Chocolate Chip Cookies
Last week one of our friends dropped off a batch of chocolate chip cookies on our porch. A few days before, I had delivered banana bread muffins to their front porch. It’s a thing we’ve been doing for years, because baking is best when you can share it with other people.
My friend’s chocolate chip cookies are fluffy, maybe lighter somehow than the ones I make. As I ate my first cookie, I decided that they must follow a different recipe than I do. So as I chewed, I started trying to figure out what was different in their recipe. While eating my second or third cookie, I decided they had to have been made with shortening.
I’ve been baking for as long as I can remember. And over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. [At least I think so anyway.] I’ve gotten good at mixing batter for consistency and not being worried about following a recipe to precise measurements. Actually, my best cookie batches are all at least slightly altered from the already adjusted recipes I follow.
I thought these baking skills extended to guessing the ingredients in someone else’s cookies. Apparently, they don’t. My friend does not use shortening in their chocolate chip cookies. They actually follow the exact same recipe I follow. And that’s the one on the back of the Tollhouse chocolate chip bag.
The same recipe. Followed by two different bakers, in two different kitchens. Strikingly different results. Although both batches of cookies are delicious, they taste entirely different.
I’ve been thinking about it ever since. How we often think that following the same recipe as someone else will give us identical results. But it never works out that way, does it?
No matter how closely we follow the same recipe as someone else, we will always be two different bakers, baking in two different kitchens.
We probably don’t have the exact same utensils, and who knows if we’ve kept our ingredients at the same temperature. Baking involves chemistry, and the timing of every ingredient has an impact on the end result. We probably opened our boxes of baking soda on different days, and have different brands of butter or eggs.
Plus, I doubt that our kitchens are at the exact same altitudes. And I doubt that we have the exact same ovens, cleaned [or not cleaned] to identical states. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, our baking sheets are probably made from two different metals too.
The point is that it doesn’t matter if we follow the exact same recipe as someone else. There are too many other factors involved to expect identical results.
If we can’t even make identical chocolate chip cookies when we follow the same recipe, then I think we need to relax our expectations when we start dealing with things that involve more ingredients. In the kitchen yes, but more importantly in the rest of life too.
The next time you find yourself trying to figure out how your life measures up to someone else’s, I hope this fact pops back into your head: There are less than ten ingredients in the most common recipes for chocolate chip cookies. There are only a handful of simple steps to follow, and our cookies never come out identical.
Almost everything else in life is more complicated than baking a batch of chocolate chip cookies.
