The Sweet Life

So I had planned to do a blog entitled Decadent Desserts this week. In preparation for it, my youngest son and I baked a chocolate chip cookie, Oreo, brownie bar. Have you seen these on the Internet? You can find the recipe here: Recipe 

If you haven’t seen it and you don’t feel like clicking over to the recipe it’s essentially one dessert bar that has a layer of chocolate chip cookies, one layer of Oreo double stuffed cookies topped off with a layer of brownies.

Since my oldest is at camp this week, I’ve been teaching my youngest kiddo how to cook. This project looked challenging (since we made the cookie dough from scratch and there are several different steps he’d have to keep track of) and the pay off seemed large. Hello! It’s like the ultimate dessert. Put mousse in that puppy and it’s got all of my favorite things. And he agreed. He’s always liked to cook so it wasn’t exactly twisting his arm.

So we did it! We got it all assembled and cooked and put it out for the cooling time. But then I had a doctor’s apt. I needed to go to. Like, my doctor is to the point of only giving me my medicine one month at a time until I went to see her kind of need to go. Which was okay because the dessert takes two hours to cool. Yep, you read that right, two whole hours!

I put the dessert up where our doggies couldn’t get it and we headed into town with visions of sweet yumminess in our heads. Two hours later (my doctor was behind and I hit rush hour traffic on the way home) we returned to find the brownies on the floor, one quarter of it dessert bar gone, and my oldest dog with two deep lacerations on his paw.

Poor dears had to be taken to the emergency vet, have their stomachs emptied, and oldest dog had to have his paw stitched up. No brownies for us. We didn’t even get to taste them. My youngest kiddo was devastated.

But a funny thing happened while we were getting ready to go to the vet. My youngest saw how miserable the dogs were and how stressed out I was (I had no idea how much chocolate the dogs had eaten and I didn’t know if the oldest dog had broken his paw so I was pretty worried about them) and my youngest tried to comfort me. As we made our way to the vet he told me that he was certain the doggies hadn’t been eating the brownies for very long or they would’ve gotten more of it. You see, the vet couldn’t get the chocolate out of their stomachs if it’d already digested past that. And, since we’d been gone for like three or four hours there was no telling how long the doggies had been eating that brownie. But my kiddo was certain the vet would be able to help them. And, he told me, we could always make another set of ultimate brownies. Turns out he was absolutely right on all accounts.

So maybe life isn’t always decadent. Sometimes it’s a bit stressful. But if you surround yourself with the right people—people who care about you and want you to be happy, it’s always a sweet.

I’m happy to report that the doggies are doing fine. Oldest dog gets his stitches out Friday and he’s started successfully hobbling around the house. We just need to get his appetite back up. Apparently the brownies ruined him for his kibble! And youngest and I made a truly inspired batch of pretzels. (You can find the recipe here though I did use parmesan cheese on some and cinnamon/sugar on some instead of salt) Can’t wait to see what today holds for our little cooking camp.