Big crumbly mess

In the past two weeks, I've managed to make three batches. See I'll get to 52 batches before October 20th.

  #46 Dreamy Fudge Bar Cookies 10/5/12 These were so good, I wish I didn't have to buy it just to try it. That's right, this is my first cookie/bar that I had to buy back after making it.
 I was asked to make bars for a craft show that my church holds every year, and of course what good lutheran church doesn't sell bars.  So I had to buy a bar that I had donated to the church.

This bar was a bit of an adventure to make. The bar itself was fine, however because I was baking, I discovered that we had a mouse in the house. I knew that as soon as I moved into a house with an attached garage that I would get a mouse. The brown sugar I needed for these bars was down in the basement pantry. However, I was not the first to get to the brown sugar - it was torn open and the evidence was there. So sad. Not only was I freaked out about having a mouse, but I had to throw away the whole bag and go back to the grocery store to get a new unattacked bag of brown sugar. No worries now though, it's a week later now and my husband seems to have gotten rid of the mouse.

  #47 Soft Apple Butter Delights 10/7/12 This batch is this year's co-workers first batch for the school year.  My ELL team and I led the professional development this week. We educated the teachers about academic language and how to help all our students use academic language in the classroom. For those of you who don't know - academic language is the language of the classroom, of the workplace and of tests. Students who are english language learners, students from lower income households, students of vocabulary poor households need to be explicitly taught to use academic language. I'm very excited about what the ELL team has been doing in the classroom - it's great to hear students say "I predict the earth material will erode and deposit into a delta because rivers erode earth materials" - yes, that's from one of my fifth graders.

 Anyways, I made these cookies because teachers are exhausted by the end of the day and really don't look forward to sitting in PD for an hour and a half - cookies help. So the lesson to be learned from these cookies for all you readers out there - don't blame the teachers - we are working extremely hard to educate all students and produce deep meaningful thinkers for our next generation (sorry, I'm just tired of society blaming us "lazy" teachers - I wanted to point out just how hard we do work).

 By the way, these cookies were so soft - someone actually asked me if they were muffins that I just cut the tops off.

  #48 Cherry Chocolate Chip Cookies 10/12/12 These cookies are where the title comes into play. They are delicious, however, I feel I really should just take all the cookies I got from this batch and mush it together to make one big ball of soft cookie - they fell apart as I took them off the sheets. I think I know where I went wrong with this cookie. It called for dried cherries to then be soaked in hot water and then to be dumped into the dough - cherries, liquid and all. I bought maraschino cherries and dried them out. Then I put them "in a small bowl" to soak in hot water.  There was no measurement listed for the amount of liquid to use. However, I dumped the water out before realizing the liquid was to go into the dough as well. So I then soaked the cherries again and dumped the liquid (and cherries) into the dough. The liquid made the dough very watery.  Upon baking, they just spread out. They were really soft and they taste pretty good - but whenever I do make them again, I think I'll try it without putting the liquid in.