I don’t always get involved in our school functions, but when I do, it’s the bake sale. I really had to rein it in when Lucy told me her class was planning a bake sale; she first asked if we could make brownies and chocolate chip cookies and pumpkin muffins and s’mores bars and jar pies and peanut butter cookies and zebra cake. And I totally would have, but since it’s the school bake sale and not the Amy showcase, we settled on s’mores bars. (Okay we also made brownies but I make those all the time so it barely counts.) The recipe we use bills itself as “three ingredients” but that’s only if you count chocolate chip cookie dough as an ingredient. We would never not make our own dough! That’s more than half the fun of it. If you don’t make the dough, the kids don’t get to practice cracking eggs, they don’t get to whisk the flour, and they don’t get to lick the beaters. I mean, what is the point? And most importantly, when you make the dough, you have to smell the vanilla. At least, that’s what my mom taught me when we baked cookies together when I was a kid, and she has almost never steered me wrong.
There’s no real reason for doing this. My mom just liked the smell, and now I do too, and now they do. I do it every time I bake and think of her every single time. So I hope she really meant it because now it’s her legacy! She also taught me to throw salt over my left shoulder when it spills, but everyone does that, right?
