Twinkle: Cookie Tyrant

What is it with this family's tendency to micro-manage about cookie size? I called my MIL tonight for her delish chocolate chip cookie recipe, as I'm hosting a cousins' playgroup for my side tomorrow morning. She gave me the recipe like a normal person, without any asides or digressions about sifting and room temperature eggs and what not. And I started to think maybe this woman gives me some credit after all. Then she gets to what size the cookies should be on the sheet and she launches into a 10-minute soliloquy about cookie scoops, bigger than a walnut, but not too much bigger, etc.

She also told me to cook it way longer than the cookies needed...and I'm pretty sure she left out an ingredient or two because my cookies, while fine, do not look light, fluffy, and golden-perfect like hers. They're more flat and cracked. I'm sure she'd blame it on my youth and inexperience, but next time I make these sons-of-bitches (and I hope it won't be soon, because there's nothing I hate more than baking cookies...all those endless hours of laying dough on a sheet!) I am throwing in an extra egg or something. Even Mr. Twinkle agrees--not in a mean way...in a baffled way--that they are distinctly different than his mom's.

She also rescinded her earlier request for me to design and execute centerpieces for the brunch she's giving in honor of the little bat mitzvah girl this weekend. Last week when I offered to help, she assigned me the floral duties. Tonight when I talked to her, she was all, "Well...I don't think I'm going to need you to do those centerpieces. A brunch for a little girl doesn't require anything too...extravagant." Because MIL knows good and well that any floral centerpiece I design will look like something Marie Antoinette cooked up, and we all know what happens to extravagant b*tches like her. (They go down in history as fabulous arbiters of glam). Just wait until Twinklette's second birthday party. MIL thought she hated the 100+ person cocktail hour/first birthday party at a children's yoga studio...wait until she sees the profusion of black tulips I have shipped in from Holland for this year's fete.

Ahhh...on to make my benedictine sandwiches. That recipe came from my grandmother, who has no motivation to thwart my culinary efforts.