The Cookie Bars

I’ve never been much of a cook, and recipes that call for more than three or four ingredients are very intimidating to me, so I tend to be one of those “heat and people” type of people. I am just far more comfortable with meals (I say meals even though I rarely, if ever, include side dishes) that require little more than boiling some water and/or heating things up.

That doesn’t really afford me a lot of options when it comes to preparing dinners or lunches for work. In turn, I tend to eat pretty much the same few things on a fairly regular schedule. Ask any of my coworkers, and they will give you the list of the three or four things I am always found eating for lunches. It never changes.

I bring this up, because last night I had a hankering to bake. I never get bake hankerings (bakerings?), so I wanted to take advantage of it before the feeling passed. Not really being comfortable with ingredient-heavy recipes or wanting to risk a new recipe that I could end up hating, I opted for my old standby. Chocolate chip cookie bars. While it has more ingredients than I am generally comfortable with, they are all pretty basic ones, and I’ve made it before with great success, so it’s a keeper.

I didn’t have any chocolate on me, so I had to run to the grocery store to get some, and that’s where I ran into a hurdle. Normally, it’s not easy to find vegan chocolate chips in just any general grocery store. But I’ve always been lucky in that mine did have some every time I had needed them. This time, however, no suck luck.

The only vegan chocolate option I was able to find was some unsweetened baking chocolate squares. It wasn’t what I wanted, but since I had no other options, and I was going to be baking with it, I figured baking chocolate would still suffice. I would just have to find a way to turn the squares into smaller chip sized morsels.

I got home, and immediately went into my toolbox (yes, I own a toolbox. And it actually has some tools in it), grabbed a hammer, and immediately started banging away on the box of unsweetened baking chocolate.

It did nothing.

I ultimately had to take out a knife and slice and chisel off little chunks until I had managed to get enough to make the bars worthy of the chocolate chip name. This amount also just happened to coincide with the point where I got so frustrated with the process that I couldn’t take it anymore.

I popped them in the oven and was very pleased with myself. I was already imagining showing up to work today with cookie bars knowing Lauren loves my cookie bars. She would be so excited and thankful. I would be the hero of the day.

Smugly, I sat down to watch tv while they baked and snack on some leftover chocolate squares.

That’s when a sense of dread set in.

The chocolate was absolutely disgusting.

They meant it when they said unsweetened. It was nasty. I assured myself that the bars would be fine. There was a good amount of sugar in them to make up for the lack of sweetness in the chocolate and everything would still be ok.

I was wrong.

After letting them cool, I took a bite of one only to find that it was as wretched as the chocolate itself had been.

This was a disaster.

I couldn’t bring these pieces of crap to work to share with people. I’d be run out of town with pitchforks.

I’m just so confused as to why they make unsweetened baking chocolate if baking with it makes your food taste like shit. The surgeon general needs to put a warning on that stuff. May cause death and loss of friends.

You live, you learn, my little Morissettes.

I’ve got one hand in my pocket and the other one is throwing away an entire batch of cookie bars.