the ingredients on the stove to melt the baking cocoa into the rest of the ingredients! How could I have missed that very important piece of the recipe? No wonder the cookies were dry and wouldn’t stick together!

I called my brother first thing the next morning and asked if he and his wife had tasted any of the cookies.

He said, “Sis, what did you do to those no-bake cookies? They were AWFUL! We had to throw them out to the chickens!”

We laughed as I told him that I’d forgotten one key detail: to melt the ingredients on the stove.

My brother said, “Oh, well, the chickens ate ’em just fine! But your fudge was sure good!”

When I told my boss the no-bake cookie story, he smiled and laughed, as he nodded his head. He said that my friend had taken some of her cookies to the church’s Christmas decorating party that night. She was sharing with everyone how much fun we’d had making cookies. She then said, “We must have done something wrong with one batch, though, ’cause they’re awful! But please don’t tell Marilyn ’cause I don’t wanna hurt her feelings!”

Maybe I need to make cookies a tad more often?