Double, double toil and trouble

          After two and a half hours dutifully spent typing at Starbucks (my third home) this morning, I was woefully only a little over halfway done with my Macbeth paper. As promised in my last post, I looked to baking for a much needed distraction. So when I got home I started looking up cookie recipes. I remembered we still had a can of pumpkin in the pantry left over from the holiday season, and due to my current health kick, I searched for recipes that substituted pumpkin for shortening. I found these "Pumpkin Oatmeal Cookies" that fit the criteria.
         As I began to mix the ingredients, I felt fatally cursed like Macbeth. First, I mixed the pumpkin and brown sugar (right on track), but then as I added the spices I realized the nutmeg was practically empty (a travesty in CT, the nutmeg state). I haphazardly shook in pumpkin pie spice instead, but was afraid that since I already added cinnamon, which is also in pumpkin pie spice, the cookies would go on cinnamon overload. Next, when I added in the dry ingredients the dough began to feel uncharacteristically dry. Turns out I overlooked the direction to beat in egg whites before adding the flour. I mixed them in after, which caused the whites to sit in an unappetising fashion atop the dough like oil separated from water. The last step was to add the oatmeal--which I didn't even think about checking stock on because we always have oatmeal handy. Turns out, there was only about a half cup left, so I supplemented the lacking cup with instant steel cut oats, which looked like the arch nemesis of rolled oats.
          As I realized my cookies and I were star crossed lovers, I debated throwing out the dough and starting over with a new recipe, but I figured all I had to lose by going through with them was two extra pans to wash and a little pride. Plus, if they were awful I would have to make something else which would provide an extra buffer of welcomed procrastination time. So in they went.

I recommend these to the health conscious, under 75 calories per cookie

          By now you're expecting me to say that the cookies came out fabulous despite all the mishaps, and I decided to rewrite the recipe, naming it "Annie's steel cut and rolled oat pumpkin cookies." Well, they weren't a disaster, but also weren't amazing. Yet they were sweet and satisfying for a healthy treat. I'm happy I stuck it out.

For now, those damn witches are nagging me to finish my paper...

Until "tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,"
Annie (and I vow to cut the Shakespeare references after this post)