I love to bake. I love baking cakes and cupcakes, but my absolute favorite things to bake are cookies. I also eat when I am stressed. I have been insanely stressed lately, and have been baking and eating cookies by the metric ton. Just how many cookies will it take to make everything seem better?
I have decided to take this on as a mathematical challenge. In order to ensure accuracy in my measurements (the quantity of cookies consumed, not my expanding waistline after having consumed them), I have been baking both oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies by measuring out one level tablespoon of cookie dough for each and every cookie. In theory, this makes all of the oatmeal cookies the same size and it also keeps the chocolate chip ones fairly uniform. I was unable to make the chocolate chip cookies look as nice and neat as the oatmeal cookies, probably because of how the oatmeal cookie dough retains its shape while the chocolate chip dough mushes into different dollops. Perhaps this is a good thing, since I am adding another variable I can blame if anything goes wrong.
One morning, I woke up fairly cranky, so I devoured an oatmeal cookie after eating my breakfast cereal. Hmmm. Still cranky. One must not be enough, so I munched on another one while I was getting the kidlets up for the day. The only thing this did was drop crumbs in the hallway. Rats. That added stress since I had to go clean up my mess. Rooster had to have a cookie for her daily allotment of egg (Yes, her allergist has given orders that she is to have a cookie a day to slowly get her used to consuming egg.), so I noshed on a third cookie when I got one out for Rooster. By lunch, I was frazzled by trying to do laundry when I kept finding dirty clothing stashed in different places, so I ate another cookie. After trying to do the dishes, keep the kidlets amused, and straighten up the messes they were strewing all over the house, I decided that one final cookie was in order. I then decided that my calculations were complete as far as the oatmeal cookies were concerned.
The chocolate chip cookies were a bit harder to maintain any sort of restraint when it came to eating them methodically as my stress levels rose. A second Open House was scheduled for today? Eat a cookie. Heck, make it two. Rooster and Horse both decide to get showers without actually using soap? Eat a few more. Frustrated about having to read a book I do not want to read and instead feel like throwing a temper tantrum about it? Heck, finish what's left of the batch. The chocolate chip cookies did not fill me up the same way that the oatmeal cookies did, and I ran out of them faster. That pretty much concluded my testing of the chocolate chip cookies.
After all of this testing, I had to quantify my results. First of all, I was five pounds heavier than when I started, which certainly did nothing to make me feel better about life. As far as eating oatmeal cookies was concerned, one made me feel hungrier, but not any better emotionally. The second one removed the feeling of hunger, but still did not make me feel better. Every cookie after that merely increased my heartburn and made me really thirsty. Clearly, the amount of oatmeal cookies consumed did nothing to make me feel better about life.
I was a bit more hopeful about the chocolate chip cookies, until I hit cookie number four. From that point on, I simply felt ill. The worst part about feeling ill when consuming those cookies is that I kept eating them regardless of my rebelling stomach. Chocolate was involved, and surely I could rely on chocolate to make it all better! Somehow, that is not what my research showed. In fact, I'm fairly certain that my research proved that eating four or more chocolate chip cookies makes someone stupid and very, very sick. It did nothing else that I could see, unless we are counting those annoying five pounds that latched themselves to my fat cells.
So I suppose that after all of this cookie research, I should lay off on the fats and sugars for a while. Otherwise, I will have to be rolling myself down the hallway to lie down when my stomach refuses to let me put more junk food in it. They might be delicious, but I have proven that no amount of cookies will make it all better when life is stressing me out. Bummer. That would have been so yummy had it worked.
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