Back at Mum's house, we had a sweet KitchenAid that did everything but make little baby KitchenAids. When I was living on my own, I just didn't bake much - any cooking I did was just to make dinner. (Between working full time, stage-managing for community theater, and skating with the local roller derby team, I just didn't have time. We can't all be superheroes like Annie.) Well...I decided I wanted to make homemade Samoas, and the base is shortbread. Creaming butter and sugar is required, and did I want to sit there doing that with a hand mixer? Oh, hell no. I am not Wonder Woman.
Now, no one here no one really bakes, but my aunt's mother did once upon a time. So when I went looking for a stand mixer in the uncharted wilds of The Hall Closet, I did in fact find one. It has been here a long, long time. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...That 70's Mixer.
According to my aunt, That 70's Mixer actually dates from the 1950's, but The Happy Days Mixer is not as cool a name and does not allow me to envision myself as Kitty Foreman while I make things. Therefore, That 70's Mixer it will remain.
When I first turned it on, there was this...smell. It was similar to the acrid, dusty smell you get when you turn on the heat for the first time in the late fall, or maybe what you'd smell if you set a mummy on fire with napalm. I was genuinely concerned that it might burst into flames.
But slowly, slowly the beaters began to turn. They sped up, and then while they were certainly not turning with the kind of vigor that I have come to expect from my mother's KitchenAid, they were turning with sufficient speed to cream the small amount of butter and sugar necessary to my cookies.
When Jamie pointed the homemade Girl Scout cookies out to me, I decided that attempting them was necessary. Samoas and Tagalongs were always my favorites, so the Samoas were my first try. I thought using the recipe for the bar form of the cookies was the safest bet - okay, really I was just too lazy to make all the tiny donut-shaped cookies. But either way, bars.
At first, everything seemed to be going SO WELL. The shortbread baked up all nice and pretty, the caramel melted beautifully, I mixed in the coconut...and um...yeah. Kinda dumped the whole bag in there.
LOOK IT SEEMED LIKE THE THING TO DO AT THE TIME, OKAY?
Usually when I make things with coconut, it's like...twelve ounces of coconut. The whole bag. And I had melting caramel, and some of it was stuck to my hand and it really hurt, and so I just...I don't know. I panicked. I panicked, and I threw all the coconut in there, and it was like...okay, they were still good. They're just really, really thick, and nobody can eat more than half of one at a time without total sugar overload.
BUT THEY WERE STILL TASTY, DAMMIT.
They look really, really good. Yum.
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