Broiled Cookies

It all started Friday night with a cookie craving. Generally I don't buy the pre-made cookie dough rolls (in a refrigerated asile near you!) but I caved to their siren call on my last trip down the grocery aisles and Tim has been hearing them calling his name ever since. So on Friday night he looked at me and said, "You know what would be good right now?" And I said, "No. What?" And he said, "Cookies." I attempted to point out the boxes of Girl Scout Evilness lying around the house but was met with a shaking head and mutterings that sounded like "Waarrrmmm, Goooooeeyyyy, chocolate chip coooookies."

So I toddled off to the kitchen, grabbed said cookie dough, spun the oven to preheat and began to prepare the cookie sheets. Normally, about halfway through the dough distribution, the oven beeps to let me know that it is now happily preheated to 375 and, if I am so inclined, I can begin the creation of delectable baked goodness whenever I so choose. The missing beep should have been my first clue.

Oblivious to the fact that it never did beep, I opened the door and slid in the first tray. I do recall thinking that yes, indeed, it felt a tad cooler in there than I would expect, but it probably just hadn't finished preheating (a fact I verified by noting that the "Preheated" indicator light was no yet lit). So I added a few minutes to the time when I set the timer and went back about my business. When the timer went off 13 minutes later, I opened the oven door, expecting to see golden brown circles of cookie dotted with gooey chocolate and instead found little lumps of cookie dough that were identical to the little lumps of cookie dough I had put into the oven just 13 minutes earlier.

I checked the stove and got the familiar *tick tick tick foof* and a happy blue flame. I checked the broiler - again, flame. Oven? No flame.

So Tim, being a fairly handy guy, pulled the thing apart, thinking that it was most likely the igniter (ignitor? I'm too lazy to go look - if you care, pretend I spelled it correctly. Otherwise, just tarry along if you will.) and that he would also be able to, fairly simply, switch out the parts from the broiler to the oven and life would be back to mostly normal.

As you can probably imagine, the answer to that thought process was "Yeah. Not so much."

At this point, I began scraping the cookie dough into a ziploc bag so I could get it back into the fridge before it was no longer edible. Tim called our friend who was supposed to come over later so he and Tim could bake a cake for the annual men's baking competition at church to let him know that our oven was out of commission. (They really need to come up with a catchy theme for this competition -- I keep suggesting "What doesn't kill us, makes us stronger, but hey! It's for a good cause." Somehow that just doesn't go over. Regardless, our friend seemed to think that Tim would be able to help with a cake that was not composed of either Ramen noodles or fried eggs. I was skeptical, but eager to watch and see.)

So Tim made do with Girl Scout Evilness after checking with me to make sure we couldn't broil the cookies. I assured him that no, we couldn't broil cookies.

Fast forward (I know you're laughing, but seriously, this is the condensed version) to last night. After finishing supper, we settled in to watch The Pink Panther with Steve Martin. As the intro has barely finished, I asked Tim, "Are you still hungry?" He nodded, "Yeah, a little." "What sounds good?" "Cookies." I laughed and offered to get the box but he shook his head. "Weell, maybe we could broil the cookies." Tim's eyes widened until they were about cookie-sized, "You told me we couldn't." "Yes, but I've had an idea..."

So we wandered upstairs and I plopped out some dough onto the cookie sheet, moved the rack to the very lowest position, flipped on the broiler and put the cookies on that bottom rack. And, after about 7 minutes, turned off the oven. And after another 5ish minutes, took out the cookies. They were perfect.

Turns out you can broil cookies. Who knew?