Fortune cookies (p. 780)

Sometimes I open my big mouth too early. And by "sometimes" I mean "often". I don't like when recipes fail. I know that nobody likes a recipe to fail but failure for some people gives them the kick in the rear they need to accomplish bigger and better things. Not me. If a recipe totally is a loss, I move on to making something else most of the time.

"So what?" you are thinking. "Interesting (sort of) but what does it have to do with TJOC?"

Well, still on my high of winning my category in the chili cook-off (sure, I was the only entry in "vegetarian chili" but I refuse to let that diminish my win!) I came up with the bright idea of making Fortune cookies (p. 780) for the one-year anniversary of my awesome coworking space, Cohere. I told everyone about how I was going to do this, with custom "truth or dare" style "fortunes" inside. And then I tried making the cookies.

I stirred together egg whites, sugar, and salt.



I added melted butter, flour, and vanilla (one ingredient at a time):



Eventually, the dough looked like this:



I dropped them on parchment paper and cooked them:



They were failures. Big failures. They were way, way too cookie-like to work as a fortune cookie. A fortune cookie needs to crisp up a lot so that after you fold it, it holds it's shape. That didn't happen with the TJOC version. At this point I wanted to consider the recipe a loss and move on with my life. They were never going to work, frankly, I don't believe the recipe works as a fortune cookie at all.

Unfortunately, remember the beginning of this post? Yeah, I still had people happily tweeting me about their excitement to eat homemade fortune cookies and sending me Facebook messages with their ideas for the truths or dares (which was awesome, I'm not creative enough to come up with all those on my own). So I sighed, went looking throughout the internet, and found another recipe.

Which worked.

I made mountains of fortune cookies:




They were beautiful, surprisingly tasty, went over extremely well, and almost won a cupcake competition that they weren't even entered in (obviously, as they are not cupcakes)--they almost won through write-in votes). They were obnoxiously time-consuming but very rewarding if you like accolades as much as I do. And they were far, far more delicious than your average restaurant fortune cookie!