WARNING: Do not eat more than ten cookies in one sitting. This is
pure cholesterol in a neat and tidy package.
What you'll need:
- four sticks (one pound) of salted butter. Real butter. Do not profane this recipe with margarine or any other substitute, or suffer like the infidel you are.
- four cups of flour. That bleached white stuff.
- one and a half cups of brown sugar. Make sure to break up any big Lumps in here. Of course, you could just leave them in, but don't blame me when you chip a tooth on that lump of carmelized sugar.
- various flavorings. My favorite is vanilla, but you can use other kinds just as well. Make sure you have at least two tablespoons worth around.
- about three to four hours of spare time.
First, the butter. Unwrap it, then chuck all four sticks into a large plastic mixing bowl. Nuke them for about thirty seconds on high so that they're slightly runny, but not melted.
Now, take the brown sugar and dump about half of it in with the butter. If you followed directions, there shouldn't be any lumps to make the next part more difficult than it has to be. Mix the butter and sugar like a madman until they're well blended, then toss in the flavoring and the rest of the sugar. You guessed it, keep mixing.
Now, once you have that sloshed into a nicely amorphous mass, add in about a third of the flour. Fold it into the mix until everything turns the same color. Follow up with the remaining two thirds of the flour and treat them in a similar fashion.
At this point you should preheat the oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit and get out a few cookie sheets (or pans- see the following paragraph).
You should now have a fair amount of a sticky, light tan substance. There are several possibilities open to you now. you can:
- say, "to hell with this," roll out the dough on a cookie sheet and just cut apart whatever comes out of the oven.
- be a good little androgynous figure, roll it out to about a quarter of an inch thick and use all sorts of pretty cookie cutters to dress up your artery cloggers.
- or you can do what I always do: grab a glass, roll it out to the aformentioned quarter inch, and start making circles.
Once you have a sufficient number cut out- say, around
twenty- arrange them on a
cookie sheet so none of the edges are touching, then pop them in the now-hot
oven for around
fifteen minutes. When they come out, they should be a light golden brown and
smell like buttery heaven.
I've never been able to figure out an exact number of how many come out per batch due to wild dogs and hungry older brothers, but it should make at least forty to sixty cookies. Feel free to post variations.